♬ Put Me in Charge of Population Control ♬ (Patreon)

This post was requested by Patron Peteg87 (and others!) who want to know about population management, goals and other tricks that can help keep a settlement focused.

Population is one of five resources you manage during the typical lifecycle of a settlement, you have population, hunters, endeavors, gear and resources.  Yes, hunters are best considered as a separate resource from general population.

The cycle typically is:

Population ⇨  Hunters  ⇨ Resources + Endeavors  ⇨ Gear/Innovations  ⇨ Population 

It's a relatively simple cycle and the death of most settlements outside of the final fight tends to be a loss of population or sometimes loss of a specific gender. 

I've written about this in the past, but I will reiterate it here - Women are more important in Kingdom Death than men, they make better hunters also. Only in People of the Sun do you want a 50/50 split of genders all the time, in Stars and Lantern you want 3 women for every man and hunt parties should always be either 4 women or 3 women 1 man.  Kingdom Death is no place for a man, it's too dangerous out there  for them. Seriously. 

If you're one of those people who want to randomize genders on birth, well you need to pick your hunters from the pool of survivors who has the most spare members and never, ever go hunting with your last 2 members of a given gender unless the settlement is about to die.

So that's the first hurdle, you should manage population genders tightly, you do not want lots of men going out hunting. Men are bad, which is often a good rule to live life by. #AmazonsRule

So, now that's sorted we're going to go on and look at the goals for population and then consider the risks involved and the tools you have available to control things.

Population Goals:

The most basic population goal is this, never let your settlement fall to 0, however it is more accurate to say never let your settlement fall to 4 population because then you are risking everything with each hunt.

However, even that isn't accurate because 4 population is likely a number that's going to end in total extinction. So we really should be looking at the lowest you should ever tolerate your population being is 10 - and I'll be honest, even that is too low, a few bad breaks on the numbers and you can be wiped out within 2 lantern years.

At the other end, there is absolutely no upper limit for how much population you should aim for having, because there is no drawback to having a billion survivors (apart from book keeping).

So we've set our absolute minimum tolerance at 10 (if you have to) and upper limit to be infinite like the void above the survivor's heads.

Still, that's not ideal, 10 population is in no way a manageable number because it's very vulnerable. Also it fails to meet the society benchmark the game has inbuilt, and society is a huge tool for protecting population. So now, we'll look at the various populations and consider the numbers.

If you happen to come out of the Prologue and First Story with the maximum number of survivors, then you will have 14. This is 1 survivor short of hitting Society in Lantern Year 1. That is a HUGE boon if you can manage it, so you should absolutely be spending 1 or 2 endeavors in this situation to trigger augury and try to hit that population gain. If you fail, you will at least get an early death trigger.

Which brings us onto the next important thing, who to use to breed. Well, unless you have Family, Bloodline or similar then you should never be breeding from hunters. Hunters are way more valuable than plebs (plebs are generic survivors who have never been on a hunt and hold no value because they are the same as the rest).

This is why losing survivors in LY1 to Intimacy isn't that bad a situation, you can get an early Death Principle.

Death Principle

Unless you are an experienced player, you should NEVER pick Cannibalize as your death principle, it will trend your population down to zero. Always pick Graves, yes I know that people see the name Kingdom Death and go 'Lets be savages' but as it stands right now that is a very poor idea.

Birth Principle

You do have a choice here, yes Survival of the Fittest is absolutely the stronger option because of how it buffs your hunters. But Protect the Young (PtY) is absolutely viable for settlements with newer players, in fact if you are trying to get a handle on how to control population, you should pick PtY and accept that your going to be less powerful in the hunt and showdown phases while you learn what works for making population pop.

Also, because of how powerful Iridescent Hide is, in People of the Stars Protect the Young is a very viable and solid choice - even for experienced players. This is a campaign specific situation that is caused by wanting to roll a 10 on the intimacy chart - in Lantern that's not really something you care about too much because Saviors harm your population and weapon mastery development, but in Stars it's absolutely one of the best things that can happen.

 I've written about the various principles previously and I'm going to give you all five links here:

• Death  
• Birth 
• Society 
• Conviction 
• FFA vs. Ultimate Weapon 

 What numbers to aim for?

Well the first number is 15, that gives you access to your society principle and depending on which one you choose (they're both viable) and that's a good starting point.  The number of survivor's you're going to aim for after that depends entirely on that principle and the hunt rotation schedule you keep.

