One Hour One Life Forums

dluzak

Member

Registered: 2018-03-17

Posts: 1

Population size management.

Hi all,

When playing I often experience situation when in well prospering village the population increases above the level that the food supply can support and out of the sudden everyone die from starvation.

Has maybe anyone done some calculation what farm size is needed for a given population size (with and without clothing)?
Nonetheless even knowing the numbers I think its pretty hard to manage the population cap. When everyone is doing their jobs and going back and forth it's hard to count everyone in large village. The non-unique appearance makes it even harder when there are clones in village.

Has anyone found out any reliable method of population management?
If think one of the solution might be a dedicated "hive queen": one woman that is the only one that can raise babies. Such queen will need to estimate how many people the village can support and decide according to it how many children can be raised and which need to starve. I think it might be quite expensive to have a person that only rise babies and eat, but in large villages it might be worth it. After getting too old for breast feeding such queen would pass her duties to another younger woman and change role to other e.g. farmer, smith, cook.

Gate Valley

Member

Registered: 2018-03-09

Posts: 9

Re: Population size management.

I remember seeing a post a while back about small-scale sustainable farming. It involved 7 carrot plots, 3 for seeding and 4 for food that sustained a total of 3 people if they were fully clothed. That was a while back before carrots got tweaked so you could probably do something like a 12 plot farm where 2 are used for seeding to sustain 6-7 people fully clothed. If they're naked it'll probably be closer to 3, maybe 4 if you have other food nearby like wild carrots that you can use to supplement your own seeds and eat wild carrots. This kinda relies on people sort-of knowing what they're doing though. If one person is farming, one person is hunting, gathering wheat, and baking pies, and the other people are just eating food and not doing anything meaningful, you're screwed. Hell at that point I'd consider giving them a warning first and then killing them if they still don't contribute.

A lot of civs can avoid having to have people constantly working and constantly knowing what they're supposed to be doing by simply having huge carrot farms worked by multiple people. Then if one or three people slack off it's not as much of a devastation to the village. But if you're trying to match your population size to your food production size then you won't be left with a safety net and in small cases just one or two people screwing around can ruin the whole village.

As for actual methods for population control your scenario you describe is pretty normal, or at least someone knowledgeable will speak up by the fireplace and tell all the young women that we can't have any more babies for X amount of years. I've had to do it before, and I've also been ignored as three more babies pop out and inevitably we starve and all die out a decade later.

ShadowsSoldier

Member

Registered: 2018-03-14

Posts: 50

Re: Population size management.

I remember seeing a post a while back about small-scale sustainable farming. It involved 7 carrot plots, 3 for seeding and 4 for food that sustained a total of 3 people if they were fully clothed. That was a while back before carrots got tweaked so you could probably do something like a 12 plot farm where 2 are used for seeding.

Your numbers are terrible, 1 carrot plot left to seed creates 5 seeds each seed has 2 uses,
So 1 carrot plot = 10 seeds
Do 10 rows, 9 for food, 1 for seeds. its simple math.
if you would like to expand:
20 rows, 18 for food, 2 for seeds.
See how easy.

Please for the love of god don't do 3 for seeds and 4 for food, giving you 30 seeds for the 4 food plots you have left Or 12 plots 2 for seeding giving you just under double the amount of seeds required to re-seed.....

Farming is the simplest application in this game and also one of the easiest things to overthink.

Happy Farming

Helperguy

Member

Registered: 2018-03-15

Posts: 34

Re: Population size management.

i think there is no maximum population size at all. it depends on the expierience of the born babies, because i drectly run out of town and crafting stuff in the wild when im old enough and see that the farm will not work for whatever reasons. (e.g. not enough soil or not enough clothes for everyone)

Matok

Member

Registered: 2018-03-04

Posts: 66

Re: Population size management.

i think there is no maximum population size at all. it depends on the expierience of the born babies, because i drectly run out of town and crafting stuff in the wild when im old enough and see that the farm will not work for whatever reasons. (e.g. not enough soil or not enough clothes for everyone)

There's no minimum population that works either. By that I mean, if you get two people together who don't know what they're doing, they'll still starve. If you get 40 people together who all do know, they'll be fine.

But they starve or survive as a single unit. Since food is freely takeable by anyone, you can't stop people from messing with the seeding carrot plots so a few starving individuals that panic and eat the last carrots that were meant to go to seed can starve the entire civ.

This sort of short sightedness will always be a problem as long as people are allowed to take anything they want to. Population management won't fix it.

Last edited by Matok (2018-03-17 16:36:57)

33Spectre

Member

Registered: 2018-03-11

Posts: 15

Re: Population size management.

Since food is freely takeable by anyone, you can't stop people from messing with the seeding carrot plots so a few starving individuals that panic and eat the last carrots that were meant to go to seed can starve the entire civ.

the only solution atm would be fencing the fields to passively steer people away, but that's both expensive on resource, time and space, and also only ever so effective. the game is about society, so cooperation will always be the best tech that will decide...

Hiker170

Member

Registered: 2018-03-12

Posts: 28

Re: Population size management.

It would be preferably in most cases to have someone who know what they are doing take care of the farm, and not have others help them with it. This is because for one you can manage seeds and carrots a lot easier and if you just use the help for watering well an advanced enough society will have mutiple water tools which will make it possible to water large areas of carrots at a time. This way you can allow the newer players to mess with things like pies, metal and wood and learn about the limitations of these types of things in a relaxed enviroment. The civilisations I see fall tend to be when everyone goes on to say I know how to farm and proceeds to constantly pick and water all the carrots with no management of them.

It would be better for newer players to not have to worry about farming to much, but more about how to explore, hunt and craft clothing. This would allow for increases in population because new players know where to find food when it starts to become difficult, have extra time to search for that food and the farmer/s to do their job.

ned

Member

Registered: 2018-03-06

Posts: 72

Re: Population size management.

It takes 4 min for watered carrots to grow. A carrot replenishes 8 food, and a naked person loses about 12 food / min.

A good rule of thumb is when there are roughly 2 baskets of carrots left per person, that's when it's time to replant.

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