Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

In Capitalism Labs, a lot of people have noticed stagnant or declining population over time. That is because population will decrease if there aren't enough apartments or office space to rent. In my recent game, I was able to grow the populations of each and every city (though slowly) by building apartments or offices if I ever found demand to be higher than supply. In my fastest growing city which was the one with the lowest wages (and therefore where I did the majority of manufacturing), I had to build more than 20 apartments to meet supply! Needless to say this was only possible after I had started making good profits, but I didn't build them all at once. I would build one apartment and wait for it to fill up after establishing my first product line. As I expanded to more products and profits started rolling in, I would increase my apartment and office construction similarly. Apartments are actually a pretty stable source of income once occupancy fills up, though the return on capital probably can't match that of your product lines. I never built community facilities at all, but would build retail around some of my apartment buildings thus adding to their attractiveness and increasing their value while also generating demand.

The human player is actually a huge factor in the Capitalism Labs economy, maybe too much, but if you want a growing population, you need to make sure there is ample housing available. In the cities where I was slow to build housing (due to lack of money or money better used elsewhere) I noticed that there was a slight decrease in population even though the economy was booming at the time.

One last thing, I also try to build retail stores without demolishing residential housing as much as possible. Even if it means 10-20 traffic points. Those points can always go up (due to population growth around the store and traffic bonuses for specialty stores) but if you are demolishing a lot of housing without building any, then that will eventually do you more harm than good in the long run as population decreases along with demand. I've also read that demolishing lots of housing will hurt your brand rating. I hope this post helps those of you who are confused as to why population is decreasing despite a booming economy and rising wages.

Nice. On my current game it was actually the AI in my city that bought a load of land just outside of town and built up loads of apartments etc on it. I built next to it to help me start up.

Awesome!

What is your rental rate (% of market rate) at the beginning and end of this process? And what population growth do you get after how many years of running the business?

I always just click on the button that sets the rental rate to market prices. The apartments and commercial buildings aren't my main business focus so I don't want to spend much time manually setting the rents and checking on them. I just build them and check on them occasionally to see that they have high occupancy (and all of them do since I only build if there is a shortage or close to being a shortage).

The growth rate is still terrible, around 0.2% for 20 years, but in the beginning I was not able to satisfy the demand because I didn't have enough money, only recently did my main businesses produce enough money for me to build and build and build so I still need to run the game for a couple of more decades to give a good answer. I suspect that the growth rate will never be very great and that has been one of the things that has been mentioned to the game developers to fix.

One city actually declined by 0.2% because the demand was so much higher than supply. I've noticed that you need to maintain a small surplus of living space if the city is to grow. You will still get over 90% occupancy in your apartments even if the supply outstrips demand by a little bit. I am currently on a building spree, but I'm trying to limit the apartment construction to 4-5 apartments at a time so that I don't drastically overbuild. I wait until the new buildings get up to 70% occupancy and then build another round, so far demand isn't close to being satisfied in the city with the biggest shortage (my main production city). I'm waiting to see what will happen if the economy goes into a recession, so far it's been in a boom all the way due to my constant expansion of factories/mines/stores.

The population growth rate is quite terrible. I have over +100 housing supply in most cities and they are my apartments which I have almost maxed out on community, shopping and green and set to market rate. Still it is lower then 0.2%
Commerce buildings are even more over supplied.

At least cities don't die out like in Capitalism 2 though...

It seems possible to get a population spike by spamming apartments. But the annual return is extremely low for them, even with a little demand it is often lower then the interest rate which is pretty absurd. (I use low macro simulation, so they are fairly constant and should definitely be higher then interest rate)
With oversupply like this it is like 2-4%...