I thought upgrading Annúminas was difficult. When I first started my game as Gondor, I was looking forward to restoring Osgiliath. I then saw the population requirements and about had a heart attack. After writing a little python script to find out exactly how many turns it would take to get East Osgiliath from 325 people to the staggering 28,000 needed to build the Huge Wall, (which I uploaded
here if anyone cares) this was the result:
At 0.5 %, upgrade takes 894 turns.
At 1.0 %, upgrade takes 448 turns.
At 1.5 %, upgrade takes 300 turns.
At 2.0 %, upgrade takes 226 turns.
At 2.5 %, upgrade takes 181 turns.
At 3.0 %, upgrade takes 151 turns.
At 3.5 %, upgrade takes 130 turns.
At 4.0 %, upgrade takes 114 turns.
What the hell? I don't know about anyone else, but even with low taxes and a governor, my population rates never go over 2%, so it would be turn 200+ before I could even have the option to restore the city. Even if I managed to get the rate up to 4% and keep it there, my games usually don't last a whole lot longer than 100 turns. What was the point of including the rebuilding of Osgiliath if it's never going to be seen?