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salamander: Cooperatopolis: Flowerchild Commune Challenge

Started by salamander, March 10, 2015, 07:56:26 AM

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salamander

The next few years focused on continuing to develop the southern parts of the town ... the SW area across the river, the S area between the river and lake, and the SE area at the lake.  The decrease in population growth I mentioned at the end of the previous several years seems to have reversed itself.  I'm betting that I just overpopulated houses with the last group of nomads and get a brief dip in births for my trouble.

Year 25 -- Happiness was starting hang more around 4 1/2 stars instead of 5, so a chapel was built in the south.  A market was built in the southwest area, and a new boarding house (#9) was started nearby.

Year 26 -- Started on a boarding house (#10) at the lake in the southeast.  The southwest area got a forester lodge and a gatherer's hut.  I seem to have plenty of logs and firewood at the moment, so the plan here is to set the foresters to only plant for a few years to get a good forest going for the gatherers, and then stop work at the forester lodge

Year 27 -- The lake boarding house is starting to populate, so a school was built nearby.  More resource production building (for gatherers, hunters and foresters) started by the river.  At the moment, if the population keeps growing, I'm going to need a lot more food coming in.  I plan to treat the foresters here the same as at the forest cluster in Year 26.  An additional boarding house (#11) started in the southwest area.

Year 28 -- Kind of a boring year, pretty much letting the laborers and builders catch up on all the buildings placed in the last couple of years.


For the next few years, I think I'm going to have to concentrate on getting the food reserves a lot higher than they are now.  I also want to try moving the students around after the housing shuffles, so some additional schools are going to be needed.

Nilla

Your population graph is very instructive; It shows very good the main problem to take nomads. I do not talk about deceases. I do not talk about uneducated people. I talk about the birth rate of your original people.

If you don't plan carefully and build a lot of new houses (in this case boarding houses), the nomads will take all the new houses and there is no room for your originally young couples to move out. That means; the birth rate goes down after you take the nomads. If you draw a line, estimating the normal natural population growth, you can see that you would have had about the same population now, even if you hadn't taken the nomads. Two differences; younger and better educated.


salamander

Year 29 -- Four schools were started (with two actually under construction and 2 paused) for the student shuffling.  Boarding house (#12) started as well as another fishing dock on the river.

Year 30 -- A new cemetery was constructed in the south.  The original was still only a little over half full, but I don't think that will last long.  The next major move is going to be to start building around the lake -- a market and two boarding houses (#13 & #14) were placed to the south of the lake.  I think @Nilla's right about the nomads vs. housing, but against my better judgment I accepted another group of 18 of the wandering fiends (11 adults and 7 children).  So far, I haven't had any disease outbreaks, but I may be playing with fire (which I also have not had yet ... knock on wood).

Year 31 -- Built another fishing dock on the river because I'm still a little nervous about the food reserves and how quickly the population is starting to climb.  For the same reason, started on a gatherer hut/forester lodge pair near the new south lake settlement.  Again, the foresters will be set to plant only for now.

Year 32 -- Built a boarding house (#15) at the original lake settlement, and started a market and a boarding house (#16) on the north side of the lake.  Finished building another of the schools for shuffling students around as the number of students is growing.

Year 33 -- Boarding house (#17) built at the new north lake settlement, and fourth school for shuffling unpaused.  Still being stupid ... maybe I'm getting overconfident ... a group of 36 nomads was accepted (19 adults and 17 children).  This will probably lead to the birth rate decrease @Nilla was talking about, so some more boarding houses are going to be needed very soon.  This may be the last group of nomads I accept -- their numbers are starting to get too high to comfortably take them in.

Year 34 -- Built a third chapel at the south lake settlement ... try to keep these folks happy since they look like they're going to have to eat mostly fish for a while.  Also put in a school at the north lake settlement and two more boarding houses (#18 & #19).  Added another gatherer/forester pair to the south of the south lake settlement.


Managed to get the Isolationist Award, even though I didn't realize I was working toward it.  Maybe I've been too diligent about growing the population, or maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention, but the rate at which it's increasing is alarming.  At this point, I'm afraid I may be headed for something like a Malthusian meltdown if I don't slow it down.  I may try only doing the housing shuffle once per year instead of several times like I have been doing.