Most players keep sending the same 4 survivors out over and over, only swapping when injuries, death, temporary skip next hunts or retirement forces them to switch it up. Personally I feel that this is not the right way to play, I tend to go for a 8-12 group of survivors that I rotate around, 4 of which specifically face dangerous nemesis monsters, the rest are the cream of the crop survivors who have been upgraded via Forbidden Dance, Drums, Random Chance/Settlement/Timeline Events and Cooking.  I am in no rush to complete weapon masteries when I play not because I feel they are bad, but because I would rather have 6+ mature in the mid game over rushing out 2-3 and risking murder.

This is especially important when you are doing Green Armor because you absolutely need 2 Katar survivors training, losing your only Katar survivor when they're just shy of mastery is generally the end of the Green Armor run (and time for Project Déjà vu) - but it is a good practice to have in general.  The way I get newer people playing with me to appreciate this is by gifting them a pool of survivors that they maintain and breed with - letting them understand that these are their potential hunters and trying to encourage them to rotate them around by doing it myself.

Accept Darkness

If you go the route of Accept Darkness, you are toughening up your hunters by giving them more resistance to death by brain trauma - it is worth noting that brain trauma is the least threatening way of losing a survivor in the game, there are multiple methods to create huge amounts of insanity if you want to use them, but it is still desirable.  If you are struggling to keep hunters alive, this is the superior choice because it gives you more durability and margin for error.  By doing this, you don't have to push your population to a massive size, I recommend between 20 and 30 survivors is a good number to aim for here. Generally you'll try to grow the population once or twice a lantern year.

Collective Toil

Things get more book keeping intensive if you choose to go the route of Collective Toil. It does make your individual hunters weaker but it gives you a return on investment for your population, which allows you to do more things during the settlement phase. These additional endeavors will allow you to get more from your innovations and generate extra resources. So in the case of Collective Toil you want as much population as possible.  40 Population =+4 endeavors (which is an entire hunt party), 100 Population = +10 endeavors and so on.  It's exponential and you end up at a point where you can concentrate on gaining more and more population, especially when combined with Graves that turns all those deaths into more endeavors to spend.

Collective Toil encourages and rewards you for having a giant pile of population and lets you do a lot more with the settlement phase. You can even go further with this and make settlements with millions of survivors, essentially distorting the game to the point where the only risks are loss of hunters, gear and the final nemesis fights.

In essence I'm saying, get lots of population, a lot more than you're usually using, because you should be able to survive -12 population in a very short time frame without suffering a game over and still have enough people to go out hunting. If you want to play it a bit more dangerously then an -8 population buffer is enough to withstand a bad hunt followed by bad settlement event, but I would not recommend this.

Protecting the People

So, what tools do we have to protect population?

The first, and most obvious one is Protect the Young, I've written about this in the past (see above) and it is very important to stress my main point again.

Survival of the Fittest is more powerful, but for people who are struggling to manage population Protect the Young is your best choice to practice with. 

After that the main tools are ways of triggering intimacy and ways of making sure that intimacy is successful.  Your most common trigger points for intimacy are:

• Augury (Organ Grinder) - Location
• Matchmaker - Survivor Settlement Phase ability
• Love Juice - Resource

Initially Augury is your main option, and you should be looking to hit this at least once every year (after you've used all your resources that matter), the low roll result allows you to convert early scrap into Understanding and once you have a survivor with 3+ understanding you can trigger intimacy more often. It's often worth having a 'booty shaker' survivor who sits in the settlement with 3 understanding and just convinces the other survivors to pair off. 

Matchmakers are something you can also make use of, but I do not really rate them too highly for a few reasons. First of all, you need to hit 3 courage in the settlement phase, which generally isn't easy as most ways of gaining courage require a lot of development from the settlement.  However, the big issue is you need to be a returning survivor, so this is something that would go on a hunter. 

You'd prefer to have Stalwart on your hunters if you can - however, that is hard to achieve and I do understand that often you'll end up with Prepared survivors instead because the Hunt Phase loves to hand out courage, while monsters generally don't.  So it's not optimal to get Matchmaker on your hunters, but it can happen and if it does, you should probably consider promoting the survivor who's achieved Matchmaker into rotation.  

As for good old Love Juice, unless the Gorm is around smashing up your resources with its acid tears - you should sit on love juice in the settlement storage for as long as possible, you want to spend them in combination with your best innovations to get as much bang for your buck as possible.  Which brings us onto the other piece of the puzzle - innovations.

