The economy clears every tick — but who's doing the producing and consuming? This diary is about populations, the beating heart of the map.
A pop is a story
In The Long Century a pop isn't just a headcount. It carries demographics, an occupation, and a standard of living shaped by the prices we covered last time. Those three things together give a pop something most strategy games don't: a reason to act.
Migration and conversion
When opportunity is better elsewhere, people move. Two kinds of movement matter:
- Migration — pops physically relocate toward provinces with work, higher wages, or simply room to grow.
- Class conversion — a pop changes what it is: a farmhand becomes a factory worker, an artisan is pushed out by industry.
Both are driven by the same economic signals that clear the market. A booming industrial province pulls labour in; a province whose RGO is exhausted bleeds it out. Over a long campaign, the map you start on is not the map you finish on — and you didn't script a single line of it.
What this enables
Once populations move on their own, a lot of grand-strategy staples stop being bolted-on features and start being consequences: urbanization, labour shortages, unrest where standards of living collapse, the slow shift of power toward whoever industrializes first.
That's the loop we're chasing — economy, populations, politics and war, each feeding the next. More soon. As always, come talk shop on the forum.