I'm now trying to take the game to the next level (for me) and figure out micromanagement to get schoolchildren to shack up as soon as possible. If they can't produce stuff, they might as well be producing babies, I figure.

The trick seems to be when to put the final task onto the queue of mostly built houses. Too early and couples separate, too late and kids stay in their parent's basement and waste months or years of their lives. But there's no point in kicking her out on her own unless there's a boy at least 10 years old for her to start a household with.

Through population of a few hundred or so, it's not hard (but awfully tedious) to keep track of this. Just leave open the text box of every house where one of the principals is a student, and close it when both are part of the workforce. You only have to go through maybe a dozen houses to see if this the event of a person entering the workforce who needs a house, or if he's already a couple.

Beyond this point, I'm at a loss. I can't find any boxes or reports that help me decide how to deal with the event, and the number of open boxes becomes overwhelming.

How do you manage it?

I don't. I've noticed that it would seem that two students won't shack up together, there has to be one actual breadwinner in the household. Given there's no currency, this is odd, but I've never got 2 students to move into a house.

However I find that growing your population too aggressively will result in a spikes in food consumption, also you'll then get population spikes as you can't keep this up, and then they'll all die about the same time. Furthermore because they're getting older, they haven't been breeding, meaning you suddenly find all your workers dropping off, and no new ones coming through. I try to keep the ratio to about 2/3rds working, 1/6th students, and 1/6th children. That seems to create a sustainable population throughput. Then I grow this slowly and carefully.

Right. It seems you need one of the two in the workforce.

But if you build a house when you get the message about the student entering the workforce, and it's someone still living with the parents, all is well. If it's not, someone in your settlement will decide to get a divorce, which, unless you force them back together pretty soon, looks to be permanent, or mostly so.

If you could just shut the house down when you overbuild, like you can other types of production, that would work, if a little clunky. But I've found only two ways to do that with houses -- Demolish Building and Upgrade to stone (assuming it's not already), both of which summon laborers to clear out the food stored in the house, which is a complete waste.

The only other way I've found to do it is to cycle through the laborers using the profession menu looking for the recent grad, but it appears to cycle from oldest to youngest, so you have to click through nearly all of them to get to the one you want, and if you click past him, you have to start all over from the oldest.

I just figure there must be an easier way.

Stop worrying and learn to love the population bomb. You're aiming to build a better society right? Why not just leave them to it, let them be students, up the expected working age (effectively abolish child labour) and work from there.

A male student and female worker can move into a house together and immediately (I mean 3 months later) have a child. But a female student moving in with a male worker won't have a child until after she's graduated. I prefer to wait until an empty house can go to a new couple both of whom are already working. In a large community (well spread out, with several schools) I'd be worried about a student moving to somewhere an awful long walk from the particular school she attends.

You never know when an older house will become vacant. Remember that anybody suddenly widowed (by old age or anything else) will look to re-partner so you often get grannies and grandpas moving house to somebody else's. As a cushion (against opening the way to divorces) I try to stay a house or two short.

I've not figured out exactly what the "families" number in the town hall overview means, but maybe it does represent the number of houses you want.

My way of seeing how many men and how many women are waiting to pair up and leave home is to write on a piece of paper the children born in each house, ticking them when they graduate (your way it would be when they start school) and crossing them off when they leave. But I've not taken this beyond a population of 300.

Interestingly, I've seen a Lets Play on You-Tube where the player suffered a population crash after almost running out of children. The only boy ended up as a teenage "adult" alone in one house and the slightly younger girl alone in another - yet she had first one and then a second child, as if they were a functioning couple despite occupying two houses at once.

Hadn't noticed it because my current game has skewed female since the game started, and I've never paid attention in earlier games. Good info to know if the sex split ever reverses or narrows. So far, it's been a schoolboy's fantasy -- 7th graders being seduced by college-age women. Is that a problem? I wondered why some graduate at 16 or so, while others not until in their 20s. Is it they have to accumulate a certain amount of time actually inside a school building? Huh. So each housing cluster should ideally have a neighborhood school?

I can probably verify it in my current game, as I've been building warming houses out in the boonies for winter resource gathering, and several of them now have school-age kids. I'll just make sure not to bounce people around, and see whether the ones close to school graduate before those in flyover country. Huh. Another thing I did not know. I assumed they had to be actually living together. I've seen it where the 11 YO boy moves out on his own into an empty house within a few seconds of shacking up, and she gave birth a season later, but he moved back in with her once winter came on, where he sired a second, and later a 3rd kid.

If that's the case, it makes things much, much easier. Potentially a lot more firewood, but easier if divorces don't actually make a difference in childbearing. Empty houses near the school for the boys to live in, while she lives closer to work and swings by as needed...

My latest deduction: in the Town Hall overview page, the number of "families" is actually the number of adult couples plus the number of single adults.

Example: "92 adults, 42 houses, 51 families". All but one of the houses were inhabited by couples (with or without offspring), two of the couples being new ones formed when widows and widowers re-partnered. An odd-one-out widow was alone in the other house. The difference between the 51 and the 42 represented the 9 grown-up children waiting for a chance to leave home.

What the numbers don't show is the male/female split of the young singles - 5 and 4 as it happened, so immediately completing two more houses would make the report "44 houses, 49 families", provided waiting adults paired up with each other and not with students. But if a male adult pairs with a female student then they do not count as a family at all - distorting the picture - until she graduates and is ready to have kids. A couple more school leavers and some old age deaths later it was "44 houses, 45 families" with not 1 but 2 adults (both of them lads) still living with parents.

What about the other way round - male student with female worker? I don't know (haven't seen that one since coming up with the theory).

Conclusion: whatever the shortfall of houses to families (according to the Town Hall overview report), complete half that number of new houses; repeat process until the numbers match. If you want your schoolchildren to shack up as soon as possible, that is. Check again every time the event log reports someone becoming an adult.