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More stable populations

Childbearing age limit raised to 50, average lifespan decreased to 65. This results in better housing behaviour, and more stable population numbers over time.

These changes have a few other side effects. Notably:
- For any given number of houses, your total population will be higher,
- For any given population, there will be more children.
Both are because of the longer childbearing age span.

Very, very rarely, you might see the adults of a household dying before the children enter school / are of working age, in which case they die, or before they finish school, in which case they become an uneducated worker, because children cannot be without a parent.


Long description:

The population dynamics in Banished tends to result in unexpected and unavoidable population fluctuations. The reason is primarily because couples only have children if they're living in their own house. They only get their own house if there happens to be an empty house. If you're not constantly building houses, houses only empty when an old person dies. With the default numbers, villagers can't have children when they're older than 40, and they often live well past 80. So if you don't build new houses, Generation 1 might have children in their 20s and 30s, but by the time they die in their 80s, Generation 2 are already in their 40s and 50s, and can't have children. With no children, your population crashes when Generation 2 dies.

The macro picture of this is that population numbers easily enter into a fluctuating pattern that doesn't stabilise, as houses alternate between childbearing and childless generations. People often recommend "building one house per year", which has the effect of averaging out the population fluctuations of each individual house. While this works, any crisis that results in major population disruptions will throw your population out of balance. I don't consider this to be a good game mechanic - it's counterintuitive, and you're having to micromanage something that the game never implies you need to micromanage (you're having to control how villagers inhabit the houses, but there's no actual mechanic to evict or rearrange families, only building and demolishing houses).

With the lifespan and childbearing changes in my mod, by the time Generation 1 dies, Generation 2 are still able to have children. With villagers having children up until 50, and dying in their 70's, Generation 2 are likely to be in their 30s or 40s when Generation 1 dies and they inherit the house, which means they can have Generation 3, and you don't have your population crash. Each generation typically inherits the house from their parents, and you almost never see an old widow/widower living alone in a house.