Not every Lord wants to be popular amongst his own serfs, but if you are wanting to make your population rise so you can fleece them for more taxes at some point in the future you are going to need to know how to get your approval rating up to attract more of the right type of peasant to your enclave and worship all who come under your own coat of arms.
Just like in real life if you barrel around town being an absolute idiot, people are going to hate you, tell their friends and well, no population growth for you. To attract them all in, you need to look after the good folk, even if you don’t really want to.
How to improve your Approval Rating
For starters, you need to make sure everybody has somewhere to live. There’s no point in moving to your town if they are going to be sleeping on the streets you probably don’t even have because it’s the Middle Ages.
Food is also another must-have but first let’s deal with assigning land for housing. You need to designate Burgage Plots which you will find on the Residental section of the Construction menu.
Once you have drawn out your zone your available workers will get cracking and we can start to encourage the people you will then need to keep happy into your town. Houses within these plots can be upgraded in exchange for resources and then each can mouse multiple families. As your town grows, this will become essential.
Now you have people coming in and you have housing and enough food for them you need to start thinking about what else they may need. Back in the day, the heart of any new community was its Church, so make sure one of these is on the priority list for construction as you will get an instant popularity bump when it is completed.
As your population grows so will their demands and providing just the basics won’t wash. Get a Marketplace up and running sooner rather than later and make sure it is as close to your residential area as possible. Nobody wants to lug a crate full of turnips far after all.
Later on you can instigate trade routes that will being in new goods to your marketplace that you may not be able to supply yourself.
Once you have all this ticking over your population should continue to grow and you can keep your people happy.
