I feel a bit thick becouse having played this game for 600h I still dont get what determins migration. I probably get most of the factors but let me give you an example that puzzles me.
In my current village (level 2) I usually get up to 6 migrants. Never any more than 6. Then I suddenly get 12 migrants. What caused the game to suddenly double the number of migrants? The happiness numbers are reasonable but two noticeable features are a slight lack of food and a 92% migration rate. So, what made the migration rate suddenly double? chanse? random doubling?
Sorry for coming back to this situation and sorry for a bit of whining and we have discussed this before but I come back to the question since imho this is a vital part of the game. It is easy in the begining to keep the labourer numbers up, but eventually demand and not wanting to wait any longer easily ruins the labour count. This turns playing the game into a waiting game, just waiting for migrants and for people growing up. This in my opinion lowers the fun factor of the game.
Is it possible to more consistantly double the migration by playing the game differently or is it just luck?
EDIT: Is it a programmed kompensation when the no of laborers gets to small?
You and me both, bro: I’ve got over 600 hours in and Migration still doesn’t make sense . . .
The game says that having extra Food, Housing, and Happiness levels high increases Migration.
In my current game (0.9.0,0.9.a) I regularly had migrants in groups of 6 to 11 while in Tiers 1, 2 and 3 - even had a Migrant group of 11 when Food was only +4, but Housing was virtually double what was required by the population.
Reached Tier 4, and Migration fell to less than 1 per year average. Happiness still at +85 - 95%, Food at 5 - 10 months extra, Housing at +20% extra. Laborers were almost always less than the game desired - it wanted me to have about 10% of the population as Laborers, I had about 1/2 to 2/3 of that: nothing I did made any difference in the Migration amounts.
It means that virtually all population increase in Tier 4 is from the difference between birth and death rates, which makes the suicidal nature of the villagers - running out to the raiders, continuing to wander out to where wolves and boars are gathered - even more of a pain to the gamer, and a major frustration if one has any desire to grow the town.
Quite possibly this is linked to making the Relics more important in the game. Increasing the Birth Rate, decreasing the food/population required, both become extremely important when survival of villagers and births are the only way the population will increase. But that, in turn, makes certain Relics related to population maintenance and increase OP while the rest are just ‘nice to have’ AND it increases the importance of the entire Spirituality system, which several players have problems with in general as too ‘fantasy’ for their tastes.
Desirability seems to be figured only in relation to individual residences, so it’s not likely to affect overall Town Migration. And it’s hard to see how it could have been a factor, since at the time I had residences continuously Upgrading because of rising Desirability among them.
I could see it factoring in if there had been no rising Desirability, as measured by upgrading houses, for some time, but I’ve never had that happen in any town/game - slowed down, but never completely stopped.
I’ve noticed that during patch 9.0 before the 9.0a it didn’t seem to be as hard to accumulate population, i have city’s with 1600 people at 75 years. In 9.0a i have city’s with same exact map seed with 1100 people in 100 years. Maybe something was changed. The game seems to become a waiting game. Hopefully devs will fix the issue so we can at least build larger towns until they add more content and features in the future. Thanks for the game.
Migration plodding along at 0-6 people and then this happens. 30 migrants in one go (!) I don’t mind this ofcourse, quite the oposite. It seems food does not play such an important role for migration after all? Maybe availability of work and effective defence plays a larger part? But if 30 people can arrive in one go with a migration rate of 85%, how many would arrive if the migration rate was 100%? And does the migration rate matter for the one off large influx of people? What I can say for sure, is that shoes and clothes have been above 96% when large number of people have arrived, but I am not sure if there is any causality there?
Great post and a perfect example of why migration numbers in the game are hard to understand. 30 is the largest I’ve seen during the one time migration phenomena. Late game migration and birth rates along with the stupidness of the towns people during raids makes it very slow and boring prosses. I’m sure there is still a huge amount of balancing still to be undertaken to handle the new populations levels we want reach. I love the game and I’m sure they will address these soon.
With the same conditions, or better, as above when I got 30 migrants, I this time got… …drum roll… …4 migrants. An observation though is that I seem to remember having 87% overall happyness when I got 30, whereas I now only have 85% overall happiness. Hm. How can I have lower overall happiness with higher numbers? Or didn’t I have 87%? Hm.
