Can you please explain Population Growth? Does the AI have full jurisdiction or can I create new citizens at will?
This has yet to even be decided. Suggestions are welcome if you have any.
Having seen and played Timber and Stone, I see problems with the food supply drawing immigrants as a method of population growth, even though it seems like a natural fit for that game. At least T&S is very buggy and erratic in terms of getting immigrants that way.
Having couples pair off has been done in some other games (notably the Millenaire mod with Minecraft) and then having three or more stages of life as the kids āgrow upā to become adults (and extra vulnerability for the kids playing near dangerous things). Millenaire has the extra feature that you need to have a house built for a couple before they become adults, and the teenagers are seen as āadults in waitingā while you are busy getting the houses built for them. Going that route at least would encourage you to build the village if you wanted more people.
You could also use a combination of other resources besides food, or even have a hiring agency (something Iāve seen in still other games) in order recruit new residents into a village. I think that is sort of a cheap (as in low quality) way to get new residents, but it can be limited by āgoldā or whatever resource is used for trade. Of course gold would need to have other uses besides simply hiring new residents if you introduced that concept.
Do you have any other ideas?
The devs have said they are not completely sure, but have considered attractions in your town like Taverens drawing new citizens in.
The better your attractions the more likely a traveler will decide to settle down in your city, however nothing is set in stone and this could change in a heartbeat
How will your settlement grow population wise?
Your settlement will grow at the same scale as your food supply. We
havenāt nailed down the final mechanic yet, but we want there to be a
constant choice between burning resources to craft things (buildings,
weapons, armor, etc.) and investing in the food supply (farming,
trapping) to get more people.
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I guess itās a question of balance after they have the crafting and building part of the game nailed down and can see the amount of resources used.
and once the mechanic has been decided opon, and we get to play with the beta, even more tweaking will happen there after for balancing as migration is a big balance issue.
Iāve just found your awesome game by accident (checking CastleStory blog video) and I spent rest of the day reading everything. I can see great potential, so I feel obligated to help with ideas.
My idea is not to hire new people, but to create place for them in your settlement.
So you create a job, set itās duties, reward, rights, amount of people who can take it, formation, ectā¦ Then each unemployed person (i.e. newcomer who came with caravan) calculate risk and reward of every job available in town. He either take it or leave the town (if he thinks that somewhere else live is better).
*example 1
Job | name: worker | amount: 10 | formation: militia infantry
Duty:
- carrying objects | place: east district | time: 8am-8pm | duration: mon-frid
- combat training | place: main training ground | time: 8am-8po | duration: sat-sun
Alarms: - Enemy near town | donāt leave the town
- Enemy at the gate | army yourself and join your formation
Reward: - bed | group: east district poor beds
- money | STR*10
- alarm equipment | type: melee, armour, helmet, shield | location: east armoury*
*example 2
Job | name: smith | amount: 2 | formation: castle militia crossbowman
Duty:
- working in smithy | place: high castle smithy | time: 8am-8pm | duration: mon-frid
- combat training | place: castle training ground | time: 8am-8po | duration: sat-sun
Alarms: - Enemy near town | donāt leave the town
- Enemy at the gate | donāt leave the castle
- Enemy in castle | army yourself and join your formation
Reward: - bed | group: castle smithy
- money | STR10 | DEX10 | INT5 | blacksmithing10 | armourcrafting10 | weaponcrafting10 | bowcrafting5 | precise works5
- alarm equipment | type: melee, armour, helmet, crossbow | location: east armoury*
After seeing such opportunity, a person calculate:
- whole settlement living value: how safe is it an how much is settlement currency worth (how much actual food, clothes and housing he can get with it)
- how much work he need to do, how safe is his workplace (how many people died nearby in the past)
- how risky is his militia formation (how good equipment, how many died in the past), how safe and comfortable is his home,
- how big is reward: how much money he gets, how safe and comfortable is his house
Each person know his value, based on skills and attributes, so the formula is:
[reward value - personal value * (work time + 1/4 spare time) - risk value]
If itās positive, person takes the job.
If he find a job that suits him best, but is already occupied by someone less proficient, he takes his place. And old employee have to search for new job.
Sometimes, once per week maybe, each employee revise his and other available jobs and eventually switch it.
