I’ve slain the evil fluctuations that were plaguing my dear faiths. Populations now behave in a nice, heartwarming way: they grow for a while, and then taper off until you do something to encourage their growth. Well, the graphs warm my heart anyway. For those of you who don’t get my jabbering about graphs, just believe me that it’s way better now.
There were quite a few problems causing this, actually. For one, I turned on too many things in the game before testing them all individually. For another, I had a cool idea for regulating population that while cool, was totally not the way populations really behave. Thirdly, I was making formulas without considering very much what the graphs/maths/calculus behind them was.
Another funny thing happened in Faith, which shows how it’s starting to have some character. I noticed that as time went on, my faiths were all getting pitifully low “economy” scores. My people were lazy bums! I took a look at the default laws and values in the game, and noticed something was missing that exists as part of most societies - “Hard work encouraged”. So I quickly added it into my admin panel, and economies started to go to normal.
I’ve been working on Faith in 15 and 20 minute blocks throughout the week whenever I’ve been studying or working for long enough for my vision to blur, or some such. The last week in Faith development has been almost entirely fixing bugs and adding things to troubleshoot this problem. I’ve gotten a lot better understanding of my creation though, having now watched more than 8000 simulated years of behaviour!