by Inviscid
Tonesta78 wrote:
So a week on, and I'm still struggling to understand how a population of 180+ is possible in this game!
[...]
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.
I'll try making a post in the strategy section sometime this week, as that is probably a more appropriate place to discuss this.
I agree that it requires quite a bit of luck, but based on how we did I don't think it's that crazy (though it's hard to judge how much luck we had). We had a score of 942 and a total (gross) population increase of ~93.* We also lost once, so there is a population difference of 22.
As we build some of our permanent centers relatively late, building all of them early enough to get the full population benefit would already get you 10 extra pop. and would probably prevent population loss once or twice. Don't do some of our useless character upgrades (+6-8), connect all the cities (+3), expand the grid a bit more aggressively (+2-3), get the other havens quicker (+2-3) and I can imagine getting to 984.
*The breakdown is (guesstimated from notes) 33/26/34 from SC/Permanent SC/Direct, with half the direct pop. upgrades being from the last two months. This does not account for the 2 or 3 times a permanent center prevented a decrease in population.