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Families vs Houses

Started by slink, May 19, 2014, 06:56:47 AM

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slink

Today, while growing Boltona for the most recent challenge, I finally built a Town Hall.  Up until this time I had been making a new house for each newly graduated person who had a hope of moving in with someone, even if that someone was a student.  Only one person had died, and her widower was still living in their house.  Imagine my surprise, then, when the Town Hall said there were 34 houses and 25 families.  I counted noses using various methods, and finally came to the conclusion that the game does not count couples as families if the wife is a student.  I can't tell if it counts couples as families if the husband is a student, because I had a gender imbalance that resulted in all male children being born for a while.  The widower, by the way, is apparently still counted as a family.

Previously we, as a group, had determined that every working adult awaiting a house counted as a family, so that the count of families went down by one when two of them moved together into one house.  Sometimes the numbers just didn't quite add up, though, when people moved in together.  I thought it was because there were large numbers of people in my colonies at the times when I was most interested in the occupancy of houses, and that I was missing people moving into a house or dying or whatever in the flow of information.  The above could instead be why it was happening.  If the male who had matured was counted as a family-in-waiting, and then was no longer a family when he moved in with a female student, then the number of families would have decreased by one while the number of houses occupied went up by one.

Another way to express this might be that the number of families is automatically decremented by one whenever two people move in together.  If there was only one of them awaiting a house, then that family would disappear from the tabulation.  If this is the mechanism, then it should also happen when male students move in with female working adults.  The question is whether it reappears when the student finishes school.  I am guessing the answer is yes, because otherwise players would have been screaming about having increasingly wrong numbers.  Or maybe the answer is no, and we have been playing with bad data?

And why is the number of families not decremented when one of a couple dies, in that case?  And then, I have to wonder if this is why sometimes old people don't move in with someone.  Does the game still think they are a family and are not looking for a partner?

slink

An old man died and his widow moved in with the widower, after which another male became a working adult.  He moved into the vacant house with a female student.  After that, two of the female students became adults.  The count of families is now 26.  There are eight couples with female students.  So far the count is consistent although I did not see the number of families change in a way that made sense with the death, moving-in, and finishing school.  It may have been lagged.  I am playing on 2x.

rkelly17

#2
Your second post is consistent with my experience. For the fanfic I'm doing I've followed people quite carefully. Pre-town-hall I tried only to build houses when a male and female adult were available. One young woman died in childbirth and her spouse remarried immediately to a female student even though there were graduated females for whom I did not yet have a partner. When one of the male pioneers died his widow remained single until a female pioneer died and then her widower moved in with the widow. She still had a student at home, so I assume that's why he moved. On a couple of occasions when I built a new house during a surplus of females the male who moved in did not always select the oldest unmarried graduate female. When I built the town hall the numbers seemed about right. I was tracking house/family pretty carefully and it did increment by one every time someone graduated. I can't say for sure what happened every time, but there were several times that a new house reduced the number of families. I had, for example, 17 houses for 19 families and when I built a new house I had 18 of each. Widows and widowers can select new partners from a large age range. I had one fellow who moved in with a woman who was old enough to be his mother. In fact, she had been his father's second wife after his mother died of old age. Cheeky bugger!

slink

#3
Okay, the female students who are already living with someone are causing the number of families to increase appropriately when they become working adults.  It is just couples consisting of one working adult and one student (female in this case) who are causing the count of families to be low compared to the actual occupancy of houses.  I was concerned that students who had already paired up might not get counted when they finished school.  It does throw off your count of required houses, though, until they finish school.  It matters because you want to move working adults out of their parents' homes as soon as possible so that the parents might have another child, when you are initially growing your colony.

@rkelly17 : What threw me was having 34 full houses with only 25 families recognized.  That was clearly incorrect.  Also, my second post is in agreement with my first post, so somehow I did not communicate well.

slink

#4
An-n-n-nd ... female adult workers who move in with male students do increment the family count.  When their male partner finishes school, he does not increment the family count.  The game correctly sees a difference between a breeding situation (working adult female and male student) and one that is not a breeding situation (female student with working adult male).  That doesn't explain why widows and widowers without children are still considered families.  I guess they are still working adults who are looking for partners.  It's only the working adult males who has partnered with female students who make the family count inaccurate by not appearing as a family.  It's a small but real difference between the displayed count and an accurate count.

