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[thvaz]

There are two (old) bug reports about population crashes in human towns. It looks like NW_Kohaku identified the major problems these towns face in world gen, in these two bug reports: 5432 and 5263 . In 0.42.03 I still find towns where most of the buildings are abandoned shops or ruined houses, and very rarely towns with symbols different than "+". I want to know if more people have the same experience. Maybe we can help Toady to identify more causes for these problems.

edit:typo

[TheDorf]

Yeah, I rarely see larger cities in my worlds. I generally don't let world gen run for too long though, because my computer is waaay slow. If people who let world gen run longer have the same issues and it's caused by a bug, I'd love to see it fixed though.

I just really want to see more large cities with libraries and the like.

Edit: Couldn't this be hotfixed simply by making vampires never stay permanently? Ideally, even stronger vampires should be killed during worldgen, but that would probably require quite a bit of work (making strong world gen adventurers more common or somesuch...)

[SaD-82]

The first one I can confirm - had some talk here in version 0.40.XX.
If the towns would become inhabited after a while (which they do, but without building new houses or rebuilding old ones), the issue wouldn't be as big (as long as you slay the vampires).
The second one I thought to be fixed. Had one occasion in 0.34.11, but never afterwards.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

Bug or feature?

That said, if you want larger cities, I recommend making humans immortal. I gave elves cities once, and the one I went to was enormous.

[SaD-82]

Or removing vampires in AdvWorldGen.
But this will remove a lot of Fun, too.


Edit:

Edit: Couldn't this be hotfixed simply by making vampires never stay permanently?

They move from location to location, if they are suspected to be vampires by locals.
I would wish, that there would be some kind of vampire-hunter-brigade which wouldn't denounce them, but put their heads on stakes, instead.

[thvaz]

Bug or feature?

That said, if you want larger cities, I recommend making humans immortal. I gave elves cities once, and the one I went to was enormous.

But did these big towns have a lot of abandoned buildings too? One of the issues appear to be that abandoned buildings are never reclaimed and used again, so the city just grows and grows with new buildings, until the point that there are towns with only shops and abandoned shops ans houses.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

Bug or feature?

That said, if you want larger cities, I recommend making humans immortal. I gave elves cities once, and the one I went to was enormous.

But did these big towns have a lot of abandoned buildings too? One of the issues appear to be that abandoned buildings are never reclaimed and used again, so the city just grows and grows with new buildings, until the point that there are towns with only shops and abandoned shops ans houses.

I didn't get to explore it too much, because of the lag, but it seemed to be thriving.

[therahedwig]

I actually had some luck this version, as I was watching world gen I saw some * and # pop-up and I recalled that people had been looking for worlds with cities in them. So I exported my worldgen parameters, and made a backup copy of the world itself and made an archive:

Namnïr (Sorry for the tar, I am currently having trouble figuring out how to use this archiver program)
The cities are on the southern continent. The biggest being 'Voicerasps' which is a city with a mixed population of Humans and Goblins(There's a Goblin civ very close by which I suspect they all came from) under a Human civ(The Society of Ancients). For some reason it is filled with leather shops at the center. A bit more than 5000 inhabitants.

Then there's Sloshpastimes, which is a city of similar composition, but which went from * to + in worldgen. As expected, it's filled with abandoned shops.

They are about 2 adventurer's days apart, so you will have an easy time investigating both.

Then there's also the second largest city, 'Mellowrasps' which isn't too far from 'Voicerasps'(or at the least, it's on the same continent), but I haven't gotten there yet, so no clue what it's like outside of the Goblin population being lower.

Hope you guys will be able to get something out of it?

[Max™]

Nope.


I've let them go longer but even at 300 years or so this doesn't happen, is it just larger worlds or something?

[SaD-82]

Give it time (if you have time) - stop at the year 1000 (and visit the towns - or get lucky and see at WorldGen a town going from "growing" to "crash" to "growing" again) and you will encounter this problem.
If vampires are in said town, or wars were raged against it, or megabeasts came to visit, there you will always have fewer people.
Therefore abandoned shops/houses.
New people will immigrate, but the old buildings will stay abandon.
And if these people-killing-events spiral, you will get ghost towns (just ruined houses, no market, but many people living in the castle or at the outskirts).

[thvaz]

Around 500 years you can see it happening most often.

[Toady One]

As far as I can tell, the main issue unresolved that wasn't intended is the non-tyrant vampire predation.  So I've added vampire purges for next time (triggered by over-predation on civilians), and populations seem to hold stable.  There will still be dips from legitimate causes, but hopefully not like before.

[Max™]

Ah, I thought it was a matter of people not seeing ANY towns getting to the # and masterwork stages, no I do find towns that are full of abandoned buildings still, yeah.

Incidentally, oh great Toady, Elves lack brewing reactions but build taverns anyways, goblins have the brewing reactions (I don't think that was one of my changes since I leave them no eat/drink as I recall) but it's an easy enough fix. I was wondering about that earlier when experimenting with getting them to make libraries (added in the paper/bookbinding/etc to make sure they work) and they're even bloodier than the human ones! Weee!

[thvaz]

As far as I can tell, the main issue unresolved that wasn't intended is the non-tyrant vampire predation.  So I've added vampire purges for next time (triggered by over-predation on civilians), and populations seem to hold stable.  There will still be dips from legitimate causes, but hopefully not like before.

There isn't an issue with abandoned buildings never being used again?

But I'm happy to know the vampiric epidemic will be restrained next time.

[Toady One]

Nope.  That was probably some old shop code.  For the regular house/workshop places, it only knows now which industries are in use with exact proportions, and what the maximum number of buildings was -- when the population falls, the unused portion will be left empty when you go to visit.  But it isn't tracking each individual building now that there are so many of them, only the important ones like temples and taverns.

With vampire purges enabled, I'm getting a ton of # cities, and at year 270 in a medium I'm looking at a masterpiece symbol now too.  Hopefully it holds through the years...