POPULATION/WORKERS
People as the productive resource — colonists assigned to jobs, city populations filling workplaces, worker units gathering and building — where labor allocation is the economy's core decision.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN COLONY-SIM · CITY-BUILDER · RTS · STRATEGY
The lineage is foundational: Populous and Settlers built genres on it, RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress assign pawns with skills and moods to work priorities, Frostpunk makes workforce allocation under scarcity its moral engine, city builders balance residential supply against industrial demand, and RTS worker counts (SCV, probe, drone) are competitive theory's first chapter. Designers make population the resource because people are scarce in a way materials aren't: a colonist assigned to farming is not mining, so every allocation is an opportunity cost, and population growth — slow, demanding food and housing — becomes the true tech tree underneath the visible one. People also carry simulation hooks materials can't: skills that grow, moods that break, needs that cascade (workers need food needs farmers needs housing needs builders), producing the interlocking dependency loops that make the genre's economies feel alive rather than arithmetic. Key decisions: individual workers versus statistical population (named pawns with traits create stories and micromanagement; abstract numbers scale to cities), how allocation is expressed (per-person job lists, priority matrices, or building-slot filling), and growth pacing — population as reward, immigration as faucet, death as real loss. Pitfall: allocation without tension — when population comfortably exceeds demand, assignment becomes clerical; the genre's drama lives in the gap between jobs needing hands and hands available, and designers who let that gap close have automated their game's central question out of existence.