World of Banished

Conversations => Tips and Tricks => Topic started by: irrelevant on September 17, 2014, 09:30:50 AM

Title: What "Families" means
Post by: irrelevant on September 17, 2014, 09:30:50 AM
There are a lot of new folks here on WoB! So I though I'd repost this tidbit, which is buried in reply #9 to my Sink Mill blog: http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=327.0

To summarize, at the start of this town I had a serious imbalance between male and female children. It was a struggle to deal with, but there was a benefit.

The population imbalance allowed me to figure out what "families" means on the town hall statistics panel. At least I believe that it did.

"Mine shows that I have 14 families. When I go through and count noses, I have 11 "married" couples. That means that there are three more "families" somewhere. In my case, these could only be the three unattached female adults, two age 20 and one age 19. The unattached males cannot possibly figure into this, they are 12,11,8,5,5."

So, "families" = married couples + unattached female adults

If anyone has any data that points to some other definition, please post it here!
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: slink on September 17, 2014, 09:56:26 AM
Families are widows or widowers living alone, plus single adults living with their parents, plus all married couples, minus married couples where the wife is a student.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: irrelevant on September 17, 2014, 10:04:08 AM
So it's kind of a useless number then. There's an awful lot of room for noise in that formula, specifically having an adult female living with her parents counting as a family, and an adult male living with his parents counting as another family is counter-intuitive; if a house became available and they moved in together, they would no longer be counted as two families but rather as one.

Just curious, is that documented somewhere?
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: Pangaea on September 17, 2014, 10:08:00 AM
On that later point, this happens sometimes. You build a new house, two people move in, and family goes down by one. Pretty sure I've seen that happen.

Families in Town Hall is a nice guideline though. I try to make sure number of houses aren't too far apart, to ensure a steady growth without too many people getting old without having a chance to get kids.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: slink on September 17, 2014, 10:34:29 AM
It is the summary of my own detailed observations.

It's reasonable for all singles living with their parents to count as families, because potentially they can marry a student when they have a house and this sometimes makes the family count stay the same both before and after a house is used up.  The flaw is that wives who are students remove the couple from the count, whereas husbands who are students do not.  When the wife finishes school, then the couple is included in the count.  It does make it hard to keep track but as a rough guide it is not too bad.  A more detailed population table would be nice.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: rkelly17 on September 17, 2014, 01:41:27 PM
@slink has done the research and is the expert on "families" and what that means.

Quote from: Pangaea on September 17, 2014, 10:08:00 AM
On that later point, this happens sometimes. You build a new house, two people move in, and family goes down by one. Pretty sure I've seen that happen.

Families in Town Hall is a nice guideline though. I try to make sure number of houses aren't too far apart, to ensure a steady growth without too many people getting old without having a chance to get kids.

Happens to me constantly--In fact I assume that every time I build a house the family counter will go down by one. Early in the game I try to stay pretty close; then a bunch of people dies and I have too many houses. You'd think I'd learn, but I don't. In a recent town even with 400+ citizens I had a drop in families (a slow loss of population over time caused by a gender imbalance and not paying attention suddenly made a crisis by a a bunch of nomads I had accepted 10 game-years before dying of old age all at once) and ended up with the numbers being equal. Then the number of families took off and in a few years I had twice as many families as houses. It was crazy.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: Squishyjam on February 09, 2017, 02:53:24 PM
I'm curious if anyone has figured out at what point a worker becomes too old to pair off and have children if a house is available. I had to delay house expansion due to a resource limitations and now I've gotten where several unattached male and female workers in their 30s don't pair off. I've now got plenty of housing, and several empty ones opening up as workers in their 70s die off.

My issue is that without breeding family pairs my population is trapped in a declining spiral for awhile as I've only got 9 children/students with an aged population of 45 workers between 30 and 79 in age.  Most of the workers are over age 50.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: kid1293 on February 09, 2017, 03:59:07 PM
Marriage are determined by two variables in Citizen.rsc in Modkit's Template folder.

   float _marriageAge = 2.0;
   float _marrigeRange = 4.0;

which you multiply by 5 to get

start possible marriage = 10 years old
end possible marriage = 10 + 20 = 30 years old

This is from vanilla game. Many mods change these values.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: brads3 on February 09, 2017, 05:11:32 PM
SQUISHY, are you playing with any mods?? if not then, i belive the child-bearing age for fm's stops at 35-45 yrs old.even if the fm is living by herself she can have children.but not if living with both her parents. am i right in assuming ,you are new at playing banished? i say that based on the struggle you had to be going thru to age the population so far before you added houses.if i am not mistaken in the vanilla game child-bearing age starts at 15.you could look to nomads to get some population growth.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: Squishyjam on February 09, 2017, 05:50:48 PM
First time coming back to it after a year of Factorio. Tied the latest CC mod and had a blast. Figured I would try vanilla for some achievements. 

I made a mistake focusing on the wrong things and lost track of the population ages. Oops. I think the map is recoversble since I've got a ton of food and may be able to wait through the demographic changes.
Title: Re: What "Families" means
Post by: brads3 on February 09, 2017, 06:29:34 PM
wb,there are tons of mods now.and more  being designed.i take it you mean the cc journey.the mini mod has small townhall that would give you nomads in a couple years to boost the population.last count i had like 75 mods.