How do I increase the population?

[vastator]

No smutty answers, please! I'd like to give Germania a larger base population and increase its farming output to boost growth. I realise this is covered in the SPQR mod, but I'm looking for something to add to my current RTW campaign rather than a full conversion.

[vastator]

Okay, I tried raising initial population levels and starting treasuries in the descr_strat file, but afterwards I couldn't load the Imperial campaign. Clearly I'm doing something wrong, but what?

[professorspatula]

Be careful when increasing population. If you raise the population too high for barbarian cities, I think it goes a bit wrong somehow. Also, if you update the governors building level to reflect the increased population size, you must update the line that says: 'level city/town/village'. If you have the wrong governor building for the level of the settlement declared, you'll stuff up the campaign and have the settlement permanently stuck at a particular level. I'm not sure if that alone will prevent the campaign from starting though. Did you alter anything else?

Here's a German settlement I increased the stats for in a test campaign a few months back.

{
level city
region Tribus_Chattii

year_founded 0
population 9000
settlement_tax 51
plan_set default_set
faction_creator gauls
building
{
type core_building governors_palace
}
building
{
type defenses stone_wall
}
building
{
type equestrian stables
}
building
{
type barracks militia_barracks
}
building
{
type missiles practice_field
}
building
{
type hinterland_farms farms+2
}
}

The population is excessive, and at 9,000 it's a minor city, so there is a Governor's palace (automatically becomes German equivalent). The level is set to 'city'. If it were set to large_town, the settlement would have problems.

That is probably the type of thing you'll be after. Also note if you increase the farms too far, you end up with Roman ones which give you a culture penalty from the start.

The city also has stone walls for extra protection from those neighbouring savages.

Go through every change you've made to your strat file and look for possible mistakes. If when you exit the game, there isn't an error message telling you what went wrong (this is providing you start with the -show_err switch) then it might be a long process.

[vastator]

Thanks for the advice! I didn't raise any small town populations above 1900, so I don't know what went wrong. Is there perhaps a hard-coded cap for starting populations? I'll have to look that up.