Hey there, as I was searching for a nice alternative to The Settlers 3, although I still see this game as the pinnacle for games of this kind, I wanted to give Alien Nations 2 a try. Yet, after playing a few tutorial missions, I have unfortunately seen what many people have already said: As soon as your happy citizen finds a house he gets another citizen and they get ALWAYS 2 children, forcing you to build even more houses but wait, as soon as these kids turn into adults they need houses too and when they got it tadaaa more children and more houses have to be built!

Now, I really think about of not starting with this game at all but keep sticking to The Settlers 3, due to the “breeding like rabbits problem”, which, from what I have read so far, only occurs in the gold version of the game and that is the one GOG offers to us. I have never played Alien Nations 2 before and now I wonder how the experts out there cope with this problem. Does anyone of you has some tips for a new player, like me, of how to deal with these breeding people of the gold version? The tutorial (right the first one) tells me that they would just either leave my city, which I think I would be fine with, or turn to criminals, which, I guess, means murdering my people, stealing the recourses I have gathered or whatever criminals do in this game.

And yes, I have searched all the existing pages of this forum for help but there was none, except for the tip to shut down all of your processor cores with the task manager and give the game just one processor core and that maybe will kill this “gold version bug”. The problem is that the GOG version is already just using one processor core (I have checked it with the task manager), so that cannot be the reason. Otherwise the game works fine on my Windows 7 64-bit system, intro and music are there, no mouse flickering or anything of that stuff.

So, how do you guys cope with your people breeding, as soon as they just got a house? Do you just let them become homeless, do you wait until they leave your city, do you catch the criminals or what are you going to do with this problem? I would really like to know your experience in coping with this, so that maybe I can try this myself because otherwise I think I will stay with The Settlers 3. Thank you very much in advance!

The Nations Gold is a different game to Settlers 3, although it is similar in many ways. This can lead to frustration since the same ways of playing will not work. Three of the biggest differences are the importance of frequent trading, the population model, and the strategy in waiting to evolve to the next stage.

The nation is pretty unique in allowing you suffer from overpopulation, unemployment, lack of housing, and the resulting unhappiness if you don't plan ahead, much like the real world. This helps make it much more of an economy-based game than others. The Nations has good mechanics, but it takes time to learn them. Once you learn them, this problem is very easy to manage.

In most missions, you need to expand as quickly as possible, especially where combat is (eventually) involved. However, sometimes you need breathing room, especially in the later game when you start running out of land. The easiest way to do this is to not train teenagers, which forces them to become adults and breed much sooner. Instead, wait until they grow up as 'untrained'. Another trick is to avoid building houses until you need them, if you have excess houses you will grow even quicker (this is to help balance things if you do lose a lot of people to death or emigration). If you are not in a crisis (ie: enough food, no criminals or enemy soldiers in your town) it can be a good strategy to leave new recruits unhoused for a day or even two: they will recover their unhappiness in time. This will slow down the population even more. Plan in advance and know when you will slow down your training, and balance your housing construction to your needs.

Note: If any of your citizens are unhoused, and you kick out a housed resident, the unhoused citizen will breed in the house (but not if they already have children, ie: were housed at one point before).

Trying to get citizens to leave will be very difficult. Some will become criminals, so you'll need to plan ahead for a police station to avoid losing the game. Once the criminals are reformed, they will re-marry and breed again (again to balance things if you've had a disaster to allow you to repopulate). You'll need extra management to ensure only the untrained citizens are angry, and reformed criminals are homeless and will hopefully emigrate.

Bonus tip: your intrinsic rate of growth for a map is determined by the number of starting teenagers and babies. Take a look at their numbers when you start and plan accordingly.

This is the biggest flaw of this game and I don't think there's any workaround for it. I loved the original Alien Nations because your population would only grow if you had extra housing. So you could build up population to a size you're comfortable with and just have a nice self-sustaining town without worrying about ever-growing population. Thre's no way to control population in this game which is a shame because it is a wonderful game in all other aspects.

Wow, I was just randomly coming back again and have seen that I finally have received two good responses! So, at first, thank you both, deparvius and tyros!

