News:

Welcome to World of Banished!

Main Menu

irrelevant: Gopher Prairie: extreme tenure, 10,000 years

Started by irrelevant, December 23, 2014, 06:52:58 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 4 Guests are viewing this topic.

irrelevant

Year 129

So much for boring! ;D

One thing I have learned from this town is that uneducated towns are far more volatile from a population standpoint than educated towns are (look at how much houses vs families had changed in just 9 years; this is why @Nilla got pop 5000 in just 30 years in Doolin). This is obvious if you think about it, families form and children come when the parents are 10 years old. I tried to recover too fast from my population mismanagement, I reclaimed the demolished houses too quickly, and I am going to pay for that with another, bigger, pop surge and crash, and I'll have to do the whole thing over again.

But it is interesting, and therefore, fun. ;)

Nilla

That's a comfort! To make a town as boring as possible seems to be............ boring ;)

Perhaps you have already thought about it, but I will remind you about your boardinghouse. If the number of children goes down too much, use them to create new families.


irrelevant

Yeah, I tore them down, needed the space. Plus I'm not sure that any level of micromanagement could prevent this coming mess.  ;D

Edit: I built one back, you're right, it will make a difference, but it will take lots of work.

irrelevant

Year 136

So inspired by @Nilla's suggestion to use my BH I have undertaken some serious population management. Investing a lot of time in going through the housing one by one and demolishing 2-3 houses at a time, moving the families into the BH (where the children from the demolished houses hook up into new units), then reclaiming the demolished houses. The newly formed families move into the reclaimed houses, and the empty-nest oldsters take the next available housing. When the BH has sufficient space I rinse and repeat.

I am concentrating on getting the 30-something females hooked up. I don't want to create yet another pop surge, so I'm picking the spinsters, thinking they will produce one or at most two children. So I go through the houses looking for 30 y/o female basement-dwellers, then search out likely males to pair up with them.

It really slows me down, but it is interesting work. There are some fun stories here, but it probably is best just to consider them briefly, without too much detail, and then move on ;). Lots better than 20 years ago, when my indiscriminate matchmaking was causing all the 10-y/os to pair up. :o

Emergency Village 7, built to replace the former BHs, and to consume food and resources.

Emergency Villages 8 & 9, built to provide housing and emergency food production. If it isn't obvious, these days I always leave the job of harvesting surface stone and iron to the foresters.

Frontier forest nodes; if necessary, Market 10 will replace the barn under construction at center.

Last year 14 uneducated hunters at 14 cabins produced 6400 venison and 160 leather, essentially all of which went into TPs where it was traded for 20,800 peaches and pecans, for an ultimate yield of 1485 food per hunter. Not bad for uneducated.

irrelevant

Year 152

Village Ten underway. Need more houses and therefore more farms.

Village Ten, Village Nine. Once the sine wave gets started, it is really difficult to get it stopped. With uneducated, it is doubly hard, with the kids hooking up and having kids at age 10. They get a full house by 25, and then live another 50 years.

Nilla

The sinus-graph is impressing. It looks like you built slightly more houses continuously. Each "max" is a bit higher than the last. It also looks like you have stopped to work with the population to minimize the variations. It's maybe not possible to stop it with the uneducated, but to minimize it. I have some suggestions how to do it, if you wasn't to try during your next 40 years.


irrelevant

@Nilla Part of my problem is that during the pop crashes I end up with the inevitable large number of houses with one adult (and sometimes a child or two) in them. During each crash I have micromanaged this by firing all builders and "demolishing" all of these houses, then gradually recovering them as couples become available.

The result of this each time has been a huge surge in new children, and a ballooning population that totally outstrips my ability to build new houses in the following years. This leads to the next crash.

Of course I would be interested in hearing about any ideas you had for controlling this. The next crash is just around the corner  ;D

Nilla

I would try this:

Look at the number of children. Choose an "ideal number". (about 12% of the constant =average? population, we have discussed this before.) To make it easy, say your choice is 100 children.

As soon as the number of children gets higher than 110, send a bunch of old childless people to the boarding house and close their homes, and don't open them, until the number of children is down to 100 again. As long as there are old people in the boardinghouse, there will be no new couple and I hope less children.

As soon as the number of children goes under 90 (and there are no closed houses to open), send a bunch of families with adult children to the boardinghouse (I wouldn't mind too much about the individual age of the mothers, look at is as an average thing). And new couples will be found, in the boardinghouse or in the homes, it doesn't matter.

I think to succeed to work with the population is to act early, as so many other things in Banished. Not wait until the population grows/reduces but be ahead of the development = looking at the next generation and act there.


rkelly17

Quote from: irrelevant on February 17, 2015, 03:55:28 PM
@Nilla Part of my problem is that during the pop crashes I end up with the inevitable large number of houses with one adult (and sometimes a child or two) in them. During each crash I have micromanaged this by firing all builders and "demolishing" all of these houses, then gradually recovering them as couples become available.

The result of this each time has been a huge surge in new children, and a ballooning population that totally outstrips my ability to build new houses in the following years. This leads to the next crash.

Of course I would be interested in hearing about any ideas you had for controlling this. The next crash is just around the corner  ;D

Far be it from me to claim to be an expert on Banished matchmaking, so any advice I give is worth what you pay for it.  ;)  What I would try is not to worry about getting everybody a house when you have a surplus of "families" without housing. In such a case build 2-4 houses per year and see if that smooths things out a bit. That should let some of your couples get together and start having babies, but hold some off until later when they can get a house and do the same, but not in such pronounced waves. The question would be how well that works with uneducated workers.

