Speed up port growth.

[Shadowood]

Yeah, there was this game I used to play where you can give citizens money for them to grow faster or take more money to make them grow slower.

SIM CITY!!

[Maha]

there has been suggestion of a large port overhaul, complete with port defense etc. i can see 6 categories of 'attributes (like ships have) one of them could be tax to population growth, another to 'the councils coffers' and another to port defense etc.
i rather await a big well thought out change that makes impact on the game than a small change of little significance in gameplay

[Captain Jack]

There is no natural population growth right now (positive or negative).

This is a lot harder to configure than you possibly realized when you first thought about this. Simulating population growth and keeping it balanced is a very tough task. You would need to define acceptable boundaries for maximum and minimum population within which a dynamically growth rate would stroll. Then defining this very dynamic growth rate pacing would be a big challenge already.

Current system is more PvP oriented and results in a very balanced outcome. For those unaware, population in a port changes in the following ways:
-Build Up port increases population in a fixed way (Gold coins based, always the same output for the same cost of gc)
-Transport Immigrants increases population in a percentage based way (Voodoo card are required, output is always relevant to base population).

Similarly, there are two ways to decrease port population:
-Through hiring crew for ships (again, a fixed way). However, firing is adding population back to the port (the only way to move population through ships right now, it is manual though).
-Black Death (Acts similarly to Transport Immigrants)

In real case scenario, once a port population has been depleted severely (see Akrotiri right now), Build Up port should be a better way to add population. At 100 gc spent, 1 new citizen will join the port. If we look at Akrotiri, a transport immigrant will add 1% which at 2M pop is going to bring 20k new citizens. The same amount can achieved by splashing 2M at the port. The population will pay this sum back in about 1.6years.

We should also take into consideration the bizarre numbers of population that each port currently has. At a point where a 2M populated port seems to us like isolated. Well,it is not. It is not really our fault when players decided to make more money from citizen tax and immigrated tons of new people in all ports of Avonmora. Of course, it is not that it is entirely your fault.

Current system will always favor the ports to grow over time. Why? Because simply, people always build up ports. Influence is lost but people are not. The situation only balances later where % based Black Death removes extra population added by Build up port, only because their total number is now significantly smaller to the numbers that Transport Immigrants took the port. It becomes obvious that the system is as Balanced as it can be.

Before taking a final decision, we need to look where population is actually used in the game, besides taxes. It used to play a role at innate production of resources at ports. Since the flood of Fertile lands though, that similarly played the same role as Transport Immigrant, all ports warehouses were fulled at 2.1Billions. There was no counter to this card after all. So production STOPPED. That's right, there is no innate production for some years now. So population is not a worry for production.

There are party cards and these represent perhaps the strongest reason why a port needs a healthy amount of citizens right now. There is a standard consumption per citizen (currently same for all 3 resources) which is renewed every 3 days (resources update). I can tell you that a port of 2M is a small figure for this. You need about 80M at least (quick rough estimation) on a low traffic port to be certain that the people will participate in all parties. Still, it sounds like a reasonable difficulty that party users might encounter. I mean, that this by itself is not enough to justify such an implementation.

Besides, we already have plans for population, which you can discuss here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1569&p=17799&hilit=consumption#p17799

[Grimrock Litless]

Currently in the real world, most rich countrys produces less then poor ones. So maybe make natural growth the same? Lets say each 1000 population gives 1 - Total influence of all combined nations on port * 1x10^-5?
When a port has too much population, people whould want the port so they might spend on it making growth drop.
This is just a assumtion.