Population Growth Control

**Canterbury** · October 04, 2008, 05:52 PM

I'm trying to create as realistic a mod for RTW as I can, and need a little help. I've chosen EB 1.1 Alex as the base, and while I'm really impressed with the AI and the level of historical detail, there are still a few unrealistic mechanisms that the modders haven't touched, and I want to see if I can tame.

The first is the seemingly uncontrolled population growth. Even EB allows for 5%+ growth rates in certain circumstances, 50x the historical average population growth in preindustrial economies. I know about the population growth bonuses [+ and -] in the EDB, and that population growth cannot go below O% because of them. What is the basic mechanism? I found one thread that got tantalisingly close

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ght=population

but didn't actually describe. Funnily enough someone was complaining about accidently creating the effect I'm trying to get on purpose. It seems to be about the farming level in the province. Can the population growth effect of this be manipulated, and how? Any help would be most appreciated.

**HouseOfHam** · October 04, 2008, 09:18 PM

Reducing population growth:
- Get rid of the grain resource (in descr_strat.txt), or rename it to something else
- Reduce base farm levels (in descr_regions)
- Reduce public health bonuses from buildings (in EDB)
- Reduce anti-squalor bonuses from traits

Note: The first 2 will also impact income

**Canterbury** · October 05, 2008, 04:15 AM

Thanks for that. Good pointers. What I want to do is create a system where the settlements you start with are effectively what remains through the game and where recruitment is restricted by population as much as money and barracks type. A bit of an experiment but we'll see...

**Canterbury** · October 06, 2008, 06:31 AM

In case your curious, I've gone as far as I can, and have reduced population growth to +15% per year, with no possibility of increase, a big improvement on the +35% with a huge number of health and population bonuses to come that was operating before. Not ideal, but I'll have to let squalor, recruitment and disease do the rest of the work.

One last question, is it possible to script a negative population bonus to directly to farms or to government buildings, like EB have done with their colony "building"? And I assume the effect of taxation on population increase is hardcoded?

**HouseOfHam** · October 06, 2008, 10:41 AM

Edit export_descr_buildings.txt and remove the population_growth_bonus and/or population_health_bonus from the appropriate buildings, or make it negative, as you like.

EDB guide

**Canterbury** · October 08, 2008, 04:48 AM

Originally Posted by HouseOfHam

Edit export_descr_buildings.txt and remove the population_growth_bonus and/or population_health_bonus from the appropriate buildings, or make it negative, as you like.

EDB guide

Tried it all, [EDB guide was the first place I looked] but while a negative population growth bonus shows up on the card for government buildings and for farms it doesn't have any effect. Possibly a hardcoding issue, where pop growth will have a negative on everything other than base farm level and grade of farm. Thanks for all your help. Will keep experimenting...

**Aradan** · October 08, 2008, 07:47 AM

Have you added the second "bonus" element in the relevant lines?

**Canterbury** · October 09, 2008, 12:05 AM

Yep. It was actually CTD when I attached the population negative bonus directly to farms, ignored when I added it to any other buildings. I ran the game through until I could build a "colony", which has a negative population bonus in EB, and it had no effect on the base farm level or the farm development, which I think proves that the problem is hardcoding rather than my crappy modding. Hurrah for me...

**AqD** · October 11, 2008, 02:04 PM

You'd need to run several tests to make sure the populations can still grow slowly and not killing AI factions. Anyway, it's not possible to get realistic growth rate in RTW because the minimal unit is 0.5%.
________
Jennice cam

**Canterbury** · October 11, 2008, 03:28 PM

Originally Posted by aqd

You'd need to run several tests to make sure the populations can still grow slowly and not killing AI factions. Anyway, it's not possible to get realistic growth rate in RTW because the minimal unit is 0.5%.

What I'm trying to do is balance these changes against doing most of the recruitment in the mercenary pool system, which doesn't subtract from population.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?p=3811385

Hopefully I can get it going, as it would create a M2TW type situation where settlement development had nothing to do with how many units you recruited and I would no longer have to deal with runaway population growth's domination of the game. Even then, as you say, it would be easy to go off the other end and have too little, which the AI in its infinite wisdom, would fail to handle.