Population control

There's not much else to say. Yes! I completely agree.

It doesn't have to be hard, just a flip-switch to say "Stop breeding, dammit!" and using Workers/Settlers for migration. Remember that people are a resource in Elemental, though. Every time you build a soldier, you're using resources.

The fact that people are a resource does add another angle. Instead of a toggle that completely halts population growth, it can set the current population (or maybe even a player specified pop) as a target; if the population falls below that target, growth will resume until it reaches it again. If somehow the population exceeds the target (maybe you disbanded some old troops in the city) there are two things that could happen - the population could slowly fall off until it's back down to the target, or it could stay at the new level until you specifically do something to change it like train new troops. I like the latter, at least as a default.

Halt population growth? I would rather use the excess as cannon fodder to wear down my enemy's army... Legions of unarmed peasants ftw!

That sounds good, too, as another option. The thing is I'm assuming unarmed peasants would still require some minor upkeep, so drafting excess population into a massive force of cannon fodder might not always be practical. And just as importantly, that would break the immersion for anybody trying to play a relatively benevolent leader

P.S. I'm desperately awaiting a new dev journal  

They don't realize that by being the squishy bulwark against the implacable foe, they contribute to the greater glory of the empire. Ungrateful cunts.

Turn the excess population into Soylent Green.

lol

Which is why they are cannon fodder not 'Sit and defend the city' troops. The quicker they die the less you pay
Sure they will still eat food and such, but they would have done that anyway...

Of course there is always.... A Modest Proposal Now THAT is how you deal with overpopulation Nom nom nom.... Okay so maybe I have been playing Left 4 Dead a little longer than I should...

Ha ha ha, I'm genuinely surprised that the forum doesn't censor swearing  Having previously spent a lot of time on the CSS and TF2 forums you become instantly aware that there's censorship going on due to all the kids speaking in little pink hearts all the time. Here however I've been reading for months and haven't had cause to notice that it wasn't in effect.. I guess we're all just too damn grown up and civilised .... other than Luckmann that is 

Soylent Green is people!  D:

Yes, Population control is nice.  Most games force me to do it with my buildings and general upkeep to keep population growth down.  Or I have to focus on building the infrastructure to Support the population they are growing too.

Even something we could do to half our growth to keep it more managable.  Especialy since we can turn population into troops!

And being one of those nice leaders I'd not like an army of cannon fodder either... Unless I was desperate!

"Go forth troops and destroy the invaders to defend our last city! And if you could pick up some chocolate on the way home that would be nice..."

Also if you disband units in cities, if part or all of that population then goes to the city they were stationed in then those hordes of peasants are both Emergancy cannon fodder AND they could be used as a way to transfer population around from city to city.  Got a city that produces swords but you build troops elsewhere?  Then build some cannon fodder since it doesn't seem to affect your build rate of buildings at all and Send them to your Troop town, Disband them and Poof.  Population control!  The Original Civilization kinda did this with settlers, You could drop multiple into a small city and boost it's pop. And it took a full population to make one.  They had limits so you could only get it up to like 4-5 or something (can't remember). 

If it's not included then it might be something we can mod.  Tech (Immagration)  You then can build a unit with the (Move population) power.  They go to the city they want to be in.  Use the power and it adds a % of the pop (1-100%?) to the city itself and consumes the unit.  So we got lots of way's to get that going.   Lol, I'm already thinking of mods to code and I havn't played the game yet!

Rawr!

I appreciate the general intent of the OP, but I have to say that any direct UI option in this area would seem very out of place aesthetically for the fantasy setting. AFAIK, the only top-down 'population control' efforts before the 20th century were to *increase* breeding, e.g. monarchs backing up religious bans on contraception. But I know very little Chinese history, and they seem to have done pretty much everything the Europeans did, just usually at least a few centuries earlier.

Even though it seems unpopular around here, I'm more interested in map-based constraints on population that will both help ensure that wilderness remains throughout the longest games and enforce a 'medieval' sort of population pattern where true cities are fairly rare and most population resides in forts, manorial estates, peasant villages, and market towns. I have high hopes that the re-thought economics (specifically caravans that can move food) will help this become a reality.

Well the reason why I want this has nothing at all to do with realism (and, this is fantasy, so just because something hasn't happened in our own history doesn't mean it can't happen or we shouldn't be able to do it in a fantasy game). The reason why I want population control is because if there's no easy way to do it, I am always forced to manually fiddle with population-altering buildings and such. For example, in GC2 I might be able to support 15 billion people at an acceptable morale, but I can't produce just 15 billion units of food due to the way the farms worked. The result was horrible - either I'd have to settle for a lower population than I could technically handle comfortably, or I'd have to produce excess food and then manually deal with extra population (and the only way to do that was through Colony Ships, or being invaded...). It pissed me off. And if a similar thing happens in Elemental, it too would piss me off.