I think that even with a very balanced new houses/new couples approach, cycles are unavoidable after a certain population level. It may be built in from the early wave of deaths when the first generation dies at close to the same time.  :-\

irrelevant

Quote from: Nilla on February 18, 2015, 03:54:01 AM
I would try this:

Look at the number of children. Choose an "ideal number". (about 12% of the constant =average? population, we have discussed this before.) To make it easy, say your choice is 100 children.

As soon as the number of children gets higher than 110, send a bunch of old childless people to the boarding house and close their homes, and don't open them, until the number of children is down to 100 again. As long as there are old people in the boardinghouse, there will be no new couple and I hope less children.

As soon as the number of children goes under 90 (and there are no closed houses to open), send a bunch of families with adult children to the boardinghouse (I wouldn't mind too much about the individual age of the mothers, look at is as an average thing). And new couples will be found, in the boardinghouse or in the homes, it doesn't matter.

I think to succeed to work with the population is to act early, as so many other things in Banished. Not wait until the population grows/reduces but be ahead of the development = looking at the next generation and act there.
@Nilla, I agree with this general approach as a way to prevent this from happening, but I'm not sure I can make it work here. My reasons for thinking this are 1) uneducated changes the calculations because they start reproducing at 10 rather than at 16-20, and 2) I am so far gone into the sine wave, I don't think I can pull this out using feedback. It's like using the thermostat to try to adjust the heat in your house on a -10C day with the windows open.  ;) I need to get out ahead of the curve somehow. As you say, "to succeed with the population is to act early." which I failed to do.

Quote from: rkelly17 on February 18, 2015, 08:03:07 AM
Far be it from me to claim to be an expert on Banished matchmaking, so any advice I give is worth what you pay for it.  ;)  What I would try is not to worry about getting everybody a house when you have a surplus of "families" without housing. In such a case build 2-4 houses per year and see if that smooths things out a bit. That should let some of your couples get together and start having babies, but hold some off until later when they can get a house and do the same, but not in such pronounced waves. The question would be how well that works with uneducated workers.

I think that even with a very balanced new houses/new couples approach, cycles are unavoidable after a certain population level. It may be built in from the early wave of deaths when the first generation dies at close to the same time.  :-\
I think you are selling yourself short; you have been here longer than most of us, and I reckon you have figured out a thing or two ;) I've pretty much decided that since what I was doing before was not working (indeed was making things worse), this time I am going to continue building houses and forget about the pop crash. I don't think 2-4 houses/year is going to make much difference though, maybe something more like 15-20. In any case, I'll see what happens when you let them spread out among the empty houses as they like. It may make the crash worse, but the rebound may also be less steep. And anyway, I only have to keep this going another 44 years  ;D ;)

irrelevant

Year 156

Village Ten, Village Nine - expanding farms and housing

Nilla

Quote from: irrelevant on February 18, 2015, 06:28:57 PM
I agree with this general approach as a way to prevent this from happening, but I'm not sure I can make it work here. My reasons for thinking this are 1) uneducated changes the calculations because they start reproducing at 10 rather than at 16-20, and 2) I am so far gone into the sine wave, I don't think I can pull this out using feedback. It's like using the thermostat to try to adjust the heat in your house on a -10C day with the windows open.  ;) I need to get out ahead of the curve somehow. As you say, "to succeed with the population is to act early." which I failed to do.

I think you are wrong. I think it is possible to change this, not easy, but possible.

Some day I might prove you're wrong!  ;) I haven't that 200 year achievement. I never felt any kind of challenge in trying for that one. This might be a chance. I'll let you know, be sure of that.  ;D

But of cause I think it is wise to build houses and expand all the time, slow or fast, doesn't matter. The main thing; expansion. That's how the game was designed.

rkelly17

Quote from: irrelevant on February 18, 2015, 06:28:57 PM
I think you are selling yourself short; you have been here longer than most of us, and I reckon you have figured out a thing or two ;) I've pretty much decided that since what I was doing before was not working (indeed was making things worse), this time I am going to continue building houses and forget about the pop crash. I don't think 2-4 houses/year is going to make much difference though, maybe something more like 15-20. In any case, I'll see what happens when you let them spread out among the empty houses as they like. It may make the crash worse, but the rebound may also be less steep. And anyway, I only have to keep this going another 44 years  ;D ;)

Thank you for the complement!  :)  You are no doubt right about the numbers. I forgot how big Gopher Prairie had become. 2-4 would be a tiny drop in the bucket. Sometime we should do some sort of experiment on the optimum percentage for number of houses vs. number of "families."

irrelevant

Quote from: Nilla on February 19, 2015, 03:29:41 AM
But of cause I think it is wise to build houses and expand all the time, slow or fast, doesn't matter. The main thing; expansion. That's how the game was designed.
Yes, this is a mistake I made in this town. I built the way I always do, maybe even a bit slower. But that doesn't work for uneducated, who reproduce faster than educated. And then I took the nomads  ::)

Quote from: rkelly17 on February 19, 2015, 09:05:46 AM
Sometime we should do some sort of experiment on the optimum percentage for number of houses vs. number of "families."

Yes, there is a great need for this.

Year 156

Villages Four, Two, and Seven.

Villages Five, Eight, and Ten.

Villages Nine and Six.

Villages One, Three, and Eight.

irrelevant

Year 163

Heading down the sine wave again. No special measures taken this time, other than to follow @Nilla's advice to try to keep the number of children around 100. Even that hasn't worked out, as large numbers of houses are being vacated, and new couples are moving in. Three diseases in three years didn't help matters; 30-40 died in a tuberculosis outbreak. Fortunately I was able to contain a smallpox outbreak to patient 0. After the TB, built three more hospitals.

Villages One thru Ten