When you're Dwarf being spammed by a ton of greenskins and have like 5 dudes you spent 3 turns recruiting... it's a bit of a problem.

In the new update you start with more population, so dwarfs and elves should be taking 2 turns to recruit new units, other factions take 1 turn. If you notice a faction taking 3 turns to recruit units out of their starting region please tell me

Originally posted by Rose Ubercat:

When you're Dwarf being spammed by a ton of greenskins and have like 5 dudes you spent 3 turns recruiting... it's a bit of a problem.

yeah, that's the actual dwarf-life... that's why you need allies!

Hey Lorghul! I've been loving your mod so far. I was waiting for a mod like this for ages, but I'm experiencing some problems with the recruting time for some factions. In the first few turns of my Golden Order campaing and my Clan Skryre campaing I've noticed that I couldn't recruit any archers or skaven slaves in less than 2 turns because of low population in my starting region. I think this is intended but I also consider this choice a bit odd for races like humans and, most importantly, skaven who usually have no problem with population (lorewise speaking). My suggestion would be to remove the recruting time penality for those regions that have 30-50% work force and leave it for the regions that have less than 30%. Otherwise you could add more base population to the starting regions of the main factions to help them recruit faster in the first turns and then slow them down when they expand. Anyway I hope you continue working on this mod, it's fantastic! Keep up the good work, man!
P.S. My campaings are on Normal/Normal, I don't think difficulty has anything to do with the amount of population you get at the start but I'll put this info here just in case. Also, I'm using some other mods that modify the core gameplay but they shouldn't interfere with population or growth.

Yup that was changed in the update today. Golden Order and Skryre should have 1 turn recruitment in their starting region on a new game.

Originally posted by Lorghul:

Yup that was changed in the update today. Golden Order and Skryre should have 1 turn recruitment in their starting region on a new game.

Cool! I guess I'll start a new one. Btw thanks for your quick response.

This mod is great. Didn't test it much but I love it already.

I'm sure there is a ton of potential for making races really assymetric. As it works right now it's already very very good.

About assymetric stuff - racial conversion mechanic among the interaction mechanics could be cool. Also population things tied to corruption and buildings and public order. Undead corruption making most population types "convert" into undead population faster.

Another thing is public order: higher public order could represent control over the conquered population: how well the conquerer's policy works (including undead "convertion" for example), with public order beneath 100% allowing unfriendly race population to leave and scatter to their nearby friendly settlements (or just ones with lower public order).

The dream would be this mod adding a whole layer to the game which is population, making it central mechanic of the game (which would make sence from immersion point I guess). Central mechanic because of population being the main resource, that is usually not directly controlled, which is fun.

I'm currently working on an update that adds an undead population that pops up out of the ground when vampiric corruption is high. VCounts corpse and ghost troops come from this pop, ghouls and vampires come from human pop. I'd eventually want to make every race a different from one another, eventually.

As for angry foreign races, the plan is to have them form armies if public order gets low enough and their parent faction is still alive. Basically just let them directly take back territory you've conquered if you leave it poorly guarded.

Great idea about undead!

Rebels make sence. Maybe some other stuff can be thought out also, in time.

I love this mod. Adds so many wonderful things and promises a lot for the game. Have now tried it with Karaz-a-Karak, Eltharion and Skarsnik. Since it's a Beta, here's my feedback:

I'll start with tl;dr suggestions, then share my testing experience:

TL;DR -

The negative impacts of low population (low to no workers) coupled with food insecurity is very fun in the early game, but does not seem to scale down well-enough to match the pace of the game down the road. As a result, I suggest:

(1) Buffs to food production, additional sources of food acquisition (from sacking, razing, raiding, or even winning battles) and/or reduction in food requirements.

(2) A buff to population growth, or additional ways to acquire population (more impactful migrations, or ways to trigger migrations from outside, or ways to spur population growth at cost, either investment or whatever, or migration events with each new settlement level achieved, an province decree that increases population).

(3) Some way to directly counteract low population besides just waiting for the trickle up of people. Perhaps disbanding troops buffs population, or after battle replenishment options spur population growth, or as your ranking in the world increases more people migrate to you (a level 10 world power greenskin faction on a waagh should have greenskins coming to live in its settlements).

Ok, those are my suggestions. Here is my experience behind them:

Right off the bat, the troop recruitment pool system is spot on and works great. It changes the early game considerably and in a good way. Especially as dwarfs, fighting for every last militia man for replenishment to stay alive was awesome. The system scales nicely too, I think. Even into the late game it's still a big consideration. Also dividing the troop types up indirectly encourages varied armies; low on one troop type, recruit another.

