How do I deal with low peasantries/population?

[MachopPower69]

I am playing as Elysia in a AH mod and one of my biggest issues is low population and low peasant numbers. My economy is in the negative, turmoil is high and my SoL is low to which I lost half of New England's population due to a famine because of not enough people wanting to work for food and low infrastructure (I had issues with low infrastructure for a while).

Should I switch to a different custom union or doesn't it encourage migrations?

 

[DukeLeto42]

No, no, you should definitely join a customs union. It'll be... fun...


Taking this more seriously, you've kind of buried the lead here. Low population is generally not the issue in V3 at the moment - at least, not as long as you've the right laws in place. Low SoL and high Turmoil are the real problems - under those conditions, attracting migrants just won't be an option. V3 operates on an "if you build it, they will come" premise - build high SoL, happy pops, and jobs to spare, and you'll never run low again.

 

[MachopPower69]

No, no, you should definitely join a customs union. It'll be... fun...


Taking this more seriously, you've kind of buried the lead here. Low population is generally not the issue in V3 at the moment - at least, not as long as you've the right laws in place. Low SoL and high Turmoil are the real problems - under those conditions, attracting migrants just won't be an option. V3 operates on an "if you build it, they will come" premise - build high SoL, happy pops, and jobs to spare, and you'll never run low again.

How do I attract more population and SoL? Build cotton farms, build clothing manufactories, rinse repeat?

 

[Fawr]

How do I attract more population and SoL? Build cotton farms, build clothing manufactories, rinse repeat?

If you look at your state's migration attractiveness you will see it is based on SoL with a few modifiers (common ones are the migration decree, happy intellectualists, turmoil, unemployment). Until you sort out turmoil you are likely to get more people leaving than joining. The main way to do that is to make a legitimate government and to increase their SoL.

To get high SoL you normally start by employing your peasants more effectively, but it sounds like you have done that already. Next step is to make sure they are in productive industries, or to make the industries they are in more productive. You can help here if you trade away the goods they are producing (cloth, clothes, etc) to other markets and by buying the ones they need to push down the prices (food, services, heating, etc). If you look at a pop and hover over the right area you can see where they spend their money currently, which should give you a good idea of what you want to decrease the prices of to get the largest bang for the buck.

Long term the biggest gains are likely to be production technologies so that each worker produces more goods.

 

[EleventhAvenue]

Some images of your situtation would be really helpful here, but generally low population alone doesn't mean that you'll have issues with SoL and turmoil. Are your buildings productive? What are the wages like?