Sounds complicated and a lot to set up? Maybe a bit. But you have to do it only once per some time, and if you do it well you make your population nearly automatic. It can even works with birth-aging-death system.
More in-detail explanations:
- Job name is set manually, just for you to recognize it. Itās generated automatically based on main duty if you donāt set your own
- Amount is the maximum number of people who can do this job. it can be set as permanent value, or based on something (i.e. link it to workshop size, amount and price of food, amount of spare beds, ect.)
- Formation is the military formation the person have to join in case of training or call to arms. Everyone need to be tied to some formation (those too valuable or weak to fight will just get order to hide in safe place)
- Duty is what that person have to do. You select from list of possible tasks like: building, mining, training, ect.
- Place determine boundaries of each persons work. Any need for his job behind boundaries will be ignored. You can set it as constant area or proximity from person.
- Time determine how long person has to work. When work-time starts person start walking toward workplace.
- Duration is just to coordinate multiple duties over time (i.e. different tasks for farmer during summer and during winter)
- Alarms determine if and how person should react certain alarm. Alarm types are set globally, but not every citizen need to care about most of them.
- Each bed belongs to one or few groups. Job can limit possibilities to find bed outside of certain group (i.e. if you donāt want your worker to sleep too far away from his workplace)
- Money is awarded based on how good someone is at certain job. But money is just and abstract number, determining how much each person can take from your stockpile. So the real reward value for person is [bed comfort value + food value + clothes value]
- Bed comfort value is based on many things: how safe it is (how many and how far are guard outposts, how far from the gates, how close and how often people dies nearby, ect.) how much furniture and decorations there are in the room, how big is the room, how many people share the same room, how close to food source, how close it is to some attractions (taverns, churches), ect. Price people pay for their bed is based on comfort value and manually set multiplier (for whole town - imagine it as tax rate)
- Food value is how nutritious and varied is the food. Nutritious is constant for each type of food (i.e. potatoes have 2) while variety is based on type of food (i.e. potatoes=1 fish soup=3), but each type counts only onece (i.e. 5 portions of potatoes still counts as 1 variety). Additional variety points are granted for each food genre present in the meal (vegetables, grains, meat, fruits, dairy)
- Equipment value is universal for each item (i.e. open helmet is always and everywhere worth 20), but modified for each job and formation (i.e. melee fighters value helmets a lot more than archer, blacksmiths value leather apron more than fisherman)
- How people spend their money:
- They spend nearly everything they earned that day
- They divide earned this day money evenly between three catecories: food money, housing money, equipment money. Then they add all stored money to equipment money.
- They check if they can afford enough cheapest nutrions (i.e. 5 portions of potatoes) then they check if they can change part of it for something better (i.e. one portion of potatoes to cabbage) they continue until food money is gone, then go and eat.
- They look (within limitations set by job) for suitable house that is closest but below their housing money, and stay there.
- They check what part of their equipment is the worst (i.e. you donāt provide any helmet during call to arms), then check if there is any available at the marked within their budget, then buy it. Then they check for second most needed part of equipment, and continue till they check all parts.
- All money that left after shoppin goes to storage.
- Money sink is required to prevent filling the market with goods that nobody wants to buy, It can be done either by time decaying (i.e. every midnight each item has chance to loose quality), or usage wearing (i.e. every taken hit has chance to lower armour quality). Of course well made items are way harder to destroy than cheap mass production. And epic items are nearly eternal.
- Alarm equipment is limit of which and where person can take weapons in case of alarm or training. He can take his own personal items if they are better and if they fit set limitations. People will buy themselves weapons just like they buy clothes.
- There can be hundreds of available items in your settlement, and setting their price manually to avoid depleting stockpile would take hours. Your task there setting one variable: price multiplier = for how long do you want your stockpiles to last = how much should settlers be able to buy each day. Itās your choice wherever you want to hoard more items or to make population happier. So the prices of various goods and services should be calculated automatically based on:
- Basic item/service value (i.e. food value, bed value, equipment value)
- Amount of certain goods
- Amount of other similar goods (i.e. other types of food)
- Population size (10 swords for 5 people is a lot, 10 for 200 not so much)
- Average payment
i.e. In town with few but good tailors clothes will be generally expensive (only few people sewing, low stockpile) but difference between bad and good quality will be small (good tailors make more good clothes than rags)
It turned to be quite wall of text, but I just love creating them. Hope anybody reads it, and maybe implement as mod one day.
