voluntarily homeless

[Kaldir]

In my current town I've seen a homeless citizen appear a few times, without me upgrading or demolishing houses. What could make these people leave their home voluntarily to live on the streets?

[slink]

Sometimes a spouse becomes homeless temporarily when the other one relocates and the first one is busy at a task, but I've usually seen this when I've been building new houses.  I suppose it could happen when a house becomes empty.

It's also possible that it is a pathing glitch, where the program temporarily can't find the path between the person and their home.

[Demonocracy]

I've seen this too.  It didn't last very long, but it was strange.

During the Market Radius challenge, I also somehow managed to wedge homes so close together that villagers kept getting stuck between the buildings.  They wandered back and forth without a way out and eventually die.  I ended up having to remove one of the buildings to prevent it.  Before this, I didn't know that was even possible!

[salamander]

I saw this, or at least noticed it, for the first time yesterday, and it happened two or three times.  It might be a clue to someone to know that I'm about to get myself into trouble with population.  Total population is about 400, and I thought I had stabilized it.  Turns out I was just at the top of a very broad peak, and it's now gradually declining.  It was during the slow decline that I would occasionally see the homeless icon appear.  There are quite a few single occupancy homes, and a lot of the ladies in many homes are past child bearing.  I'm going to try to shuffle the population around some, which I've never done before, to try to get the birth rate back up, but I suspect it's going to get ugly before it gets better.

[Kaldir]

Thanks for the answers. A pathing issue as @slink suggest could well be it. I've seen it happen a few times, and it was always when I just added some new farms, and the workers would come from far away before the game reshuffled the jobs.

@salamander: hope you get your town on it's feet again.

[salamander]

@Kaldir -- Thanks, I hope so, too.  This is the town I want to do the merchant timings on, but until I can sort of let it run by itself, I'm not going to be comfortable concentrating on arrivals at trading posts, etc...  That's why I was trying to get a stable population at only ~400 total.  A little while ago some nomads showed up, and I thought long and hard about whether to admit them or not.  In the end I did, both to get some young'uns in the town again and because I'm a softy.

[Kaldir]

I haven't accepted nomads since I discovered the benefits of education.

My latest town had an interesting, extra long path for a merchant, as indicated in the minimap attached. Red path is towards the trading post, blue is away. This trading post is in a lake, connected to the main river by a small stream, which surprisingly is enough for the merchant to use. If travel time of the merchant influences it's return interval, this could help with calculations. I can provide a savegame if you like. The town is very self sufficient and overstocked on about everything (only tools will run out after a while without restocking iron and coal).

The town has 5 other trading posts along the main river.

[salamander]

Taking in the nomads could turn out to be a big mistake -- I've probably just lowered my birth rate even more with crowding -- but with many of the females being too old for babies, I'm taking a chance that the nomad children will move through the years and hopefully shorten the crash I think is coming.  My biggest concern is running out of laborers to replace folks as they pass, but it occurred to me a few minutes ago that I have a lot of excess farmers I can turn to laborers with a little adjustment to my farm layout.

Thanks for the offer of the savefile.  I already have a fair amount of timing information on my current map, so I'm going to stick it out, at least for now.  But, doing something similar on a different map (yours) could be a good comparison.  I'll let you know when I get to that point, either here or in a PM.

That merchant on your map travelling down a small stream is interesting.  I have a lake that I haven't expanded to yet that's fed and drained by small streams only, and only the drain stream connects to a large river.  I wonder if merchants would visit trading posts on that lake?  Something for the future.

[slink]

I had traders visiting a trading dock on what was effectively a little puddle, almost completely cut off from a lake, which was connected to the river by a stream.  The rowboat made the trip, heaving itself over the mud-bar separating the puddle from the lake.  I put the trading dock there just to see if the boat would come.

[salamander]

I haven't expanded over to the lake yet, but it's close enough to build a trading post pretty easily.  I think I'll do what you did just to see what happens -- are the merchants so profit-hungry that they'll pole all the way upstream to the lake?

EDIT: typo correction

[rkelly17]

I have had several maps where traders boated right over what appeared to be a narrow peninsula, including pushing their boat right through the mud--and people could not walk over the same spot. It appears to happen when you have land squares touching only on the diagonal. The graphics part of the program draws in land connections but other parts of the program see two water squares touching at the corners and say, "Hey! I can boat from this square to that!" For some reason people can't seem to walk on the diagonal--like the diagonal roads have to be stair steps.

@Kaldir, what is the seed for that map? It looks interesting.

[Kaldir]

@rkelly17: the seed is 627758563, Large Valley. It's the map of Lowellion.

[rkelly17]

Thanks. I might try it out. I love to see how different people do the same map.

[Kaldir]

Do post your town in the Village Blogs, so we can truely compare them.

[salamander]

@rkelly17 -- +1 to @Kaldir's request.  I really like comparing how different folks do things, all other things being equal.  That would be totally cool (no, I'm not from the Valley  ).