Population Question`

[Foodstamp]

Nerfix said:

We're also given the option to tweak the amount of gold, supplies and resources at the game setup! And guess what, these cost 0 points! And they apply for everyone.

Sure we can pay 40 points but with only 350 points to use it's more expensive than you make it to be.

Your argument is like saying "There shouldn't be a way to modify the gold generation in the world because you can always pay 40 design points and take Order"

Sounds good to me . Whats the point of having scales in the game if your just gonna counter them with those types of settings? Research is another I believe you can do that with.

[Nerfix]

Well, we have been able to modify the amount of Gold in the world ever since Dominions 1. I guess it's that devs thought of giving the players a chance to play in a richer or poorer world.

In Dominions 3 we can change a lot of things at game setup that can be changed with scales. Gold, resources, supplies, even research. so why not population?

Give the players the option to do that. You don't have to use it.

[Foodstamp]

I wouldn't use it. But, I understand alot of you guys would, so I am not against it.

But most of this thread has been about there being positive population growth with a 0 growth scale because people "naturally" expand in population without any outside influences.

And that is what I don't want. To log into version 3.01 and be like, oh well, growth 0 is really growth 1, GG shrapnel forums, gonna use my 40 points elsewhere.

[Agrajag]

Nerfix said:
Sure we can pay 40 points but with only 350 points to use it's more expensive than you make it to be.

Just as a small reference, it takes Growth+1 (+0.2% population, +2% income [and an irrelevant boost to supplies]) 49 turns in a province to bring in the same income as Order+1.

[Foodstamp]

Growth scale also seems to affect the types of "Something unexpected has happened in this province" messages I get in my games. I don't have any tested proof or references to back it up, but it seems the scales affect my random events.

[Twan]

I think that terrain types should have an effect on population growth (say farmlands +0,2, plains/forest +0,1, swamp -0,1, waste -0,2, freshwater +0,1, with fort +0,1 ; or something directly based on supplies) as well as the actual population (something like province with 30k+ pop -0,1, province under 5k +0,1, province under 2k +0,2). Say you control a farmland province which has lost much of its population. The 1k remaining people have lots of rich lands to exploit, logically their number should grow fast. In the other hand I don't think that 35k guys trying to survive with the rare supplies of a waste should have an automatic growth.

But I don't really think it's worth the effort to implement this kind of system, and without it having just the effects of the growth scale is better than an arbitrary automatic growth.

[Agrajag]

Twan said:
Say you control a farmland province which has lost much of its population. The 1k remaining people have lots of rich lands to exploit, logically their number should grow fast.

Well, maybe their birth rate will increase, but bear in mind that babies are not productive at all, they don't work at the farms to generate supply, nor do they pay taxes, and they take many years to grow to be productive :O

[Endoperez]

Foodstamp said:
Growth scale also seems to affect the types of "Something unexpected has happened in this province" messages I get in my games. I don't have any tested proof or references to back it up, but it seems the scales affect my random events.

Scales DO affect events. As an example, wealthy princes don't die in Growth dominion and immigrating people don't just suddenly decide to appear in a province with Death scale. Similarly, trolls under the bridge won't attack travelers in Drain dominion, but it's much more rare or perhaps impossible to find gems and magic items.

[Sorlakind]

The problem as I see it, is that (at least in Dom 2, I'm still waiting for my dom3 copy) if you want to take a God thematically connected to Life, you will have a very hard time - as far as I can gather from what I have read, in MP you would actually be signing your death. If you wage war with a death-scale nation, they wave wasted their provinces in such a manner that you have no way of repopulating them, so occupying them is just loading yourself with dead weight - literally. I don't know if the answer to this is natural growing population rates, but there should be *some* way for life/nature related gods to repopulate dead lands in a *feasible* way. As it now stands, the best thing that such a god can hope for is to win the dominion war on his own lands. Hardly a feat worthy of a would-be god.

[Twan]

I think rituals or other ways to repopulate provinces should be considered, with effects proportionnal to growth scale to make it a good option, but limited to provinces under x population (to avoid to see these rituals chain used on the most populated provinces)

In example a nature ritual, "ritual of fertility" multiplying by 10 the effect of growth scale on the target province for the turn may be a good idea for this (and/or the same as global enchant, and/or, why not, an astral spell summoning population from a parallel plane, adding a number of pop proportionnal to magic and growth scales, or a "summer of love" fire global augmenting the effect of growth in hot seasons.

Even with this kind of rituals, repopulation would be far slower than killing people with a death dominion + tax at 200 and pillages, and cost a lot of gems.

Another possibility may be a demobilization order, making demobilized soldiers become normal citizen (but it would be a big advantage to order/productivity and luck dominions more than growth ones).