Population

Hello everyone and welcome to the newest diary. Last time we talked about buildings and today we will focus on another aspect of what makes your governorate work, population.

You become the sole leader of your realm, kingdom, or as we call it, governorate in the game. We talked about how you can build it up with tiles and buildings but being a leader is also about, well, leading your people. We don’t represent every single individual in the game, instead the population is concentrated in so-called pops, which you can imagine as an abstract group of people or as a piece on the gaming board.

With population, we complete the basic introduction to Dragescent’s economy and the build-up of your governorate because most buildings require pops to work and provide their effect. And how specifically do they fit in the process? You create a new village tile or expand existing village (Dev diary Tiles), build a new baker on it (Dev diary Buildings) and then send a pop there to work in the workshop and produce food from grain for you.

Finally, it is important to note how you can gain new pops and how it is important to keep them fed and protected.

There are many positive and negative modifiers that influence your pop growth. These modifiers are added up and each turn contribute to your overall pop growth. When your pop growth reaches 100, you gain a new pop. So for example, you gain +5 pop growth because of your race, +20 pop growth because of your buildings and -15 pop growth because of debuffing magic. These modifiers result in a growth of +10, so at this rate, you will gain a new pop every ten turns.

Pops can’t be only gained, but also lost. Losing population deals a serious blow to your economy and can set you back for quite some turns. This is an obvious reason as to why you should watch out for hostile actions and try to at least somewhat protect your workers. There is also another one. Your population has an overall happiness that’s tied to its growth, efficiency and progress. Happiness is damaged by famines, military attacks and some nasty spells and it regenerates only very slowly. So, a well fed and protected population will grow faster and work better than the population of a governorate that finds itself in perpetual war or neglects its protection. But wars and conflict are very important parts of Dragescent and there is much to be gained from them as you will see in future diaries.

Thank you for reading and see you next time.