New Cycle: Advanced Population Efficiencies

Nikki’s Guides: Advanced Population Efficiencies [SPOILERS]

If you’ve made it here, first of all; Welcome! It should go without saying, but if you missed the title, there are major SPOILERS in here, so take a moment to consider that. In this guide, I mainly tackle the complex nature of controlling population. Mainly, how to pack in as many Shacks and/or Houses into the influence of the Tavern/Pub, Infirmary, and Security Posts. PLEASE NOTE: This was fully operation with Patch III from the developers. Future updates may break, or otherwise render this guide less efficient.

Controlling and Placing Population Centers

Using the “Grid” style, I was able to pack in 44 Shacks and/or Houses in the influence of BOTH the Infirmary, and Pub, with 6 Guard Shacks. We’ll call this 1 City Grid, for the purpose of multiple Grids later if you are building extreme populations. There may be a more efficient method, but I couldn’t find anything more efficient.

With this layout, you need the following;

This will fully cover the following population of 440-528, depending on your Shack to House ratio. On Easy mode, upgrading to Houses is fairly cheap if you build them as they are needed, but on harder difficulties, you might want to keep the Shacks, because that’ll save you a LOT of Wire.

Here is the Plat-Map from a Grid view;

And here is what is looks like in game. One Picture shows the Pub influence, and the other shows the Infirmary influence. I didn’t include Guard Tower examples, as I’m sure you get the idea.

Using the above example, you can clip off the 2 top houses and create another “City Grid.” You can do this either to the East, or South. With minor adjustments you can repeat his process to maximize the Influence of the Pub, Infirmary, and Guard Towers to reach the most people as possible. The 3-block system below would house 1240-1488 people. Again, this would depend on your Shack to House ration. I couldn’t imagine where’d you have more than 1488 people, but I’m sure it’s possible.

So, you always click “ACCEPT” when strangers arrive? You may want to think twice. First, there really isn’t any need to have more than 500 population that I can think of. More people, more buildings to monitor, mouths to feed, and bodies to house. Not to mention, if you’re playing in Story Mode, you’re going to have to build a bunker for them. If you don’t care about leaving some behind, then I’d recommend stop accepting travelers after you get to 500.

Even after 500, I was still increasing population from children. By the time the Bunker was sealed, I had 869 people, with a full maxed Bunker setup (guide in work). My Bunker could house 880 total, so I was able to get EVERYONE in, with 11 beds left.

In conclusion, you need to plan early to have your population center efficiencies in place for later in the game. First play through, and I had people all over with intermixed buildings, making it difficult to keep their morale up. On my next play through, I plan to start building the West side of the “City Grid,” and working East to avoid destroying and rebuilding. Stop accepting additional travelers into your society at around 500.