I thought food would be the problem since it only goes to just under 10k and you could get 16k people in 7 years + minimum two aphrodite blessings at around 1k people each. My population curve has flats and even some dips but no time to play to keep going back and correcting them. I still had almost 6k housing spots free at the end of the game, so no point in deleting my farms, palace or athena since extra housing spots weren't necessary as Aphrodite wouldn't bless my housing a third time in the final year (even though i did delete the tax collectors :P). These free spots were the reason my population curve didn't look a lot lot worse. My distribution was poorly set up to get fleece and oil to the back of the map and my sanctuaries took longer than they normally would have. It was nice that money wasn't an issue after year two and that I could play it on 100%, I wouldn't have finished without that. I think the map was a reasonable size and I loved having decent startup money.
Landslide, what landslide??? hehe.

Taelia.

Darn, I knew I should have knocked down Hermes temple and replaced it with Aphrodite's! Oh well, Had 4 straight line Townhouse blocks, 2 later townhouse blocks 1 on medusa plattau the other over knocked down Athena temple. Used the guilds to alleviate crushing unemployment, low pay the other way. Maxed food imports and cropland. built homes on the ridge in the last year.

Hi,
I think there are three main factors that limit the maximum number of population in this game: space, money and food.
Normally, the space problem comes at the end. That's why it was very important for me to have maximum number of highest level houses (townhouses) on minimum space at the end.
I had money problem from the end of the first until the end of the second year. After that the taxes were enough to cover the expenses.
In my opinion, the most limiting factor for this game is the food. It is easy to calculate that all available (produced, imported or requested) food per year is not enough for the theoretical maximum population, especially in the last year of the game. I managed to solve this problem (partially) by building all farms at the very beginning of the game and to store the food in 7 granaries. In the last two years, I had to keep food by building first some slam houses that not require food. But, at the end, it was very tedious to distribute the food successfully to all my 6 housing blocks.
After I sent for Perseus, I deleted the Arbor of Athena and Hermes' Refuge, I built Aphrodite's Heaven to increase desirability and population.
I build rather large 6 housing blocks with townhouses only. In december AD 6 they were nearly full and I had room for about additional 1K people. Then I deleted all non-housing structures (except Aphrodite's Heaven, of course), I used all possible space to build more than 250 new houses and I increased desirability. Right after that, I prayed to Aphrodite, and she filled my houses with additional 1K people. I tried to use Aphrodite earlier too, but then my increased population had not enough food. So I decided to use her only once at the end of the game.
My population curve may not be so steep, but I managed to have no flats or dips. I finished with room for only 1.6K people. You should see my final save with no space at all.
Iko

Results table added to the opening post

Congratulations again to the winners and Runners-up

Congratulations
Those minimaps look amazing

Congratulations to all participants, especially to Great Cornholio for winning in Easy!

Granite Q,
GC's entry can not be downloaded!

Dillon Blake,
I like your city. It looks as you enter a beauty contest!

Taelia,
Where is the Landslide in your save?

Iko

Congrats, I have to go download them.

I told you landslide, what landslide??? I heard the event sound but nothing happened because I had built Hermes where it would have slid.

Tae.

Quoted from Iko:

oops
HTML is now fixed

A sanctuary will indeed block the area where the landslide occurs.

IKO Congrats! Once again in Zeus and Posiden you proved your the Man! I guess huge unemployment was not a detriment to immigration? I had a lot of fun with this one.

Great cities. I hadn't loaded the Zeus CD in almost 10 months, but the contest info looked interesting.

I only had time for one quick test run through and less than 8 hours to finish the final map, so I'm not disappointed with 7K.

Wait until next time.

Taelia,
I really forgot about that. Everything is mixed in my head now, because of that Cup at CBC.

Great Cornholio,
Thank you. Believe it or not, this is the first Poseidon contest I won. I won all my 4 Zeus ones, but:
I lost The Armories at ICU from Henrium, because I didn't know certain riding trick;
I lost Twin Peaks at CBH from Taelia, because I didn't know the rule about only one entry allowed;
I lost Atlas Mountains at CBC from Elf, because I misunderstand the WC evaluation method;
Even though the winners were the 3 best players, I was very very close to win all of them. It seems there was always some sort of bad luck connected to my Poseidon competitions. I think I deserved to win at least one Poseidon contest. That's why I am so happy with this one.
About the huge unemployment. Just keep wages at very high and taxes at high or normal level.

Iko

[This message has been edited by Iko (edited 02-24-2004 @ 03:31 PM).]

It wont be Iko's last either! I'm waiting to see his entry for any money competition and how far he blows the rest of us away.

Well done Iko and GC great results.

Stringbags

Well this is one I tried to take part in, but failed miserably due to other issues... sorry GQ..

Well done to all the entrants..especially ftuowl If i'm not mistaken its your first competition?? It may seem a long way from the winners but its a great way to learn. Stick with it, you'll have great fun and everytime you participate it makes the next one just that little bit easier.

Iko Just looking at your minimap frightens me!!

I forgot to tell you something new I learned in this contest. When you load my map, you'll get messages some houses are blocked. That is not a mistake. I learned that when Aphrodite blesses the households, she fills with people even the houses in the areas cut off from the world!!!
Iko

Well I had some fun making this game, the testers had a good time fine tuning it; and it would appear you all enjoyed playing it too. Seems like a job well done

Congratulations to the winners - awesome totals! I, too, forgot about the "1 entry only" rule and submitted fairly early in the contest when I was having some Internet problems and was afraid it would pack up and die any minute. Then RL somehow got in the way for a couple of weeks. However, looking at the entries, it's doubtful that I could have done all that much better. I didn't even think of replacing Hermes or Athena with Aphrodite in order to have a "more attractive" city.

As mentioned, food seemed to be the big stopping block. I just couldn't feed my people of a consistent basis so the population went up and down a bit. I still haven't learned to squeeze every last housing site onto a map - like Iko. I tried in the last year to add some primitive camp sites; but immigrants were flowong fast enough to fill the "regular" housing anyway - probably due to the lack of the Aphrodite sanctuary that would have negated the high unemployment problem. I even tried to call out the militia to ease the unemployment; but that caused other problems.

It was a fun little scenario though - thanks Granite Q.

Quoted from DillonBlake:

No problem DB, glad you enjoyed it