- Joined
- Nov 25, 2003
- Messages
- 76
Well if you like your stock houses nice and tidy, then you'll either really need to balance the resources or simply build more. I don't find balancing resources to be an easy task. It seems that you either have a ton of food lying around or you're running out. I can't seem to get a balance there. I tend to have my population rise quickly, but not fast enough to justify suddenly being out of food completely. It looks like everyone does the majority of their eating at night as well. That plays a role since the stockpiles become full during the day, but no one eats until night. Another idea would simply be to increase the size of the capacity of the stockpiles. For really large towns, 15000 units of resource is not sufficient.
I find smelters to be an absolute necessity. In this case, I could care less if it has people gather ore faster. What I do care about is it increases the amount of ore a mine will yield. Even without workers expect the ore content to rise at least 50% per load.
Now to answer your question. Fertility deployment should be in the middle of housing. The nursery, for example, gives a fertility bonus to all nearby residential buildings. Technically, if you like a high birth rate, you'll want to influence as many houses as possible. This means putting them in the most dense areas. The statue does this, just on a smaller scale. The nursery may also have a slight increase to productivity since mothers are not stuck leading their children around all day. That's pure speculation at this point, however.
This all brings me to some problems I have with birth rates in general. If you leave a town with an 800 people capacity, they won't reach anywhere near that (or it will take considerable time - longer than I've been willing to wait). When you first start the level, everyone is young. Any births yield instant population growth. Problems start when you've been playing a map for awhile, generations will start dying off. Now those births are only maintaining the population and cancel out with those dying from old age.
Without disciples, people will do their thing during the night only, and several births will happen around sun up. This is what the nursery and fertility statue influence (I think) - these births that the people do on their own. Creating breeding disciples allows for the whole process to take place during the day (and at a faster rate).
Having said all of that, I find the fertility buildings pretty useless because I don't think it helps the breeder disciples, and you must have breeder disciples to grow (or even maintain) a large town. Your ability to increase the people's automatic non-disciple breeding practices doesn't seem important. BnW2 breeders are also "smart" enough not to breed past their population cap. You can make a bunch without worrying about a runaway population growth. This is probably a balance issue since evil gods would have no reason to build houses at all if breeders kept going indefinitely.
I find smelters to be an absolute necessity. In this case, I could care less if it has people gather ore faster. What I do care about is it increases the amount of ore a mine will yield. Even without workers expect the ore content to rise at least 50% per load.
Now to answer your question. Fertility deployment should be in the middle of housing. The nursery, for example, gives a fertility bonus to all nearby residential buildings. Technically, if you like a high birth rate, you'll want to influence as many houses as possible. This means putting them in the most dense areas. The statue does this, just on a smaller scale. The nursery may also have a slight increase to productivity since mothers are not stuck leading their children around all day. That's pure speculation at this point, however.
This all brings me to some problems I have with birth rates in general. If you leave a town with an 800 people capacity, they won't reach anywhere near that (or it will take considerable time - longer than I've been willing to wait). When you first start the level, everyone is young. Any births yield instant population growth. Problems start when you've been playing a map for awhile, generations will start dying off. Now those births are only maintaining the population and cancel out with those dying from old age.
Without disciples, people will do their thing during the night only, and several births will happen around sun up. This is what the nursery and fertility statue influence (I think) - these births that the people do on their own. Creating breeding disciples allows for the whole process to take place during the day (and at a faster rate).
Having said all of that, I find the fertility buildings pretty useless because I don't think it helps the breeder disciples, and you must have breeder disciples to grow (or even maintain) a large town. Your ability to increase the people's automatic non-disciple breeding practices doesn't seem important. BnW2 breeders are also "smart" enough not to breed past their population cap. You can make a bunch without worrying about a runaway population growth. This is probably a balance issue since evil gods would have no reason to build houses at all if breeders kept going indefinitely.