Population dying

It seems my population deaths seem to far exceed my birthrate. As far as I can tell I have a good health index score....

Why would this be happening?


The Grand State of Dolterra

Total Population 203,677,127
Average Age 41.72
Life Expectancy 66.63
Expected Number of Births This Year 2,103,004
Expected Number of Deaths This Year 4,356,870

There's a soft limit on population growth to a certain degree. A lot of variables play into this.

Roughly between 100 and 150 million population your birth/death rates will equalize and above that go negative. Where exactly this break even is depends on things like the average age of your population, the health index and if you for example bought an enormous amount of population all at once, they will also age and die around the same time, which would cause a spike.

I can't speak to your situation exactly, without more information, but a 2:1 ratio is extreme even for 204m population.

Health/Education/Transportation indexes are all 150+ as well... are you saying I should let my population decline to below 150 million?

Yes, I'm saying you can artificially keep your population inflated if you really want to, but this is not recommended.

Christy, my health index is 150-160 and I seem to be breaking even on population at around 141 million people.

John, look at your age groups. Even though your pop is increasing you are probably loosing children. One of my countries with 117M pop, 142 health increases 250K a year but looses 30K people below age 30. I saw similar trends in other countries with 140-160 health and pops over 120M.
It appears that the soft cap is a change in age distribution. New pop is not being added to the 0-4 age group.

My population has been fairly stable for a few real life months so I dont think that is happening.

The soft cap works by reducing/increasing your birth rate, so that your number of births will slowly tread towards roughly 2 million babies per year.

This means that long term, your sustainable population will trend towards the cap, since at 2 million births a year, a population can only grow so big, before deaths catch up.

Long term, your soft cap would be roughly 2 million times the number of years that your people live. (Not times life expectancy, that number is just 100 divided by the death rate. So it does not give an accurate reading of how long your people actually live. Instead it just measures their current death rate, which is heavily distorted by population distribution). Since higher healthcare indexes make people live longer, the higher your healthcare index, the higher your population soft cap.

Signed President of DanNation on LU