Second try, think this'll be my last try though. Managed to keep the town on life support by buying food for the last 2-3 years but I could never get my firewood production up enough to balance the costs. Was hoping to hit 600, but it wasn't meant to be :/
Kinda funky to have almost 200 laborers just doing nothing really.
Getting past 600 should be doable and sustainable if you fill out all forests with farms/houses and make sure you have a steady supply of logs from trading.
I was thinking about doing that but I didn't want to waste any space with by building the town hall. Instead I'd just fill up my forests with houses and let my people breed when I felt I was approaching the limit. Guess you could raze a farm and put the town hall up instead though, but it can still take a while for the nomads to show up.
Crazy thing about surplus is that the volume past a certain point(making sure storages are saturated) doesn't matter, it's deceptive because when you have 50k food you wont notice if you're having a small deficit. Then a few years later you notice it's 25k instead of 50 and it's like this unstoppable force where even if you add a lot of food sources they'll still starve to death since storages are empty and they run around looking for food instead of working it.