Kingdoms and Castles

Have a population of 5000+

At this point it start becoming very tedious, your population will often grow and die of old age at a rate similar or only slightly lower than new comers,
You also have to deal with random peasants starving for no apparent reason they just seem to be to busy to eat or something.

Make sure you have loads of cemeteries and enough capacity, they will fill very fast and failure to bury the dead will cause 100's to leave due to disrespecting the dead and 100s to die from plague.


1. Start building large empty housing districts with everything needed to keep the peasants happy and fed. build up your city so it has over 5000 beds.
2. Ensure you are growing and saving 1000+ of food per year.
3. Build several treasure rooms and save up 1000s of gold, you can also trade spare resources with merchants for more gold

Once you are ready to proceed, find the town squares dotted around your city click on them and activate the Festival activity

Once the festival is over it will attract new peasants to live in your city and boost happiness. the festivals cost up to 400 gold per use and can attract 20-60ish peasants. keep activating festivals until your population is reached.

Have a population of 5000+

At this point it start becoming very tedious, your population will often grow and die of old age at a rate similar or only slightly lower than new comers,
You also have to deal with random peasants starving for no apparent reason they just seem to be to busy to eat or something.

Make sure you have loads of cemeteries and enough capacity, they will fill very fast and failure to bury the dead will cause 100's to leave due to disrespecting the dead and 100s to die from plague.


1. Start building large empty housing districts with everything needed to keep the peasants happy and fed. build up your city so it has over 5000 beds.
2. Ensure you are growing and saving 1000+ of food per year.
3. Build several treasure rooms and save up 1000s of gold, you can also trade spare resources with merchants for more gold

Once you are ready to proceed, find the town squares dotted around your city click on them and activate the Festival activity

Once the festival is over it will attract new peasants to live in your city and boost happiness. the festivals cost up to 400 gold per use and can attract 20-60ish peasants. keep activating festivals until your population is reached.

This achievement is for having a population of 5000 citizens.

The number of available beds and your overall happiness score govern how many people visiting your city decide to join. Happiness is your average home happiness first and foremost in combination with other factors such as your health score, food availability, and events such as viking/dragon attacks, festivals, etc.

Because your average home happiness is such a major part, you need to boost this with bonuses. I found a housing layout on the YouTube channel Building Game Help. It's a starting tutorial but the main takeaway is how he lays out the bonus buildings around the housing. I take no credit for that video or this basic layout. But I thought it was quite helpful and thought I would share it.

It is a 7x12 area bordered by a road. It contains 8 manors which are the desired housing unit as you get the most tax revenue from them as well as 200 beds total. The downside of manors is they demand charcoal. This is a screen shot of just the manor pattern and a well in the center. This is the Bonus Building Layout minus the manors. Both screens are from the game I accomplished this achievement in. In the center you have the well which is surrounded by a baker, chapel, clinic and library. Beside the clinic, is a moat, statue, and garden. These 3 are repeated on the other side of the library.

I changed up the layout slightly. I moved the clinic to the middle by the well and between the two taverns, I either placed a small market or a fire brigade. Where as the video places another garden. Granted 2 gardens touching does generate 1 more bonus point, but I opted for the benefits of the other buildings.

This layout, in combination with 5 bath houses, 3 theaters, and a jousting arena easily got me to a pop of 3500. My happiness stayed at or near 100 and I only needed a 20% tax rate to maintain my kingdom (playing on easy with dragon/viking attacks.) I didn't even use festivals until after this point (and I only built 3 town squares, not realizing they give a passive bonus to homes as well.) And even then, only after an event would drop my happiness into the 50s. (I only had 1 small treasury, and 1 large one. Money was never an issue for me since festivals were not what I was relying on to grow my population.) Near the end, I also built a Great Hall for the public feast bonus of 20 points when activated since I had massive stockpiles of wheat/fruit. Town square festivals are certainly the way to go if you are trying to get to 5000 as fast as possible since they guarantee a population increase when activated. I played to the year 700 so I wasn't exactly focused on speed.

Once you hit 3500 population, for some reason the game goes crazy as I was having massive problems with starvation and charcoal in homes, despite the fact I had over 15,000 in food and around 10,000 charcoal. I spammed small and large markets anywhere they would fit around the homes. I had almost 900 people employed at markets. This helped some. Deaths from starvation dropped to like around 10 a year rather than 20 or 30 in one event. "Food shortages" greatly affect happiness. It would penalize me 35 points at times. This is why the bonuses affecting your homes matters. The vast majority of my homes had a rating above 100 going up to 130. One other thing to help with the food shortages is to build the Great Library and research the bonus to increase the speed of bakers by 25%.

Also pay attention to negative effects, like fish mongers, pigs, butchers, mines, charcoal makers, etc. People do not like living next to such buildings so they subtract points.

Screenshots of my main housing district and my agricultural district. (More housing and like 8 large charcoal makers are on the side out of view.) No way are these optimal setups for either area but I will leave these for an idea of how my kingdom looked at the time I got to 5000 population.