The population mechanic itself is also very well done in terms of options and strategies. The functionalities are cool, it's fun to exterminate enemy populations, it makes growth and occupation feel more strategic and important. All very good in principle

But something feels very off in the balance. Namely, in terms of the negative impact of low population.

Pre-update: Playing as Dwarfs, I loved the limited recruitment/replenishment pool, and conquering more settlements to gain access to more population and increased troop pools felt very meaningful.

But my dwarf campaign is currently at turn 150, and the Silver Road, which has been tier 5 with max growth buildings in every settlement for scores of turns, still has "low workers" and just about 28,000 dwarfs. And the rate of growth is so slow, I can't foresee the population ever having a normal amount of workers.

I own a quarter of the old world and am allied with everyone else and have built up all my provinces to almost max level, and still: not enough dwarfs to recruit units normally.

The population mechanic, in other words, basically plays itself out as a mod to permanently increase building cost, recruitment time, and construction time. The negative impact of low population doesn't scale down in a way that keeps pace with the flow of the game. You're just building more slowly forever until there's nothing left to build, and then you conquer a new province and start all over again. You're nearly the world's leading superpower, but you still have low workers.

This felt thematic with Dwarfs, I thought. So, it's ok. And it didn't really prevent me from winning (this was on Legendary campaign difficulty, normal battle difficulty). I just got bored with the Dwarfs after the Chaos invasion and quit.

But post-update: the negative impact of low pop feels bizarre as Skarsnik. And bizarre mostly because of the food mechanic.

Skarsnik started strong with nearly 40k greenskins in Karak Azgaraz, and with them, the ability to recruit units and build buildings at normal speed. So this felt different, and balanced: of course the Greenskins can recruit faster, they're mushrooms!

But his population ALSO starts off starving. And despite building the only food producing building I can (besides the settlement itself) it stayed starving. Until that population dwindled to where it takes 2 turns to recruit goblins...and kept dwindling

Fast forward to turn 50, and I've held the whole province for a while. Built max food buildings in every settlement. Every settlement max level (except Karak Norn on it's way to level 5). STILL have low workers in Karak Azgaraz and "No workers" in the remaining two regions.

And there's nothing I can really do about it. As greenskins, I can't really settle anywhere else that allows my population to migrate. I can't export food or expel population because the Vaults (the only other province I control) has three settlements each with 0 greenskins in them...and none seem to be showing up, even after exterminating all the dwarfs. Conquering neighboring territory doesn't help because neighboring territory doesn't have any Greenskins populations I could expel or force migrate or whatever.

And even if I could buff population, everyone would starve, since I can't for the life of me produce enough food to feed the Greenskins that I do have (Which are, again, "low" to "no" workers). Even with a nearly fully built up starting province, my already LOW population is still "hungry."

It has just dawned on me, I suppose, that my provinces will all build up like this: excruciatingly slowly and with almost zero benefit to me besides the dopamine hit of having reached tier 5. Because by the time I'm down building them up at increased cost and money, they'll be worthless because they won't produce any money. 6 out of my 7 settlements have...no workers.

The campaign is still playable, it's just that the mod, instead of adding new levels of strategy, has just increased construction cost, recruitment time and construction time, and reduced income. I'm playing at a fairly normal pace. The population mechanic + food management just isn't scaling well.

So that's where my suggestions come from. The troop replenishment system directly changes the game pace in a great way, and scales up as you scale up as a world power. But the population system first runs parallel to the games pace before diverging from it and doesn't scale with it. I've just completed by biggest waagh and gotten the greatest waagh trophy: but 6/7 of my settlements are empty, and there's no way for me to fix that.

This is excellent information, thank you. I haven't had much time to test campaigns myself what with coding the features, I think after the update today I'm going to just play a bunch and not add anything for a little while while I make sure stuff like what you describe doesn't happen.

Building max food buildings and not being able to feed people seems odd though. I tested this system as Empire and actually had a large excess of food. I thought I had made it a little too lenient!

I need some figures to work off of here to find out what went wrong, if you could mouse over the "starvation" text and tell me what numbers you have in the tooltip, ie base food, climate bonus, public order bonus, untainted bonus, etc that'd be useful. Otherwise I'm gonna be stuck guessing until I can run a dwarf/greenskins campaign. I'm guessing the problem is low climate bonus from living in mountains?

As for having ways to stimulate pop growth, I agree it needs some way of being controlled but it's a difficult issue. Migration is pop stolen from another settlement, if I increase it it means you could end up getting your own pops sucked away by the AI. Especially in the case of ports, because they're all linked regardless of distance. Capture a port in Lustria and it starts sucking pops out of Altdorf!