Nilla

No panic! Don't be nervous about the food. You must concider one thing: It comes from, gatherers, fishers and hunters, That's very reliable. With farming (or trade even much more) you need a larger reserve for a bad harvest (or no food boats for a long time). Of cause, you have to increase the production, as the population grows but otherwise, it should be fine.

salamander

Actually, I've been surprised at how stable the food reserves have been over several years, even though the population has been growing.  I wonder if it's the education level getting higher and bringing in more food over the same period?

salamander

Whew! -- finally finished the challenge.  Since I was holding up the whole challenge, I haven't been keeping up with the blog very well.  Also, things started to happen more and more quickly in the last part of the 50 years, so here's just a summary of the last part of the game (years 35 through early spring 50):

The main goal was keeping the population growing, which required food (duh ...), so much of the next several years was spent building additional boarding houses (ended up being an additional 26 BH's).  Along with the BH's, quite a few more food production buildings -- fishing docks, forester/gather pairs, and hunting cabins -- were constructed to take advantage of space and keep up with food demand.  As resources were available, more markets were built to spread into new areas of the map.  Additional production buildings (blacksmiths, tailors, woodcutters, etc... were built as needed).  Also constructed more happiness and health buildings to keep the hearts and stars between 4 1/2 and 5.

Only one more group of nomads was accepted, in year 38, with 44 new bannies being added to the town.  Over the following years, two more groups were denied citizenship, mostly because of food issues later on.  That last nomad group pushed me over the edge into getting the One With Nature award.

I may have made the wrong choice in map size, which was left open for this challenge.  I chose to use a medium map, and by the end, I had pretty much used up all the space, a lot of it being taken up for forest production buildings.  By year 42, I had almost completely harvested all of the stone, and was running out of space for additional food production.  I'd hoped to be able to complete the game without a trading post, but I didn't really see a choice other than to finally build the one I'd placed on pause way back in year 4.  Food production was not keeping up with the population, and I was out of stone for more boarding houses and other buildings.  Ironically, I spent a fair amount of stone and other resources on wells for fire fighting and on hospitals for epidemics, but I never had a single disaster happen in the 49 years of the game ... I'd say that's pretty lucky.

There are 9 screenshots of the town below -- 3 left-to-right across the top of the map, 3 left-to right across the middle, and 3 across the bottom of the map.


Nilla

Congratulations! Nice job!

How often did you demolish the boarding houses? The growth is impressive at the end.

salamander

Thanks.  Through the 30's and early 40's I was demolishing around twice per year, with school shuffling happening each time immediately after everyone was resettled in a house.  For the last several years, I reduced the demolishing to only once per year to avoid the baby boom that usually happened right afterwards ... I just didn't have the food production to support big increases in population all at once.

All in all, I think @kee might want to handicap the scoring for this town: after all, I had your and @irrelevant's discussions about keeping the population growing with demolishing and @rkelly17's ideas about rearranging the students in the schools to get them through more quickly.  @irrelevant replayed 10 years (I think) with the school rearrangements and saw an improvement, but because I was bringing up the rear as far as completing the challenge, I had 21 years to do the same.  I think that made a big difference.

irrelevant

@salamander. nicely done!

Bah to a handicap. This is another challenge that should just stay open, for anyone to top if he/she can. You're on top for now, until I try again and get pop 1000 ;) ;D

salamander

@irrelevant -- Thanks.  Keeping the challenge open sounds like a good plan to me.  This has been one of the most enjoyable games I've played in a while.  The rules of the challenge really changed the way I normally do things and kept it interesting.

Go for the 1000+ town.  That would be cool to see.  :)

Nilla

Me too; bah for the handicap. I see these challenges as challenges, to try what's possible. Not competitions, to beat someone. And if I could help a little bit; I'm happy!

And yes @irrelevant; go for the 1000! I would like to see that, too.

kee

Although I had in mind to close the challenge soon and declare a winner, you make a convincing argument. This means no post  @solarscreen s champions list though, you cool with that @salamander  since it seems you'd top it right at the moment?
Kim Erik

salamander

No problem here, although I hope I'll still be to claim at least a part of the huge cash prize you were offering.

Something you might think about: with @solarscreen's okay, what about including a section in the Champion's List for open-ended challenges, or a separate thread specifically for open challenges.  In both cases, rather than listing a final "winner," something like a leader board (like in golf) that shows what the current standings/rankings are could be updated as new challenge games are completed.  How's something like that sound to everyone?

kee

I never offered cash, only capital. You'll find a stash of Unobtainium with your name on waiting for you at Sirius central.
I'll update the challenge text to make it reflect that it's open.i
Kim Erik