Population Innovations:

These innovations come in two types - there are those that improve your intimacy and those that improve your babies.  The first type are more important for population management, but the second type is the glowing light that attracts moths to them (I'm looking at you Clan of Death you absolute newbie trap).

You don't care about the second type early on, making babies reliably is more important than breeding powerful babies, so this formulates what matters when innovating - because when it comes to making babies without death, nothing works more effectively than wearing make up, for everyone. Lots and lots and lots of make up, make up on make up on make  up. A Make up-ception if you will. 

This is achieved by:

This endeavor, that comes from the Face Painting innovation, can be activated multiple times in a turn, it has a 75% chance of success (9/12) and it can be combined with Love Juice, Graves and Matchmaker (and even Tinkers) to generate a lot of population safely.  (For example - here's how to break the game with it).  It works very well with the twins result on the intimacy table if you've not built Hovel (spits) and it also combos strongly with the People of the Stars and Sun tables that give you awesome stuff on a 10 (rather than a single shitty savior - disappointed woo).

For this reason your innovation goals should always be:

Symposium > Drums > Paint

Those are the top 3 innovations for a starting settlement and they should always be your goal. The full tier list is Symposium > Drums > Paint > Ammonia > Inner Lantern > Hovel.  (Ammonia drops below Inner Lantern in priority if you are hunting the Gorm a lot).

Hovel

So the other half of intimacy is building stronger survivors and it is Hovel that holds the responsibility for that. Now Hovel is the lowest priority innovation because it fills up your innovation deck with a lot of low impact innovations that do not help you win the early game - sorry guys but living without homes is better early on.  Literally every single other language consequence innovation in the game is more valuable than Hovel. (This changes in Stars). 

But, once your settlement is established and you are starting to get a grip on your hunter's lifespans hovel begins to matter because it is where Family and the Promotional Till Death Do Us Part Partnership are located. These two innovations are the heart of ensuring that your work isn't completely lost on death - Family lets you do a semi-save state of your weapon progress (and it's the only time your hunters should be doing the horizontal mambo) and Enduring Legacy (from Till Death) is phenomenal at saving important traits. 

Finally, once you're past your first set of masters you can consider getting Clan of Death and Saga, which will strengthen your new survivors a lot - generally they should be the third generation of hunters and the stat boosts they get (in combination with weapon masteries) help you springboard towards hunting L3 monsters with newbies.

Other routes?

There are other ways of gaining population, for example if you have the Spidicules quarry in your campaign (poor you) you should be searching the nest with all your survivors every fight because of that chance to gain population (or resources). Yes, it can make the spidicules fight one that is filled with searching actions (as you have to also pop the eggs) and it dumps more spiderlings onto the board, but it is very important to do this because of the damage Spidicules tends to cause to your population normally (even if you play with the highly recommended Spidicules Intergration Package - 5 stars: Trip Advisor). Generally if you have a chance of gaining population and you can spare the time/action you should do so.  Same rule applies to hunt events, if you can gain the population without risking anything valuable go for it. 

For example:

If you had no resources from the hunt in your party (which is common as gaining resources on the hunt is not a regular thing), then you should always look to try and free this prisoner.

Always be on the lookout for new population, but remember that resources > population unless you have low population (Under 10).

Summary:

Here's a set of bullet pointed rules to help you.

• Minimum Population: 16
• Maximum Population: No Limit
• Get 15 population asap
• Use Love Juice with Face Painting/Founder's Eye
• Never breed with hunters unless you are 'saving' weapon mastery points (breeding from masters who have completed their track is good)
• Innovate Symposium > Drums > Paint > All else
• If you are really struggling, take Protect the Young
• Never pick Cannibalize
• Use 'plebs' (survivors without anything special) to do all the rolls that might get someone killed
• Use saviors as murder bait (get their hunt xp up to 1 before retirement via their ability and then keep them in the settlement to get murdered).
• Hunters > Plebs
• Keep valuable hunters in the settlement safe, for example once a survivor reaches mastery they should be put out to stud.
• Rawhide and Monster Grease early on are very powerful at stopping you losing survivors from showdowns
• Cooking rocks

If you have any further questions please do ask below, but honestly I find that the main rule with population management is never lose sight of it. You can easily get overwhelmed with excitement over other fancy endeavor locations, but if you want to do that - get collective toil and make lots of survivors so you have a lot of extra endeavors to spend each year!

Always be mindful about your population, never pick Cannibalize and you'll reach the final nemesis most of the time!