Now, if they come up with another way to solve that problem besides a toggle, fine. For example if I can very carefully fine-tune food production, including how much food to ship off to other places, as well as the ability to withhold food from my population. So long as I don't have to jump through micromanagement hoops to prevent my cities from revolting, I'll be happy.

My personal preference is for no direct "No more than X people" type of controls. People don't generally breed or not on demand and what you as a ruler do about that is an important aspect of 4X games. Do you let them die? Do you work to support them? Do you take advantage of them as cannon fodder, forced labor, something else?

Now, I would not be opposed to being able to stratify society by mandate e.g. "Your family gets these lands" or whatever, which is effectively a way to distribute resources to those that you want to stay in power since those higher on the social status will be getting more of whatever limited resources you have rather than a first-come-first-served, which seems to be the usual method of resource distribution in games.

That'd be far more in keeping - to me anyway - with the setting and intent.

Overall, stopping people from breeding isn't very hard. Just fine them into kingdom come if they get more than 1-2 child per pairing.

Edit: And I'm entirely with Pigeon on this. This has nothing to do with realism, and it's not that much of a stretch that you'll have to extert yourself to come up with a rationale. Ultimately this is entirely about game mechanics, no matter how much or how little I can defend the idea from the point of objective realism.

Or round up the excess and make em into a wonderfully delightful appetizer

A Modest Proposal: Read it! It is some excellent satire...

And a "childs per household" mandate would be fine, it limits rate of growth but doesn't put a hard cap on population. And I'd want there to be a trade-off in unrest or a monetary outlay (for your officials who keep track of that). Some acknowledgement by the game that laws cost something

I'm not suggesting it for realism's sake, but for gameplay depth. Having the ability to just say "no more than x" without any trade-offs (beyond the loss of production because you have less people) just doesn't sit well with me as a mechanic.

I want something better than GC2's population simulation as well, just not a "limit population to x".

Actually it can. You just need to find the right incentive (or disincentive) for having children so that the birthrate balances out the death rate. The actual population will obviously fluctuate but it could be kept relatively constant if overseen well. And again, the point is to come up with a game mechanic to preserve our sanity, not to mimic the messiness of reality as closely as possible.

I actually suggested that in my original post

It still isn't a hard cap though, since it's a dynamic balance between how fast people are born and how fast people are dying. Changing healthcare, for instance, would mean a rebalance or you could end up growing (positive healthcare change) or shrinking (negative healthcare change).

That's all I'm after, I haven't advocated no population management mechanisms, just not a flat "limit to x". I'd like options, letting them starve, providing monetary incentives (either to have kids or to not!), instituting childs/household laws, etc. with different tradeoffs. For example, maybe if you give people money to not have kids, perhaps that keeps the unrest effect down.

I like this idea.

Options could be good. I wouldn't complain if we are presented with various options for achieving the same thing, each with a different tradeoff. Nonetheless, my point still stands - I want some way to manage my population without having to micromanage. I want to be able to tell my administrators to do what they need to do in order to keep a city's population stable. If there are options, I want to be able to say "Provide whatever incentives or disincentives you need in order to maintain a stable population" or "Let excess population starve." So long as I don't have to constantly fiddle with city populations in order to keep them at a good place, I will be happy.

I said "fantasy" first and only mentioned history as an attempt to describe what for me would be a 'flavor' problem with any direct controls on population. Realism was not at all my concern--it hardly ever is when I think about Elemental. *Story*, on the other hand, matters a great deal to me, hence the casual reach to history for an example.

Basically, I quite agree with your dislike of pop-driven micromanagement burdens. I'd just prefer that the problem be tackled indirectly. Telling a city administrator to starve a population just seems like a different micro-burden, not a plan for overall reduction. Having a single minister who could effectively control the food supply in a large empire with many population centers seems crude, not to mention implausible without a powerful command and control system (magical 'radio' and strong, obedient police) which might never exist in Elemental or be unavialable until late game.

I'd rather see the game built to make a stably-content population the natural tendency of all population centers so that you don't get intense crowding unless you do something deliberate to create it in the first place (e.g. spending money to promote immigration). In ohter words, if a community with excess food is near or at the limits of its infrastructure, then exporting food should be the default, not increasing population.