The way population growth is handled in the game has come a long way since Songs of Syx Early Access was released. The core mechanics have gone through several iterations (such as adding nurseries for natural population growth), and are sure to still change in some details. With this Songs of Syx guide you can make the most of immigration and population growth in your city. This article is now updated to Songs of Syx V67!
Let’s start with a quick summary for those that don’t need the full guide:
To Maximise Songs of Syx Population Growth
- Immigrants need to be approved manually, or be set to auto-accept to certain limit.
- Fulfillment is the determining factor for new immigrants.
- View population details to see bottlenecks in fulfillment, and build accordingly.
- Keep in mind that different races have different requirements.
- Changes are not automatic, it might take some time for new immigrants to build up
- Natural population growth happens via specialised nurseries.
- Increase food stocks, build lavatories, graveyards and dormitories for an easy start.
Understanding the Basics
The first thing you need to do is get your city started. That means building up the bare necessities. Look for our How to Get Started Songs of Syx Guide on this. Once you’ve done this, you need to learn how to navigate the interface.
There are two ways to do this:
- Click on Plebeians, found on left-hand corner of the top menu. Then click the race of your choice, and then click population. Here you will find the immigration menu.
- Right click the race icon (eg. Humans) on the right-side menu on the screen. This automatically opens up the immigration menu.
The two pieces of information that are important here are “Aspiring Immigrants” and “Auto”. The first one allows you to select any number of the aspiring imigrants to authorise to enter your city. The second one allows you to set auto-accept until you reach a certain number of citizens.
That’s it! That’s how easy it is to accept immigrants to enter your city. Now, getting them is a bit more difficult.
Citizens and their Fulfillment
To put it bluntly, the happiness, or fulfillment, of your citizens determines if anyone wants to enter your city as an immigrant. And all of this is race-specific. Different races have different requirements, which can often be contradictory when compared to others. It is highly recommended to concentrate on one or two races, at least at the beginning.
You get started with the basics. That means providing food, furniture and habitation for your citizens. As the city grows, and you get more people to work in different industries, you start paying attention to the other parts: services, religion, government, and so on.
Notice that each of these has their own tab under th race information, and this is what you need to pay attention to. It’s also important to understand that as your population grows, the minute changes on each become more impactful. This is also why you should never use auto-immigration. It’s better to approve immigrants in batches.
Take a look at these two screenshots on how the beginning of the game and the mid-game differ:
Late Game and Nurseries
As of the current version of the game, you are likely to hit spedd-bumps around 1-3k citizens. This is where it becomes quite hard to increase fulfillment by a single percentage, and where such a change can have drastic effects.
There are two ways around this. The first one is conquest. This you should already be doing. It allows you to outsource production, and have your citizens either do refinement (ie. produce funiture instead of wood and furniture), or concentrate on fulfillment.
The second one are nurseries. These create “children”, who grow up to be citizens over time. As of now, the balance is a bit off, so it’s more or less a guessing game of how you get over this speed bump. Whatever the case, with the help of this guide you can at least get started on your journey.
For More Help…
If you are looking for detailed information, to really get into the gritty nitty of the issues, check out Songs of Syx Wiki. But you can simply play and try out different things. And if you are playing the demo and don’t have access to all the features, why not simply buy the Songs of Syx full game. It’s worth it, even in Early Access.
