Is there an existing mod that changes how old these people can age to? I sincerely feel 85ish is far too old and heavily contributes to my town always booming upwards then having its population slashed if im not feeling like expanding to keep the boom trend. I want a more stable population rather than one that fluctuates to such extremes.
here are several age mods. the propertime mod,the norseman,a guy at WOB said he would set 1 whichever way you want it.the 1:1 age mod also has many options,check the change log section.all of those age the population 1 year per game year. i am not sure if that alone will solve what you describe.sounds like trying to find equilibrium where the population graph stays stable. that has been tried. there are blogs about that. to get a decent blanace,you need a ratio of old near death citizens to students and children.the game doesn;t give us the count of those older citizens. it groups them all as adults.
each players plays and handles things different. we each learn over time our own styles.some use nomads and some don't.a 1:1 age mod whichever it be,will slow the game down considerably.some think it slows it down too far. i do like them since everything else happens on a year base.you grow food and cut wood in 1 year but the bannies age faster in vanilla.when i want to expand i take a group of nomads.you will need to build supplies to handle them. food,tools,clothing,logs,firewood. other players use different size houses to stunt growth.some only allow the bannies to have 1 child.
Some people find it useful to limit the number of houses built to one per year. The worse thing you can do is add 10-20 houses all at one time. When you do that, all the kids start school at once and later die at once. I kinda add 3-4 and try to spread those out. But then again, I never keep a town past 300-400 people.
The thing I've found helpful to mitigate everyone dying at once is to pretty quickly start a second village. Then alternate which one gets the new house. I typically start doing this by the time I have 16 to 20 families. I mean, of course they do still die, but you don't have the problem of an entire neighborhood emptying out at once. Having a 70 year old couple next door to a 20-something family with two kids, next door to a 40 year old couple with a teenager really balances things.
One counter-intuitive thing could help mitigate the up and down swings of population. Making your citizens immortal.
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If your citizens never die, then your population will only grow when you build more houses and never go down (except for the workplace accidents). So then you have a basically stable population.
