Sim Plague!

For the past six real months or so, all my countries in KB have a serious population issue: They are losing pop real FAST. Apo Republic was losing something like 50.000 people / month with a health index of 170! South Apo and North Apo were losing 25.000-30.000 people/month each. Smaller countries like West Apo and East Apo were losing 5.000 people. All with health indexes over 170 and even 180.

Recently, I made it a goal to reach peaceful game level 12 to reap that 300 GC reward. To do so I had to have an average health index of 200. So I raised this index over 200 for some countries and found out that smaller ones needed around 195 to maintain their pop and Apo Republic needed something like 220 health index to maintain its population of 170 million. A population that was increasingly old, with the over 80 group for example being 6% of the total pop.

This is obviously a dead end. So I decided to make an experiment on my poor people in the form of a sim plague! After I reached level 12 and got the reward, I started tearing down hospitals gradually to reach a health index of 130 (since I don't want to hurt my welfare index). People are dying really fast and across the board right now. In Apo Republic I'm losing over 100k people a month! And I'm not even close to 130! My hope is that this will rebalance the demographics of my countries to start over... But it's really terra incognita.

Has anyone tried it in the past? Does it lead anywhere? How low must I go in terms of health index? Any experiences or advice would be much appreciated. I think Josias/Orbiter has mentioned the term sim plague in the forums... Anyone?

yes, i have used that exact term, for the exact thing you are doing

quiet some time ago, well, i've quit and restarted several times, on one of my returns, i was gifted back my WG main, "Scary beyond all reason" which no longer exists. the interm owner, sold pop from other countries in their empire, which has an empire wide pop malus. i received a 80M pop country, that was loosing pop at 150-180 HI

after raising my HI, with no real releif, i email the GM, they explained to me that the problem would fix itself, but it would take a "long time," the problem was a pop bubble, with to many retirees.

i thought that if the GM pop sales where consistant in age groups, buying enough of those would wash out the pop bubble, i went from 80M to 150M before i realized that wasn't the case

so i reduced my HI to below 90, its been years, i can't remember exactly, while i was loosing pop, i was constantly replacing it, to stay at a >140M and eventually ended up in the 200M range

once the average pop age declined, i rebuilt my hospitals, at great difficulty, and my 200M pop country began to naturally grow. but i spent allot of gold for this

I was in a similar situation after hitting game level 15. I have found a health index of around 120 is the best compromise between a younger population and a nice welfare index.

for the last couple of years, i've been experimenting with pop growth, this takes a long time, given that 6 rl months is 90 game years, it can take quiet some time to follow a change long enough.

things i can say, don't buy pop, go for natural growth. if you can, i understand that can take a long time, but buying pop doesn't distribute the age catagories in polite way, if you buy to much, it will cost you natural growth

i don't think that the HI increases the birth rate, once its over 100, that is, going from 90 to 100 HI will increase the BR, but 100 to 110 will not. it will decrease the death rate, with out increasing the BR. probably the best long term growth is at 100 HI, but it has draw backs, HTS and HTX die off after shorter careers, increasing the EI to compensate will over train you HLW, creating a whiplash to the orignal problem

the birth rate and death rate are effected by the HI, but those are effected by other factors. the birth rate is effected by the average age, while the death rate is effected by the life expectancy, while these seem related, increasing your HI has a short term effect, that creates other long term effects, that do the opposite of short term effect

Are these countries with a population of 300.000.000+?

I know there is an issue with such countries.

the limit in the game is 300M. Some countries may have passed this limit and should be corrected at some point.

with population above 300M you could experience some losses.
when the population is between 298M and 299M it will probably stop.

try taking over a C3, and set all the indexes, and salaries to 100, run it like that for a year, and see what happens,

you'll be surprised on how well it works, maybe not the best, but pretty good

The birth rate is not influenced by the health index.

The birth rate declines slightly with the growth of the population.
the rate in percentage declines, the numbers may increase as it is a smaller percentage of a larger number.

the health index influenced the death rate.
the higher the index, the lower the death rate.

aww, but i've seen my birth rate go up! with my above mentioned experiments, i had countries at 50 HI, ran them like that for 3-4 rl months, then increased it to 90, and the BR increased

no matter, it still proves that increasing the HI to increase pop growth is only a temp effect, meaning pop live longer, increasing the average age, but these people eventually retire, leaving the work force, and eventually die, at a higher rate than immigration+births

There are death cases in all age groups.
the population is computed each month, based on what it was and the number of dead in the group is subtracted.

if the health index is higher, the number of dead in the group declines and the population growth is faster because the number subtracted is smaller.

I assume the population decline issue is also clear.
we see only a very small countries that had their population slightly higher than 300M and we see them correcting it slowly, back to under 300M.

Thanks everyone for your input and comments. As my "plague" experiment continues, I'm now losing 127,000 people per game month in Apo Republic and smaller numbers in my smaller countries. However, some things seem to be changing: Average age of my population is dropping fast: about 0.5 years every 3 game years. So does life expectancy. The over 80 age group in Apo Republic is now well below 5% of the population. While the 0-4 group is still declining (very slightly though - it's practically stable), due to the vast decline of the old groups, it's now a much larger percent of the population than it was. All in all, it seems that things are going slowly in the right direction. I'll keep anyone who's interested posted. Have a nice week!

