by Tonesta78
So a week on, and I'm still struggling to understand how a population of 180+ is possible in this game!
Was doing the math on my walk from lunch today......
So I reckon during the game there's three ways to raise population:
1) Build regular supply centers. If you win twelve straight games, then you're going to likely average 3/game here (probably you won't build any in the later months, but let's stretch it and say that you may have built more than needed in the early-to-mid game). So +36
2) Permanent supply centers. You can build six and they're going to max out at a population of 8. Let's be really charitable and say that you built all six on cities of starting population 1 and they were all at 8 by game's end. I don't really think that this is possible, but at the same time you could have population loss in those cities as well that got cancelled out. So an unlikely but possible +42
3) Game End Upgrades. If you win all twelve games, you're going to start at 5 and end up at 9 VPs. Let's pick an average in the middle and say 7. But you've got to use 18 of those for permanent supply centers, and no one is winning this game twelve times in a row without using most of the character upgrades. Let's be extraordinarily generous and say that you only spend an additional 30 points on those (so not using all of the character upgrades, and no card upgrades/permanent shelters/permanent satellite towers). That's +36 as well (so an average of 3 VPs a turn on population which seems about right if you were being aggressive with it).
'Baseline' population is 102, so that adds up to a max population of 216. If you play the game perfectly and optimized for population.
So an end game population above 180, means that you not only played a perfectly optimized game in terms of population increase, you also only had a total of negative events (i.e. all endgame plague cubes and Hollow Men in cities) that averaged less than three per game. Despite the fact that between reconning Cairo and August there is absolutely nothing you can do to protect yourself from Hollow Men population loss (also there's one month - with the defecting Hollow Men - where you're required to have three population-reducing Hollow Men in separate havens to win it! So that's -3 to begin with even if played perfectly!).
Am I missing something (other than the fact I'm still spending too long thinking about this game!?)??
Because I'm still dubious that this is possible without really extreme luck.