So, deparvius, there are a lot of very useful tips you have given to me and I look forward to try them out! I haven’t realized before that you can even train adult people and not just the teenagers. Just one question about your tip of leaving the new recruits unhoused for a day or two: Do you mean that they will regain their happiness over time as soon as they are in their own house or do you mean they will even regain their happiness by staying homeless but maybe get all the other things they need, like food? My question maybe sounds a little stupid but I just want to make sure that I do understand it right. :) Anyway, thank you very much for the helpful tips you have given me! I am sure that other players, who are asking the same things like I did about this game, will profit from your useful advices! I surely will give them a good try!

tyros: Technically, I also would have loved that GOG gives us the normal version of Alien Nations 2 and not the gold version. As I have never played the game myself before I bought it on GOG, there would have been nothing from the addon that I would have ever missed. Yet, I think deparvius’ tips might work good because from his words I can actually read that it is possible to cope with this problem of the gold version. I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it. :)

You will need to house them. Their happiness should increase as long as you do not advance technology levels too quickly. Look at individual citizens, and you can see their happiness bonuses and maluses and why. A positive balance is easy to achieve in tech stage 1 and 2, so happiness is easy to recover.

If I remember properly, it takes about 2 days for a teenager to become an adult, and about a day for a baby to become a teenager, and you can leave an adult unhoused (and unbred) with no happiness penalties at all as long as they have a house by the day's end, and a day or two unhoused should not be a problem as long as there are no food shortages.

Nations is different in that the better strategy often involves holding back on tech upgrades, housing, and creature needs, and not necessarily building as soon as you can, which is opposite from other games of this type, like Settlers 3.

With some extra testing, you can stop your population from growing in tech stage 1 by leaving unemployed citizens unhoused. They will eventually leave, as they do not become criminals in stage 1. However, this takes a long time, and limits your growth tremendously, so it is a curiosity rather than a good strategy.

There is also a 'bonus baby' mechanic. It is hard to find out just how it works, but in the early game if you have excess housing (even 1) at the end of the day AND have had at least one citizen housed that day, you'll get two babies (male + female) the next day, and hence one extra breeding couple every generation. This could be one of the reasons you were having population explosion problems.

There are other parts involved, as I've seen as many as 16 bonus babies, but this was after severe population loss and is likely a mechanic to recover from these issues.

Be careful about limiting population too much, especially in the early game. The harder levels seems to be designed for rapid expansion, filling the map as much as possible, rather than having a small efficient town which can work well in many Settlers maps.

I didn't play the original, but the automatic population increase works for me and is very manageable. I can understand the frustration though, as dealing with it is counter-intuitive, but it can speed up the early game expansion (and some missions) and makes it easier to recover from population loss if that should happen.

Hello deparvius,

Sorry for replying just now, a few days after your response. I was busy the past time and didn’t found the time already to try myself on Alien Nations 2 again. Anyway, I guess it was better, as I now have received another very useful advice from you. Sadly, my hope is gone, for just keeping shelter away from my citizens but give them food and a job and hoping for them to keep happy. Looks like the game is really much more complex than I thought! It was also very interesting to read that, despite so far all of the strategy games I’ve played, holding back on developing the newest technology and stages instead of rushing towards them is one of the keys to success in Alien Nations 2!

If I understand it right now, having a house with just one citizen inside can give you this “bonus baby mechanic”? If I understood you right, this can only be kind of a bug, as a house need to have a male and a female that have married, so that they can have children, which they, as you surely know, get right after they have married. Yet, having an excess housing is very rare for me, not just because of the people breeding that fast but also because of the building time, which is very long as well and not just for houses, unfortunately. Although not being into this game right now as good as you, I already can only agree that these bonus babies must be a game mechanic, to help you catching up again, after you have suffered heavy losses.

I also like the last part of your comment very much! You know, Settlers 3 might be better for someone that likes to build up a small village and only increases the population by building new houses, but the biggest problem I have with Settlers 3 is the fact that no stones, as well as ore, coal and all the other stuff you can bring up from the mountains, are endless, which is bad, especially if you play as an Egyptian and the only way you can actually cope with that is gain mana as much as possible, so you can cast the spell with your priest that gives you additional supplies and, if you're lucky, there will be some fresh stones for you. Therefore, both of the games have their flaws somehow. :) Anyway, I hope I soon will have the chance to try out all the plenty of useful tips to cope with the population problem in the gold version, right now I was just too busy for that but its great to know, that there is someone out there that is very helpful for this game, as at first I thought there might be probably no one having a strategy to solve this problem. Many thanks, deparvius! :)