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welcome aboard @CalenLoki! 
it did indeed! but from my cursory glance (sorry, its late, and i need some rest!), the level of detail is rather impressiveā¦ iāll give this a more thorough reading tomorrowā¦ 
That wall is strong enough to protect the Earth from a solar explosionā¦ I mean, geez, man. Impressive, nonetheless.
That is quite a well thought out idea, and I actually really like the idea that you have to provide certain conditions for a new settler to join you and take up a job.
The only problem is ā¦ Iām not sure how this would fit in with the class system etc.
For example: Currently you are in control of your settlers classes and their progression. You tell them what jobs to do, and you delegate these roles according to each individual settlerās strengths and weaknesses. If you remove that aspect of it, and allow a settler to choose whether to accept a specific job or not, you are then removing a certain level of the management of your settlement. Namely, you are removing a degree of control from the player in their allocation and use of settlers.
Saying this ā¦ some sort of self-sufficient system where you create oppurtunities and settlers come in and become relatively autonomous beings contributing to the progression and economy of your settlement would be awesome.
I imagine the system team Radiant will have will put the player in this position as the orchestrator, but I do like your suggestion of almost creating opportunities for your settlers to partake in.
Perhaps that could actually lead on to some sort of āOpportunitiesā system (without stealing too much from the Sims) where you allocate and control job classing in your settlement, but can create certain opportunities for your settlers to take part in, especially if they are idling ā¦
i like this approachā¦
and i agree that a completely āvoluntaryā system of job assignment wouldnt really gel with what that have in place now (create the necessary tool for a class, give said tool to a unit, unit is now a member of that class)ā¦
however, weāve been discussing the options for idle units in various places, and this seems like an interesting idea/potential option for those units who are not necessarily doing anything productive at the momentā¦
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Yesā¦ a bitā¦ in fact whole idea is against class system that I really donāt like. Thatās why I mentioned mod at the end 
Itās designed for system of skills, similar to what we have in DF (I have skill tree already created btw :P)
It indeed remove direct control over skill progression, but you control it indirectly, also according to each individual settlerās strengths and weakness. The major difference is you donāt have to look into everybodyās statistics to see if heād be good for certain profession.
Example: You have someone who would be good candidate for blacksmith (because he has some basic knowledge and high STR). In current system you gives him a hammer. In my system you create job that gives high reward, but only for someone who has any level in blacksmith-related skills. My system at this point takes more time, but pays off later, if your blacksmith dies or if someone better joins your settlement, or when you enlarge your smithy, ect. Then you donāt need to do any action, because system automatically find someone best suited for that job (even amongst population counted in hundreds)
Now I think that saving good addition to my system would be saving job templates between game sessions - just so starting new village is not that time consuming - simple add job, select from list, change few things, done.
I like it. Implement such system for idle units, then I just mod out direct control and expand indirect as only system 
One thing they have said time and time again, This game is made to be easily modable (which i love). The system you described could easliy fit into a bunch of mods to make an entirely new playing experience.
indeed! which, now that i give it some thought, makes me shudderā¦ i can only imagine what some folks around here will create as idle animationsā¦ 
but yes, something like this should be entirely possible, given enough elbow-greaseā¦
So I was wondering how the population would grow when this feature is added to the game, and I thought of a cool system for how the new citizens would be introduced to your town/city.
Once you get enough food (weāve had talk that food would be the key to more people), the word would spread about your town having the food, and so it would attract travelers! Then, over the course of the next few days, youād see some people walking or riding over to your town/city, and theyād stay at a camp on the out-skirts until housing is available!
What do you think of this idea?
If this is similar to another topic, you know what to do Moderators.
This was very similar to my thoughts on the topic if the continue on the no children route. The camp is also a nice touch. I can just picture it now, new settlers arriving and sitting around a campfire as your workers are scrambling to build a new house for them to live in.
Itās either that or beam down more settlers from Mars. 
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That can always be modded inā¦ now I have a picture of a voxel-UFO flying in and dropping some people up from above into your town.
Bahahahaa Iām going to have my hands full with my Japanese mod, stop giving me such good unconnected ideas! 
Well it is.
So I will.
Raya be damned Alfie, you do test me at times!
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I knew this one existedā¦ just my one was a suggestion and this was a question on gameplay. Oh well.
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