Shown as one family:
single working adults of either gender, either living alone or with their parents or their children
paired adults, with or without children, students, or grown offspring
working adult females paired with male students

Not shown as families:
children and students living with their parents
working adult males paired with female students

mariesalias

As I said on the other forum, I am so glad you turned your eye to this! I had never noticed that female students with a mate did not count. I usually seem to end up with too many females in my towns so the opposite tends to happen for me more often. It definitely makes more sense of the numbers. I tend to keep close eye on  my people in their houses until somewhere between 100-200 population. I also like to have the Town Hall numbers as a guide though, so I find this kind of information very useful!

nmid

Thanks for the research @slink... This really interests me.
Going to reread it again later :)

irrelevant

#7
Bumping this thread to the top with a question:

Do you have a strategy for building houses? Specifically, when do you build new? How many do you build? Do you aim for a certain ratio of houses:families?

My current town (which I am not sitting in front of, so I'm going from memory, which in my case is not entirely reliable ;) ) has pop ~1600. According to the town hall, there are around 530 families but only around 390 houses. I have never had more houses than families, but early on with much smaller pop I had probably 80-90% as many houses as families. This ratio has declined steadily to the current 70-75%.

So far I've been building houses as I need them to support expansion. When I push development out into the wilderness, first thing I'll do is build houses for the builders so they don't have to walk so far. Then I build farms, market, TP, and industry, plus as many houses as it takes to support the additional construction. I find that the number of builders for a facility matches up pretty well with the number of workers that facility needs when complete.

What I haven't been doing is building houses as needed by the number of families I have. In year ~63 my population curve so far has had no dips in it, just a steady climb, so what I'm doing isn't completely wrong anyway.  ;) But I do notice now that it is leveling off, and I'm concerned that I could be heading for a decline. So I guess I need to build more houses, even if there is no specific job available for whomever will move in. I do have some spots where I could do this. But I also want to be careful not to overreact to this by overbuilding.

The screenie shows my pop curve from a couple of years back.

Thoughts?

RedKetchup

i go for same amount of families versus houses. when i want to push i go for +10% houses but at some point, i still need to check if i can be allowed to do. will have enough food, Tools, clothes to support it ? when it really start to go up alot and have high pop ... at some point it s normal to have -20% cause from 1k it will go up at 1.5k, 2k, 3k 5k ?? lol
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slink

Do what pleases you best.  You know that you will eventually either run out of room for more houses, or your ability to support the population will not be sufficient, and at that time the population will begin to decline.  The question is whether it will decline from just old age, or old age plus starvation and possibly freezing to death.

Kaldir

#10
Quote from: irrelevant on June 16, 2014, 07:20:09 AM
Do you have a strategy for building houses? Specifically, when do you build new? How many do you build? Do you aim for a certain ratio of houses:families?

In my last town (Lowellion), I had an almost continuous 1:1 ratio for houses vs. families. I just kept on expanding. And those new houses would be surrounded by farms, making sure of filled up barns everywhere. Sometimes I was building 15 houses at once,  with 80 laborers and 20 builders. I could keep that up until around 600 citizens. After that, the birthrate was so high I couldn't build new houses fast enough. I never an into problems though.


These are the stats for year 68, around 800 citizens and more food than I can handle (it's actually limited at 300k to prevent overflowing, with an additional 170k in trading posts):
http://worldofbanished.com/gallery/8_08_06_14_2_44_28.png
Re: Families vs Houses

mariesalias

@irrelevant  Your population graph and numbers look fine to me. If you still want to keep growing, you might want to keep your children and students about there they are now (percentage-wise) and build new houses when the babies number starts to drop.

As for building new houses, laborers need houses too. It is not a bad idea to spread some houses for laborers around so there are always some nearby to do any jobs you have with little fuss.

I agree with @slink, do what feels best for you and your play style. :)

irrelevant

Thanks for the replies. I just want to make sure I don't overbuild and get myself into future trouble with a big baby boom. Would building, say, 20 or 30 houses all at once be risky?

Kaldir

It will be risky if you don't have enough food or clothing for the baby boom that follows (assuming you have enough young couples in need of their own house). And some 15 years later, all those babies will start to die of old age. That might be risky, if you don't have the free laborers to fill the jobs.

But with the amount of citizens you have, I doubt those 20 to 30 houses at once make that much difference for you population's safety.