DL1: Overpopulation game mechanic

General discussion, queries, etc. about Deadlock and Deadlock II.
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MildewMan1
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DL1: Overpopulation game mechanic

Post by MildewMan1 »

I don't know if I'm the only one who didn't know this, but the overpopulation stat that hurts morale is not based on the number of colonists in your territory. It's actually based on the number of houses you have and the amount of colonists the houses can support. If colonists are packed into the houses like sardines, then the overpopulation hit goes up.

I don't know if this is explained in the tutorial because I've never really used it, but I just happened to figure it out by messing with the traits of my colony in memory while playing a game. I tripled the capacity of my houses, so 1 luxury housing was able to hold 6000 people. I only needed one luxury house to be able to max out the population in the territory.

I happened to have a territory that I colonized but forgot about so the population grew to about 2000 without me building a museum. I checked the morale for the territory, but it didn't have any negative impact, so I switched to a territory that had 5000 population and checked morale there. Still 0 in the overpopulation row with only 1 luxury house, so I didn't even need the museums that were in my territories to have 100% morale.

Just thought this was an interesting game mechanic that I happened to discover by accident.
sdu754
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Re: DL1: Overpopulation game mechanic

Post by sdu754 »

If you modded the game to increase housing capacity you might have inadvertently changed the coding for morale for overcrowding as well. I have never noticed any advantage to having excess housing once you reach the 50 population limit. I will test this out however.
MildewMan1
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Re: DL1: Overpopulation game mechanic

Post by MildewMan1 »

Yeah I was wrong. It isn't affected by more houses, but morale does seem to be affected by the population limits of each house, so the ChCh't may have a built-in advantage for morale.
MildewMan1
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Re: DL1: Overpopulation game mechanic

Post by MildewMan1 »

Here's a screenshot from v1.20 of how it works. It takes the housing capacity and uses it as a modifier and then multiplies that by the morale effect from terrain type (these values are shown in the photo as well).

So for a plains territory, if you had a 400% housing capacity modifer, you would get a value of (400 * 2000) / 100 = 8000. Since 8000 > 5,000, you get a 0 for overpopulation.

For a mountain/swamp territory with max population and 400% modifier, you'd get (400 * 1000) / 100 = 4,000. Since 4000 < 5000, you get 25 * (4000 - 5000) / 5000 = -5 morale effect from overpopulation.

Note: For those who might not know this, the ChCh't get a 200% housing capacity modifier, so they have reduced morale issues from overpopulation. I checked the game manual, and this perk is listed on page 16.

https://imgur.com/a/09w9aEB
sdu754
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Re: DL1: Overpopulation game mechanic

Post by sdu754 »

The ChCh't do have a built in morale advantage when it comes to overpopulation. They have double the overpopulation limit. They are less affected by it. The only disadvantage that the Maug have is that they recover lost morale slower than other races. Outside of the Cyth you can only recover 10 morale points per turn, it is 8 points for the Maug.
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