Population Management in Kingdom Death: Male or Female? (Patreon)

Today I wanted to write about something that's not much discussed in Kingdom Death strategy.  That's the step of understanding what is the correct male:female ratio for a settlement so you can ensure that you don't end up in a situation where your settlement is short on population.

The first step in understanding a campaign's male:female ratio comes in looking at the Intimacy table and considering what that means for the campaign.  

Here's the intimacy table for People of the Lantern

When we consider this table, we can see that on the result of a 1: the nominated male survivor dies and on the result of a 1, 2 or 3: the nominated female survivor dies.  

Now Survival of the Fittest and Protect the Young will alter the odds of death; for example with protect the young the odds of male death change from 1/10 (10%) to 1/100 (1%) and females move from 3/10 (30%) to 7/100 (7%).

What this means is holding a simple 1:1 gender ratio in your settlement is not actually the right decision.  Often the numbers should be varied and skewed towards females.  However, before I run into the approximate ratios, there are a few other things that need to be considered.

First of all the tables for intimacy vary depending on the campaign, what holds true in People of the Lantern will not be right for People of the Stars/Sun.  Secondly, there are specific events in the game that target based on gender.  While they are rare, they do occur, and they almost exclusively target men (Young Rivals timeline event for Spidicules, Man-stealers hunt event) - the ones that target women (Rolling in the Dark - Dung Beetle Knight) are currently not lethal (Choreia innovation from Spidicules for example is very lethal for the male but always harmless for the female), and I suspect they will remain low in number as the game needs to avoid giving critics ammunition to call it 'misogynistic' (it's really not that at all, in fact the game is very feminist, but that is not a discussion I want to have here so the point ends now).

These events however are either rare or easily gamed when you know what is happening. Which means that they don't really affect the ratios more than a fraction of a percent.  I'm also not going to talk about Face Painting, because with Face Painting you basically need only 2 non-hunting males in an entire settlement and all the rest should be female in People of the Lantern/Stars.  But hopefully it'll make sense why when we look at each campaign below.

All of this written, what are the 'pushed' ratios for each campaign?

People of the Lantern

With Protect the Young the correct ratio is: 7 females to 1 male. However it is worth noting that the % chances of losing a female to intimacy are only 7% total.  So you can get away with a lower ratio, but I would not go below 3 females to 1 male - this means that a typical hunt party should be 3 women, 1 man.

With Survival of the Fittest things are far more dire overall as death during intimacy is greatly increased.  Males die 19/100 (19%) of the time and Females die 51/100 (51%) of the time.  That means we roughly need a 5:2 F:M ratio.  However you can internalise that a little more simply by building a safeguard in for the female side of the population and moving to a 3:1 F:M ratio.

Which means that in People of the Lantern you should roughly have three women for every male in your settlement.

People of the Stars

PotStars works out to be very similar, however instead of dying, on a 2 or a 3 the female doesn't die, but they do lose their ability to have children. This means that they effectively become 'dead' for any ratio considerations (unless the Tyrant makes them fertile again via the Throne Location).  So again you want to maintain a roughly 3:1 ratio.  However, you will have females who are viable hunt candidates because they have a Scar (Dragon Trait) and they are unable to reproduce. 

So again, in People of the Stars we should be running 3 women for every 1 man.

People of the Sun

This table looks pretty complicated, but the main thing to remember is that you are always running Survival of the Fittest, so most of the time it's the lowest number that counts.  In addition, when you drill down into the table results you will see that any result that causes a death kills both the male and female partners. 

Now breeding in People of the Sun is something that requires it's own article, as it's a lot less dangerous than it first seems, but the ratio result of this table is very straightforward.  Males die the same amount of times as females, so the ratio should be 1:1.

Summary:

People of the Lantern: 3 Females for every 1 male

People of the Stars: 3 Females for every 1 male (not including infertile females)

People of the Sun: 1 Female for every 1 male (not including males who get hit by the man-stealer)

To surmise, it's better to have more woman than a men in the world of Kingdom Death. Amazons tribes unite!