A few brief notes on how I eked out this ridiculous achievement.
Paleolithic Overpopulation Achievement
– It’s very important to not overwork your people beyond maybe %130-140 workload, as this will result in increased deaths due to starvation, hypothermia, dehydration.
– there WILL be lots of deaths, beyond about 70 or so population it becomes slower growth because even with groups of 4 immigrating, the immigration is really just balancing out the constant deaths that you have to accept. be paranoid and hyper-aware of how many pregnant female adults you have at all times.
– in order to minimize deaths resulting from people travelling too far, you want to have work areas around you in all directions roughly equidistant at their furthest points. this way you can still cover a ton of land area but you aren’t sending people to mars trying to chase that quick-footed ibex.
– take advantage of the lay of the land, locating work areas for fishing in deltas or convergences or whatever will allow you to cover more usable banks.
– it’s okay if your people are overworked all year if they are almost all working on gathering food. this means you can support them, and it’s safe to grow a bit.
– I like to produce %125 bone spears and warm skin outfits to avoid situations where I have enough work for 90 people, but I only have 88, however only 61 have clothes and it’s winter so we are falling behind because I have 27 non-working pigdudes eating my food.
– It’s valuable to think about available manpower as a resource with it’s own limit (population) but that costs increasing amounts of other resources to produce. sometimes you need to slow down growth to catch up with equipment production or something, other times you really want to facilitate growth by having more than enough bedspace. there seems to be an automatic birth control system built into the game that enforces abstinence when all the available housing is full. if you have enough food for everyone, but workload is at %145 or something, it’s time to grow.
– most of the game should be spent with about %80-110 workload almost entirely food. you should have enough production and crafting buildings to keep tools and clothing balanced with your population at all times, try to avoid a backlog in the crafting huts. it helps to have one dedicated exclusively to skin outfits and set to high priority, while the other one(s) do more generalized crafting, and may or may not be set to high priority.
– I don’t craft wooden tools for trading, slings are enough. I tried to minimize trading because even with a low comission, you are still losing value relative to processing the resources yourself.
– no flint spears, bone ones are just as good and bones will be abundant in this scenario, because we are hunting so crazily.
– you need to be constantly mindful of flint income, as when a work area depletes you could find yourself in trouble if you don’t soon create another to replace it. try to avoid having more flint than necessary, people’s labour is usually better spent on food production or skins production for the repair of all these gross little huts.