I figured out how to not starve. My people are comfy and warm. Industry is booming, everyone is educated but. . . sooner or later my population crashes. I had a high of 300 at one time but, always, the old folk start dying, the new folk don’t reproduce quickly enough. Houses start emptying and my population ends up in a death spiral.
At first it was the original settlers dying and the current population unable to fill in the gaps. But then, even after I got past year 10 or so it didn’t matter. Reproduction could not keep pace with the death rate. What am I doing wrong?
You need to slowly grow your population to avoid a die-off. People don’t couple off and have children until there are empty homes. So instead of building a bunch of houses at once you’ll want to slowly and continuously build them. Or else you’ll keep having those spikes and crashes.
Early on, try to always have empty houses. That should keep your population growing at a constant enough rate that you will have a good mix of different ages.
I puzzled with this for a while, and found the ultimate problem was a population boom that happens when you have a lot of housing turnover. What happens is that after a few generations of steady growth, there will be a lot of houses occupied by one or two old people. When the last resident dies off, a new family moves in. That’s fine normally, but when a whole generation dies off, the sudden release of housing stock lets too many families start, and you get an unmanageable population boom. During the beginning of the boom, all of your homes will be full of young families, but as the children age they stay at home. They only start families when they can move into a new home, but new homes are also filled by seniority. So as the boom slows down, new houses are filled with new couples that are 40+ that can’t have new children. Eventually, you end up with a completely elderly population that will die off and cause a total population collapse.
After a lot of experimenting, I found a way to micro-manage the housing so that you control exactly when a new family moves into an old house:
As you expand, keep track of the number of children. A good target might be ~15%-25% of the population if you want to maintain steady growth. If there aren’t enough children, just build new houses.
If you have too many children, you need to prevent families from moving into old housing. To do this, you have to do a lot of tricky micromanagement to force the elderly into boarding homes:
Look for houses occupied by single people older than 60 or 70 years old.
Build boarding houses. These will become their, ah, “retirement homes”.
Mark their homes for demolition. Immediately assign zero workers to the demolition. The resident will move into a boarding house.
Once you start needing more children, cancel the demolition on a few houses. The old people in the boarding houses will be the first to move in, but after a few seasons some will be dead, and IIRC sometimes a few will move in together. Keep canceling demolition until you see a young couple of child-rearing age move in.
If you only see the elderly moving back in, or 30+ year old new couples, it’s time to build new houses again.
I’ve successfully done this with a smaller town (filled a tiny mountainous map) for several generations. There are still cycles of faster and slower population growth, but they’re much more reasonable.
The downside is that this is really tedious, even with a small town. There’s no way to find senior-occupied homes to empty them besides clicking on each one individually. Also, the seniors don’t seem mind getting kicked out once, but after a few rounds they’ll be pissed and unhealthy.