Hey guys,

I'm putting together a little thing in Python, a city builder of sorts. Nothing fancy, to be sure. The user will click on buttons to purchase items. In-game currency will be collected via taxes. I'd like to include population growth and pretty much anything that the big city builders keep track of. 

One of the things I'm not sure how to do is simulate population growth. Each house will have a capacity, so it would be easy to say that a population couldn't grow beyond a certain point (to keep things simple), or if the population grew beyond residential capacity, there would be a homeless population to keep track of (maybe later). What factors would affect population? I'm thinking several things but not sure how to include them in formulas. Building a school could encourage more people to move in. Building other service buildings would help as well. This may not be a game design question (rather something for another forum), but how would you factor in multiple things to raise or lower the chances the population grows?

And money won't be the only metric. Farms will produce food, which might be needed in order to build restaurants. 

The pic I've attached shows the very basic and early GUI I'm playing with. Since there won't be any other graphics beyond the buttons (and maybe graphs later), there will be lots of buttons and pages to produce a lot of interactions and gameplay methods.

I'd love any ideas you have to offer.

I personally liked the way Banished handled this because it maps to the real world. But it might be difficult to pull it off in your particular scenario. In Banished you could put a couple inside a house and they would create children for a set amount of years. That is where your population would come from. Other things to consider as drivers for population would be other typical factors like economic or tourist growth. I.E if unemployment is below a certain number and you add a factory to the town it would up the chances of someone moving to your town to find work. Just some ideas, Good luck!

25 minutes ago, thepigeonfighter said:

I personally liked the way Banished handled this because it maps to the real world. But it might be difficult to pull it off in your particular scenario. In Banished you could put a couple inside a house and they would create children for a set amount of years. That is where your population would come from. Other things to consider as drivers for population would be other typical factors like economic or tourist growth. I.E if unemployment is below a certain number and you add a factory to the town it would up the chances of someone moving to your town to find work. Just some ideas, Good luck!

I haven't played Banished, but after watching some quick gameplay, it's the kind of thing I would like to play. Will have to add it to my to-play pile. A new object could be created for each house, meaning it could be possible to keep track of each house, but that's a lot more complicated than I'm looking for, especially since you can't see each house. However, I think I can simulate something similar. Each house will add population (especially at the beginning). How many people move in after building one house will depend on certain factors and some randomness.

One or two at the outset, then that number goes up when a school is built. If there are jobs available, an even greater chance of people moving in. If there is no school, no jobs, no services, there's a chance no one moves in or even that people move out.

It would be nice if every action affected population somehow—positively or negatively—but I'm not sure how to track that. I suppose every action could have an effect on a happiness variable. Then tie that variable into available housing.

It's a lot of fun thinking about, even if it doesn't get much further.

I figured that might be overkill considering there would be no GUI .Well depending on how closely you wanted to model it to real world stuff. As you eluded to earlier higher birthrate does not always mean a good outcome especially if you don't have the infrastructure to support the growth rate. So the negative things could be people moving/starving/disease or whatever fun kind of madness you wanted to punish your people with for their promiscuous lifestyles. lol