Overpopulation

Overpopulation is when your current total population is higher than your max population (can be seen in council page). It will be referred to here as a percentage of your total population over your max population. For example:

Total Population 13,500 Max Population 10,000

13500/10000 = 1.3500 Therefor 35% overpop.

If you're overpop is over 15% your army will refuse to attack. If you're overpop is over 20% your thieves will refuse to go on operations for you. If you're overpop is over 30% you will get riots from overpopulation which will halve your total income.

At any hour change when you are overpop, you will lose a certain amount of peasants. The base amount is 7% of your peasants, but this will not make you underpop. Note that storms losses of 1.5% peasants per tick stacks with this, so you will lose 8.5% on any tick where storms is active.

Example: Total Population 13,500 Max Population 10,000 Peasants 5,000 Storms is present 5000 x 0.085 = 425 peasants will leave

After that (still during the hour change), if you are still overpop by more than 15% you will also lose troops and thieves. The amount you lose is a percentage equal to 1/5th of your current overpop (after peasants leave). You then lose this percentage of troops which are home (away troops do not count beyond the initial overpop calculation and cannot be lost), in order of Thieves, Elites, DefSpecs, OffSpecs then Soldiers. There is a major exception to this, if you are going to lose a certain amount of a troop, but have at least that many soldiers home, you lose the soldiers instead. The losses for soldiers are calculated after losses by this method have been taken away. Also troops in training which are trained at this hour change are counted for the dessertions.

I will continue with the previous example: Home: Peasants 4575 Soldiers 100 OffSpecs 100 Defspecs 2800 + 100 (training) Elites 950 + 50 (training) Thieves 990 + 10 (training)

Away OffSpecs 2000 Elites 1500

Total Population 13,075 Max Population 10,000 Overpop = 30.75% Losses = 6.15% (Remember, thieves, elites, defspecs, offspecs, soldiers in that order)

Thieves: (990+10) x0.0615 = 62 thieves would leave, but 62 soldiers leave instead. Elites: (950+50) x 0.0615 = 62 elites leave as there are only 38 soldiers now. DefSpecs: (2800+100) x 0.0615 = 178 defspecs leave as there are only 38 soldiers now. OffSpecs: 100 x 0.0615 = 6 OffSpecs would leave, but 6 soldiers leave instead. Soldiers: (100-62-6) x 0.0615 = 2 (additional) soldiers leave for a total of 70.

So overall you would lose: 62 elites, 178 defspecs and 70 soldiers - for a total of 310 troops or 6.08% troops (less than 6.15% because of soldiers replacing thief/offspec losses).

To only lose soldiers, you just need to have more soldiers than the total expected losses. So if you were to lose 6.15% of your troops, and at least 6.15% of your troops are soldiers, you will only lose soldiers.