Population Control proposed Fix

[Sir Thalius Hayle]

Have no solid idea on how to implement this, but throwing it out there for discussion, should it spark interest.

The plantation dynamic should play at least a part, if not a big part, in population growth. Healthy plantations equal employment for locals, which means financial means for supporting a family, which means more people, which attracts the means for supporting the population- i.e. other jobs, vendors, businesses, etc. A presence of healthy, growing plantations around a port would attract still others to live in the area. You get the idea.

Unhealthy plantations would discourage immigration to the area, not to mention slow growth in families and the increased worker mortality. It would be in a port governor's best interest to monitor the health of the plantations located around his port. Plantations that are not well taken care of would run the risk of not having their permissions renewed.

Personally, I am in favor of getting rid of TI and BD voodoo cards as a means for altering population at a port and tying population growth to other in-game dynamics.

[Vane]

Not a bad concept, "if" BD and TI cards were ever to be removed we need other "combat" oriented ways of reducing a port population though. Coupled with stans suggestions they could work well together.

[Stan Rogers]

The good thing about tying port pops to food stocks is, it only renders TI cards useless if a port exceeds its ability to support said population.
Ranking missions will still work the same but if a pop exceeds its ability to feed, the added population will die at reset.

Doing this would give food ports a major boost in advantage of food stocks so maybe that is why it is not being considered or dismissed as viable

[PFH]

Combine with natural disasters, such as famine or plague, and this will be interesting

[Captain Jack]

I fear that there is a misunderstanding. The proposed changes are a bit complicated though, so let me explain it again.

#1
NPC yearly TAX, increases from 10gc per tax paying citizen to 50gc

Which means, that a port of 100M, will now make 8.2M from the 1.65M it was making till now.
In other words, a port of 100M will make as much as a port of 500M is making now.

#2
All ports will have their population equally scaled down, by 10 times.

Which means that a port of 2.1B, will become a port of 210M
By doing this, in effect, the income of every port will halve. Note, halve but the population drops 10 times. It halves because in the previous step we have increased the tax every citizen pays by 5 times.

#3
New Port Max is set to 210M

Which means that the maximum yield of each port will be 17.5M, at 210M population.
Currently, it is 35M but at 2.1B


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In fact, we could keep population as it is and only reduce NPC citizen tax. This is the whole difference.
We just thought to also normalize the numbers around population.

The normalization has no effect to gameplay. Only to the visual. It is simply better to read 210M as top population instead of 2B.

While 210M is still a big number, at this moment it is needed as we do not want to mess with Ships transporting immigrants feature. This might change in the future though.

[Stan Rogers]

I understand the unrealistic populations in ports are a concern and if that is the sole reason for the pop cap, so be it.

If gc income from such high pops is the main reason, I guess the cheap and nasty way is to either reduce the pops or reduce the amount of gc tax each npc citizen pays (60%) I think is the contributing number.

A nation could assign a percentage of its NPC citizenry to gathering food thus leaving only 30% (random number) available to pay tax reducing gc intake ?

Diverting trade fleets of RL inhabitants to supply food to support large pops too would be just another lvl of gameplay that needs to balance a players input/contribution.

Do you think a ports ability to feed itself will ever become a reality in the game for the future ?

[Shadowood]

I think a ports population should be based on its ability to feed the populace via food stocks it is able to generate through fishing or importation.
Not enough food being supplied, a percentage of the population dies each reset until the food vs. pops equalize.


Still would like also to reduce port pops through port attacks by other ways besides voodoo such as ship cannon fire on ports.

+1

[PFH]

I think we need to focus on other tactics to deal with the population. Honestly, this can be complicated, whereas adding new and simple functions may make this easier to understand. The NPC tax, In my opinion, is fine the way it is. I think the Natural disasters should be played into this, whilst adding nation structures. One of the structures is a hospital, which protect certain populations of the tax paying citizens. Maybe add voodoo cards that increase the chances of a natural disaster by 1% each cast?

This would add different tactics for nation control and would add balancing for population control. With nation pop boosts should come chances for more disasters or increase the damage of a disaster. This related suggestion was mentioned in the plague forum topic. Specifically Shadowood with his vaccine idea for the plague.

Populations can be dealt with in different ways. You don't have to just kill them all. You can add in functions that make them depend on food, medicine, and morality of the council's decisions (or something like that.) This could add different taxes and fees (such as 10% of food sales/vaccines profit sent to nation that controls port.)

With more voodoo ideas comes even more tactics and different strategies into PG, which is what this game is about. There are multiple ways to skin a rabbit. How you skin it depends on the options available. My point is that we should just add different functions to this game. I think people are looking for that, and would make this game way more interesting.

This was inspired by other forum topics and suggestions. Suggestions mostly from Shadowood and Stan Rogers.

[Captain Jack]

This is a temporal step. We simply tweak the npc citizen tax (initial idea from dman to be fair) now to buy development time till we can have a an in-depth feature and mechanisms about it.

There are a lot of interesting ideas that have been heard in the last 2 days.

We got a base discussion we should use for the in-depth mechanism:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1569

I have already referenced this topic there so the ideas will not be lost. Still, it is better to contribute your ideas for the full feature there.

[PFH]

So this will only be a change until we can come up with better ways to deal with it? I can deal with that I'll post my thought there