Population question from the unwashed

Wondering why my population is declining at about 30 to 40k per month. immigration is over 65 and total population is about 97k. It's ok to call me an idiot as long as you provide a reference I can use or answer the question.

Thanks,
the ever inept Mute on GR with the State of Linda

Health index is too low. To maintain your population, I would set a goal of 190+.

Thanks for the tip.

I think you mean your total population is 97 million. I believe once you hit 60 million, population begins to decrease regardless of your welfare or migration index. I'm not sure why, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe I read that somewhere and I've noticed others with the same issue.

My country is nearing 60 million with a migration index of 65 and a welfare index of 132 and my monthly population increases are miniscule.

You can continue to gain population at 60 million if health index is high enough. At 60 million I was able to gain about 4k/month at a health index of ~185. I am now nearing 68 million and it is harder as I have now increased health index to 190+ and am close to 0 population gain.

this is a situation that the cure is worse than the disease.

when you increase your health index, your population lives longer. your average age, and life expectancy increase, increasing your pop. how ever, eventually, your average age will increase past a prime, baby making age. and your births will decrease...

it can also be caused just by buying, (or selling,) allot of population. next time you have a 15-25M country, buy a few million population, and watch what happens to the average age. buying pop can also create population bubbles, where you might have a larger portion of 40-45 year olds, compaired to 24-30 YO. meaning that your new population contains a larger portion of non-baby-making workers...

the ways around it? well, let your pop naturally grow, while maintaining a 110-130 HI. thats not that popular of a choice for obvious reasons.

the second work around... drop your health index below 100. 90ish would work, but the lower the faster... this will hit the elderly harder, and your average age will start to decrease to a more realistic number, and those retirement homes will be re-purposed for day cares... this method may require a bit of GC to maintain worker levels, so it might be better to just downsize. But eventually everything will get worked out, and you can re-raise your HI

i know this works, i had 2 110M + countries that where gaining pop, naturally, after dropping the HI for a while. and i had a 170M that was on the positive side of breaking even, and all of them had about 120 Health indexes.

Population at these levels should remain unchanged or decline very slowly.
increasing the health care will indeed help.

the declines come from death at younger age in all groups and that figure depends on health care.

High population with a high health index and no sale of population, will keep the birth level at a fixed level that is consistent with the population in the country.

It will in the long run, create the most balanced population distribution and will not decrease the birth rate.

Reducing you healthcare to 100 will reduce your welfare index and cause a large damage to the economy.
you can of course try, but be prepared for a decline in production and profits unless your welfare was 100 to start with.

Andy, your advise is like a drug dealer, pedaling a GC addiction.

Previously, my country "Scary beyond all reason," was my main country back from the mob war. I took a break for about a year, and when i returned, a previous ally sold it back to me.

Prior to buying it back, the previous owner sold population from their empire, and suffered the pop sale penalty. When i got it back, that stopped. How ever, as it was explained to me in an email from the Game Masters, the damage still remained, and it was pointed out to me that i had a pop bubble, that would go away, but it'd take "a long time,"

I figured that if the GM pop sales where uniform in how the age groups where distributed, it'd smooth over problem. But it only aggravated it. Even with 190 HI, their was no way i could afford the GC to keep the country afloat.

So, i came up with another plan. I dropped the HI to 90, that allowed the over stocked age group to decline at a much faster rate, realigning the average age, to being more inline with my other countries. And then just buying enough pop to maintain workers.

This took a little while, how ever, i was able to raise the HI to the 120-125 range. And at 170M population, was growing naturally. At a rate that most 40-50M countries would have a difficult time matching.

What your suggesting here, Andy, is that for some one to have a high pop country, they will have to buy the pop, buy the hospitals, then buy more and more hospitals to maintain the population. And still have to buy pop to maintain workers.

Sounds like GC addiction that can be by-passed with a little creativity.

an aside about when i dropped my HI from 180-190 range to 90.

most of my countries work perfectly with an education index in the 120-125 range. this one country was an exception, it just wouldn't work right with an EI below 200. so i was able to quickly retrain the unemployed hospital staff to shore up lost workers, and the high EI, with a few pop purchases, made it fairly reasonable to rebuild my HI.

also, the country i mentioned above "Scary beyond all reason," was often #1 for econ, and a couple times was both #1 econ, and top 10 war rank, which is no easy feat.

I will add that I don't buy pop with gold coins. I do maintain high health indexes and I also boost my population gain by using a high education index to train many high tech executives (in an empire of seven countries) and then trading these for low level workers when I raid. I raid two countries and trade about 45k high tech execs for 600k low level workers in those countries at a time.