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

[irrelevant]

@rkelly17 I think you are absolutely right about the ratio. This is also a factor. I have noticed such age disparity between the members of new households. On the other hand, GP is large enough I would think that these instances surely have to average out. And there seems to be no pattern to it. You can get a 15 y/o "man" moving in with a 35 y/o woman in one house, and in the next house you get a pair of 20 y/os. I think the luck of this draw can have a lot to do with these pop curve fluctuations. If you roll a string of older women hooking up, that has an impact.

[rkelly17]

@rkelly17 I think you are absolutely right about the ratio. This is also a factor. I have noticed such age disparity between the members of new households. On the other hand, GP is large enough I would think that these instances surely have to average out. And there seems to be no pattern to it. You can get a 15 y/o "man" moving in with a 35 y/o woman in one house, and in the next house you get a pair of 20 y/os. I think the luck of this draw can have a lot to do with these pop curve fluctuations. If you roll a string of older women hooking up, that has an impact.

Like all things where the law of averages plays a roll, my guess is that it evens out over large numbers but fluctuates with smaller samples. After 500 years you will no doubt have seen half women and half men, but this year . . . .

And I agree that there is no pattern to coupling--except maybe that no one will partner with a student if an adult is available. And I wouldn't want to bet my life on that!  So one 18 year old citizen may choose a 30 year old partner even though many 18-23 year-olds are available--or not.

[Nilla]

Yes. I'm sure you are both right and I thought like you @irrelevant that these "gender distribution" unbalance wouldn't have that impact in this large settlement, but as we see, it sometimes does.

There are some other things, that have an influence on the population:

The gender of the people who dies. If there are a large number of old widows/widowers, that occupies homes by themselves, there will be less houses free for new couples.

Than we have this separations. I am pretty sure, that in periods when the population is low, there are less families, than houses. That means separations. I don't know how to prevent this and I have never seen couples moving in together again spontaneously. So even if there are about the same number of separations in every cycle (and I don't think it is) the impact is different, depending on the age of the separated couples.

So I suppose with these random effects combined, there are these variations even in such a large settlement as GP.

[irrelevant]

Year 459

My plans changed, I came home this evening, will be gone tomorrow night.

The last two pop cycles have been much better behaved than the previous four or five were. That makes things run so much better. Just need to rebalance log, wool, and iron inventories, and I'll be good to go for tomorrow.

Food is in great shape, as a result.

[xyris]

Good luck! I'd be interested to see your progress. My top tip would be, don't try to do it without schools!

If you have any questions at all, feel free to ask. I love answering questions.

Thank you!  I haven't been playing lately, I'll have to get back to it. 

Just need to rebalance log, wool, and iron inventories, and I'll be good to go for tomorrow.

Food is in great shape, as a result.

Yes, I found out about rebalancing. The food level dropped significantly because the barns closest to the crops were full of wool. 

[irrelevant]

Good luck! I'd be interested to see your progress. My top tip would be, don't try to do it without schools!

If you have any questions at all, feel free to ask. I love answering questions.

Thank you!  I haven't been playing lately, I'll have to get back to it. 

Just need to rebalance log, wool, and iron inventories, and I'll be good to go for tomorrow.

Food is in great shape, as a result.

Yes, I found out about rebalancing. The food level dropped significantly because the barns closest to the crops were full of wool. 

@xyris  I have found that balancing wool and leather is one of the biggest challenges. The main reason for this is that there is no separate graph for these commodities, so you either have to go from memory of past inventory levels, or else you have to keep track on paper. Neither is ideal.

As you have seen, wool and leather compete with food for barn space, so it is essential not to let this go uncontrolled. My solution has been to put all leather into the TPs, and to make wool coats. I have limited my wool production to be somewhat less than enough to keep my tailors supplied, and I supplement my production by auto-trading for small quantities of wool; I buy 50-200 wool from every resource boat. I've also set a limit of 9000 on wool coats, and I do not normally use wool coats for trade. I try to keep 2000-4000 wool in stock. If I have lots of coats and lots of wool, I'll put a few wool coats in each TP (50-100, never more).

Tools are similar, although I have no iron production at all and so all iron is purchased. There is a limit of 9000 on tool production, and I keep a close watch on how much iron I have in stock. I try to keep 4000-8000 iron on hand, and adjust auto-purchasing as needed.  I never use tools for trade. If you are not sitting watching your town run, trading away tools is asking for trouble. Plus, with uneducated, there is 0 profit in iron tools.

I also buy 50 steel tools from every resource merchant.

Note that I have just 8 TPs, and I place orders with all merchants for everything I need. Every time I come to the town after I have let it run all day or overnight, I find I need to go through and make some changes to the auto-trading, and perhaps also some changes to merchant orders. I currently am ordering logs, wool, iron, and steel tools from the resource merchants; apples, pecans, logs, and iron from the general goods merchants; and apples and pecans from the food merchants.

What I am trading away is moderate amounts of firewood (500-1000 in each TP, firewood production limit is currently 32,000), all mushrooms, all venison, all mutton, all leather, all ale, and 2500 beans per TP.

I am running with the mod that prevents seed and livestock merchants from coming.

[irrelevant]

Year 507 

Crashed out after running unattended for 16 hours. The town is in such good shape, I'm confident if it hadn't crashed it would still be alive after the 34 hours that I was gone.

I have to say, this makes me happy. 

[xyris]

Those graphs are so impressive! Stable at 500 years is some achievement.

[irrelevant]

@xyris, thanks! It feels pretty good.

I only wish @snapster were here to tell me I was being stupid and shortsighted, and that what I'm doing is too easy (you had to be here a few months ago to get this)

Tomorrow I will have the opportunity to let GP run ~24 hours unattended.

I guess I am going for 1000 years. Could probly do that in a week or two.

[irrelevant]

year 538 - getting ready to let it run 18 hours

[Nilla]

Yes I agree! it's very impressive.

Have you done anything to make the population graph look like that? I mean so regular.

[irrelevant]

Nope, it's just doing whatever it feels like doing. All I'm fussing with is trading.

[Nilla]

So that "bad" cycle, back in 300 something was just bad luck, some circumstances that worked together in an disadvantageous way. Interesting.

[irrelevant]

@Nilla There was one die-off that was steeper than the others. It corresponded with running out of firewood, so it may have been freezing, or it could have been one of the nastier diseases. But It did seem to throw off the equilibrium of the sine wave.

Year 600

Ran 27 hours straight, unattended for all but 3-4 hours.

[irrelevant]

Closing in on year 700. The game is still running continuously on 5x since Saturday 29 Aug, except for three hours yesterday afternoon (crashed out).

Year 700