Christo, i'm interested in hearing about it

andy, the country in question is 169M atm, and 350 game years old...

increasing the HI does reduce the death rates, but it has a stronger effect on the age categories that have a naturally higher death rate. that is the older population benefits more, than the younger population. that results in a higher life expectancy, which ends up raising the death rate to back what it was

infact, is you look at Apo Republic, on KB, the declining HI would suggest that the death rate would be increasing, how ever, it is declining

in fact, is you compare the graph of the health index, (a one time decline that is leveling out,) you'll see a corresponding increase in the death rate, but when you compare the ever decreasing life expectancy, it also explains why the death rate is declining.

increasing the HI, will for a time, increase the pop growth, how ever, when the life expectancy increases as a result, the rate rates will return to what they were, and end up with the opposite of the desired effect

My experiment seems to validate Orbiter's opinion. While in fact, the death rate is declining, mainly because the population is dropping fast, about 1.5M/game year, meaning the Grim Reaper has an ever smaller pool of candidates every day what's interesting is WHO dies. The 0-4 group is now stable and the 80+ group declines rapidly. I estimate about 80-90% of those 1.5 people who die come from the two oldest groups.

If this wasn't a game, I'd be someone like Kim Jong Un...

Anyway, I'll keep anyone who's interested posted.

P.S. We should also take into account that I bring about 200-300k people from my slaves every day via professional exchanges. However, I've been doing this for a very long time (over a year now) and it has never helped me with my population problem before, so I won't take it into account.

it'd make since to think that if your 18-40 age groups, (the baby making pop,) maintained a steady increase, and the HI remained stable, the number of births in a country would match the increase in the prime age categories, but it declines, in step with the increase in the average age

What really puzzles me about these age groups (the babymaking pop) is that in Apo Republic the birth rate of these people is just 0.110, in South Apo and North Apo it's 0.250 and in smaller slaves like West Apo it's up to 5 or even 6.5 and 7.1 (in North East Apo). This doesn't make sense to me. How come the same people in the same age groups with the same welfare and health index have so different birth rates. It seems like people in my smaller countries are partying and f&%%ing all night, while people in my bigger countries just watch TV and eat burgers till they fall asleep!

Do you have an explanation Orbiter?

Bigger countries have better shows on TV and tastier burgers.

lol, i don't really, andy mentioned above that the birth rate slows down as the country gets bigger, which is fine, but with the with my suggested experiment above with C3s, a 100-120 HI in the 10M to 29M range, your country will grow by about 2M a month, it'll slow down at 20M but still be good, it seems the pop growth after 30M is cut in half, and cut in half again after 40M

so even tho 300M is the max, it'd seem than 30-40M is the max for natural growth, and the higher you go with buying pop, requires you to use GC to maintain that.

now you can get around that, but it takes allot of effort and replacement pop, in a way, it makes fighting for countries with transferable >20M pop the main bonus to being a war player. that is, you set your HI to kill off the older pop, and keep transferring in from conquests, until the average age drops enough to for the birth rate to come up, this takes allot, more than most would be will to spend in GC

i hope you find a better way, i'd love to hear it, the GM are only gonna tell us to raise the HI, which only causes the pop growth problem to just get worse

and while i'm thinking about it, i agree with you aries, that 120 HI is probably about the best overall HI

Well, I'm transferring pop from C3s through the worker exchange option, sending out HT people and getting LLW, MLW and teachers/nurses. I've been doing that for some time now and it's the main reason my pop doesn't decrease (if anything it increases with one transfusion of 350,000 people daily making up for the 50,000 people/month decrease). I haven't spent GC on pop yet, so I'm well stocked

So, my plan is to drop the HI below 130 everywhere and my pop average age below 35 and then start buying people - 55 mil for Apo Republic and 35 mil for each of my war slaves to begin with. That's roughly a third of their pop. That should change the demographics in a rapid and currently unpredictable (to me at least) way. Then I will take it from there...

In an interesting development, my smaller slave (North West Apo) has just seen a slight increase in the 0-4 group for the first time in ages.

Growth declines with the size of the population but it does not become negative.

the only reason for decline at high levels is natural death at all ages. That factor depends on the HI.
The growth procedure does not allow the number in the first month to decline. It may not grow, but it will not decline unless the number of births really goes down.

purchasing and transferring population might through the population out of balance but the procedure is simple:

if the computed number of births, is smaller than the previous one, the number stays as before..

you see slow decline in large countries. This is natural death rate in all age groups.
the numbers are not large and you can test and see as they decline with a higher HI.

Exchanges within the empire:

a new feature will be ready in October.
the exchanges will remain within the max numbers but:
you will not need to balance the salaries.

one sided transfer will become possible within the empire.

can i point out that a one sided pop transfer would make C3 raiding more valuable than the reduced cash?

Orbiter is right. That feature should be careful to not make population gain trivial. Perhaps require that both countries exceed 30 million pop, or something similar, to ignore the salary restriction.

Would it be possible to implement a feature where you can control/influence the birth and migration rates? So that a 300M+ population would be less likely to occur.
It could be something that is similar to "Education Priorities", but you would set ceiling values (maximums) for births (eg. max of 2 children per couple), and a quota for migration (eg. max of 1000 immigrants per month). Also, the values wouldn't give you excessive population growth, because they would just be desired maximums (eg. max of 1000 children per couple, won't mean they would have 1000 children).
This would be "realistic" also, because many real countries have birth controls (one-child policy in China) and immigration quotas (most developed countries).

Update on my plague project:

It seems that after 26 days of low health indexes (125-133 compared to 190-200 in the recent past) population in my countries is reversing its downward trend and it's much younger. The average age has dropped around 3 years and life expectancy has also droped about the same. The over 80 groups have dropped from 5% to 3% and lower, while the 0-4 groups are stable as a percentage of total pop (5%).

The real interesting thing though is that for the first time in 100 game years the 0-4 groups in my smaller slaves East Apo, West Apo and NW Apo (around 200 game years old) is actually rising in total numbers. I expect this trend to also show up in my bigger countries at a slower rate. I'll keep posting updates.

thanks, keep me updated