I would ask whether "how to replenish population" is the right question? There are two alternatives that you can consider that might be more practical:
- How can you reduce the required population?
- How can you free up space to allow more residences etc?
On population first I think the previous posters covered most options:
- GA (and when you unlock it Mountain Halls) can add quite a lot of population.
- Magic residences give more than regular. But you already have several and unless you want to spend real money upgrading you probably don't want more. It's hard to get the blueprints to upgrade these.
- Daily special buildings from events. This is the most important IMHO. Look for daily specials that are pop + culture only and give more population than culture. And then save your points in the event to get as many of these as possible. Assuming it matches beta, there'll be an event in 2 or 3 weeks and day 1 is the Goblin Gift Shop - this may be the best (non-paid) population building in the game. - it beats magic residences at least in some chapters. Last year I got 9 I think, and my total city population went up by 50% in a single day. So you'll have to wait a couple of weeks, but if you get enough of these, population won't be a problem for some time. In fact the upcoming event may have some small buildings that aren't even daily specials that are not bad for pop.
More useful might be reducing how much population you need:
- Simplest thing is to teleport workshops or manufacturies. You'll likely find as you progress and they get larger you need numerically fewer of them. So at times you may need to teleport a few. Or you may find you simply can't afford the population for them all - if you can't increase population much then the alternative is to teleport whatever you need least out of these.
- Magic workshops: these might be more useful for your population than magic residences. They produce more supplies for similar population so reduce your needed population. What's powerful, though, is combining these with power-of-provision spells. You can get those from the tourney, from making them in the MA (not ideal - better to do CC) and a few from events. If you work out how many workshops you could realistically hit with a PoP spell every day and get that many magic workshops it will dramatically reduce your needed population. I was only doing this a bit after Dwarves chapter, but 2 or 3 workshops total may be more than enough. A PoP spell triples production. A magic workshop is roughly double a normal. So a magic workshop with a PoP spell daily can replace numerous normal workshops : probably 4 or 5 once you account for the spell not lasting all day
- Use supply instants and scrap workshops entirely. if you have a Ferris wheel you can make 10% supplies every 2 days. In your MA you'll get quite a lot of supply instant options. I never went this route, but I believe it's possible to make enough to get all your supplies - and scrap every single workshop in your city.
- Don't upgrade your manufacturies to max. This is important - when you unlock manufactury techs, the new levels are usually worse than the previous ones, due to the enormous population needs. Once you get better residences later the balances changes and they become worth doing. It's generally only beneficial to upgrade to new levels in the chapter where you'll get the NEXT levels unlocked, or the one before that. Your question implies you are trying to do all possible upgrades while in the dwarves chapter - this is likely to be unhelpful.
And lastly, there is the option of freeing up space. Anything inefficient in your city is hurting your population, because it's taking space you could use for residences:
- Generally watch for out of date buildings and be scrap them. The buildings in the culture tab are generally weak and useful only in their chapter, if at all. Buildings from events are usually becoming borderline useful a couple of chapters after you got them. So if you have a chapter 4 event building it's likely OK now, but no better. Anything older is likely best scrapped. This is the dailies and random bits - the evolving buildings are better than that (and worth upgrading with RRs anyway)
- Assuming you're on EN1 you have a mass of L1 granite mines. If you upgrade these to L3 can you scrap some? That might make space for 3 more residences (Many portal buildings go to L4 - I often found L3 best. It is so long and expensive getting to L4 that it often didn't seem worth it; but L3 usually was)