At any rate I want pop growth to feel 'fine' even if you do nothing, I don't want to have to band-aid fix it with commandments or buildings that increase it to workable levels. Mostly because I can't tell the AI what to do and if baseline pop growth is "everyone dies" then the AI will let their pops die even as the player has options to fix it.

Hey man, cool mod, adds a nice layer of complexity. Few suggestions: when you expel/exterminate it targets all groups. For example, as Wulfhart I have Azur and Undead in my settlement. I want to expel/exterminate the Undead but not the Azur. Is it possible for it to only expel populations that have 0 benefit like Undead? Also, settlement growth seems a bit too slow.

It's fiddly to enable extermination for different pops, and there's usually not much reason to do it since they'll die out by themselves.

You can't exterminate Undead btw, it's not a real pop. That's why they have no text when you mouse over them. Undead come from vampiric corruption and are used by VCounts and Vampirates as troops. If you want them to go away you have to remove vamp corruption.

And yeh I'm testing an increase to default pop growth now, I'll probably put it live later today or tomorrow

food through riding is a great idea. Also, if you could add an option for international Food trade in diplomacy, that would be great too!

Thanks so much for your reply!, Lorghul. Again, I love the mod, and I'm glad my testing info is helpful.

I'm away from home for a week so I can't give exact numbers. I couldn't tell you what the numbers were for Dwarfs. For Skarsnik, as I recall, in the Karak Norn province with Fester Spike, Karak Azgaraz and Karak Norn, these were the stats:

Karak Norn:
Base Food = 0
Climate Bonus = 0
Imported Food = 0
Food from Buidlings = 30 (from the Idol building being built to max level)

Karak Azgaraz and Fester Spike had the same stats, except they had the base food bonus from the minor settlement chain, which I believe was 30?

As for Untainted Bonus and Public Order Bonus, I can't remember. I had negative public order, but it was closer to 0 than -100 and rapidly going up, and >90% untainted.

I had max level Idol buildings in each settlement for +30 food each. Sustainable Population for the province was something like 24,000. Actual Population was something like 26,000 (with 10,000 in Karak Norn and 16,000 in Karak Azgaraz and 0 in Fester Spike).

The population was "hungry".

For comparison, Dotternbach (the minor empire settlement next to Karak Norn) had around 12,000 Men and was nourished.

The food/population mechanic seems to work fine for the AI human factions: usually I see big populations there, like 80-100K in Altdorf by turn 100 or so. And most often, the AI Empire has nourished pop.

It's interesting you pegged the climate bonus as a problem. Some sort of faction/race specific climate food bonus might be appropriate (Greenskins, as I recall from the lore, have a mobile food economy: squigs and shrooms can flourish in any mountain or cave. They should be able to produce ample food in the mountains). It would make sense to tie climate bonus for food to the habitable climate mechanic in game: if a faction has a suitable climate, they get a food bonus for settling it, if they don't, a food debuff.

Skarsnik is in a tight spot because he can't/shouldn't settle the surrounding empire territory (unsuitable climate, unsafe because enemies). It creates natural breaks in the flow of migration and limits food production/exporting.

But even with ample food, what I think is killing Skarsnik's campaign is the absence of nearby greenskins. He basically has to live off of his starting population in Karak Azgaraz, which dwindles from lack of food. About 10,000 of my Karak Azgaraz pop migrated to Karak Norn, but no further.

None of the nearby territory has any greenskins by the time he reaches it. I conquered Pfeildorf, and a small greenskins population sort of spawned there (not sure if this intended or a bug) Before I conquered it, there were 0 greenskins. After conquering it, the region had about 1500 greenskins (compared to 19,000 men). But then, alas, Pfeildorf doesn't have Fester Spike as a migratable province (which seems like an oversight?). So no dice.

What you're saying about the dangers of too much migration makes sense, and I wouldn't want population to be siphoned off by AI. I generally found the migration rates to be fine. But Skarsnik (and I assume other factions who start in hostile territory, like Eltharion) needs a way to get one-time injections of citizen populations, because they'll never get migrations, since they start so far from migratable populations.

With that in mind, would it be possible to tie population bonuses to the regular in-game migration events that occur? So that in addition to the growth bonus from accepting migrations during those events, you can get idk a one-time boost to population across all provinces (to kick-start low-pop regions and overcome the isolation problem that someone like Skarsnik has?) It made me laugh that I kept accepting gits to migrate but still had abandoned cities.

Not sure. But I'll keep testing. I'll get back with exact numbers when I get home end of this week.