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Well, initially I didn't want ages broken up at all. It was a much simpler design and not nearly as much work for the db to do. There was alot of cool/weird things that determined how the population evolved. For instance, if the work force is only adults, then I needed to determine when children become adults. Of course, if you don't want to track individual years you can't do this directly. So what I did was base it off of statistics. If 1 child becomes an adult at 20, then over the course of 20 years each child has a .05 chance of becoming and adult that year. It doesn't make sense in our world, but statistically it works pretty well. Given any number of children, over the course of 20 years roughly the same amount will have become adults.
The problem with this approach is, that while it works well enough for a scenario on its own (children becoming adults, adults dying, adults reproducing), it's absolutely terrible when these numbers effect other processes. For example, a child can potentially be born, become an adult, have a kid with another adult, and die all in the course of 4 in-game years. Because of the way the various age groups interact with each-other, it really skews any population statistics to the point that they're incredibly unrealistic, and far too varied from player to player.
After playing with this for awhile in hopes that I could solve that problem, I came to the realization that if I want to track growth in a meaningful way, and on a deeper level than just a few simple formulas, I have to keep track of ages.
The ages will fall into various groups that will allow the player certain actions. Like you mention, children won't be working. How quickly a player can accomplish certain things will depend on the number of "workable" citizens he has. The value of children then becomes nothing other than the fact that they will grow to be workers. And once workers hit a certain age, they will fall into the category of pop that can reproduce.
And as far as dying, it's necessary to maintain balance. People will be reproducing, so people will need to be dying. The trick for me (and eventually, the player) is going to be figuring out how often people should be born. The player's army will also be derived from the base pop, which means if they're actively warring other territories, they will need stimulate population growth as much as possible, but within reason given other economic factors.
That's what I like so much about what I've got on paper. I've played a few tick-based games as well and it's always "your population starts at x and grows at a rate of y" and has little to do with anything other than maybe making the player money. There's a huge element of gameplay left out there as far as managing a seemingly organic society.
Needless to say, I've got a ton of work ahead of me. Unfortunately, I work alone on this and it's hard to pin down serious collaborators. It's stuff like that which causes me to waste time on "huge" problems like the one I thought I had in this thread, when all it takes is somebody else to say "well ****, all you gotta do is this."
But hey, thank god for communities like this one. I'm not all without help.
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