Individual playing style and Population Growth

[Fridericus Rex]

My recent campaign as Rome presented me with some headache -

I usually play the game managing all aspects - cities, buildings, family, diplomacy (what little is there), etc.
The pace of the game is leisurely, taking enemy cities only every 10 turn or so.

Although having the taxation on High or Very High - the population growth remains high, particularly in the occupied territories. I build all necessary suburban population reducing buildings. Some cities (eg. Patavium and even some homeland cities) with a population of 30,000 and more started to turn RED and revolted. There were no spies or any other obvious reason for that.

My Questions:
Can Overpopulation, Squalor and Rebellion be influenced by the player's playing style? Is a slow expanding player more likely to have revolting problems, such as I experienced?
If, yes, would reduction of the base population rate help players like myself?

Has anybody else experienced this?

[Theoroshia]

I've always had problems with not ENOUGH population

[Durakkon]

I love playing this style and experienced this problem early on. Like you said despite having all the right buildings pop growth would spiral out of control and soon my happy little cozy nation would all be pissed. The solution I found was in temples. Whereas before I would use a mixture of +trade, +mining +farming temples I found that the only way you can maintain public order effectively is to make about 95% of your cities under the max law + happiness temples ie. Temple of Jupiter, Zeus. Hope it helps

[Heme]

When a town gets pissed due to overpop (35k+) I just let rebels take it, recap and exterminate the folks. Then they're all merry for a long time.


Easier than sinking gadzillions into temples and other buildings, and I dont know if extermination actually has that big effect on income either, as 10k or so still remain with same buildings.

[Alavaria]

Although having the taxation on High or Very High - the population growth remains high, particularly in the occupied territories. I build all necessary suburban population reducing buildings.

If you haven't realized from looking at the settlement details, the suburban line reduces popluation growth bonus. It doesn't affect: base farming, farm upgrades, slavery, food import, health.

In effect, you can put it on and have literally nothing change.

Can Overpopulation, Squalor and Rebellion be influenced by the player's playing style? Is a slow expanding player more likely to have revolting problems, such as I experienced?

No wai ^__^
With Pergamum, I have a governor in every settlement and only enslave. It makes for some rather annoying moments, but I manage to keep VH taxes in all the homeland settlements, except maybe Pergamum itself ...

The slaves really made the city huge, I think 35K +. It maxed out the squalor PO at -100%

Has anybody else experienced this?

Temples (Zeus, lol) and some other buildings are important. The sewer-bath etc line is good, but makes your population explode even more ^__^.

If you have a governor, the odeon can get them ancillaries for Influence, which helps PO. The academy also has +5% law. If you're like me and cities grow way too fast, then I (in almost every city) can never actually get an happiness bonus, which means when I *do* get my cities to have those bonuses, they'll be really happy.

Whereas before I would use a mixture of +trade, +mining +farming temples I found that the only way you can maintain public order effectively is to make about 95% of your cities under the max law + happiness temples ie. Temple of Jupiter, Zeus. Hope it helps

Max law works. There's a few forge/hunting temples scattered about, but I definitely love the law temples.

[Scipio praeditus]

If your'e really fed up with the enormous population growth you can always cheat...

add population Rome -13582

[SonOfAlexander]

The trick is this:

1. Whenever you capture a new city, examine population.
2. Now I almost always exterminate, and that's a BIG help to population problems.
3. If the population growth rate is something stupid like 6 or even 12%, then instantly destroy all those population growth bonus things.
4. Then, if the growth rate is still too high, build suburbs, villages etc, until it is about 2% or less. I persoanlly build nothing in my captured settlements until this is done. Temples help a lot as well

[Darkside]

I have yet to experience this problem. My city of Rome has a population right now of about 48000, and all my italian cities have higher than 100 percent order, except for mediolanium and tarentum. All of them have over 30000 population.

My advice for you: early on max out your health buildings, and also MAKE SURE you build the grain import buildings as they are cheap and provide ENORMOUS health bonuses. I have a great variety of temples and don't rely on one or the other.

Health and market buildings are my priority. For example, in Patavium, which has a population of like 36000, I don't even have paved roads yet! I just got done building a legion barracks there, and have started on the paved roads. Also, build the arena-style buildings as well when you can.

You've probably noticed that the cities in Italia grow VERY fast. BUILD THE HEALTH BUILDINGS AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN. Of course, in order to build those, the market-style buildings are required, so they go hand in hand. AND DO NOT FORGET THE GRAIN IMPORT BUILDINGS IF YOU CAN BUILD THEM. THEY ARE ONE OF THE BEST IDEAS EVER IN A MOD FOR THIS GAME.

My playing style is even slower than yours, as I finally united Italy by about 500, and it's 546 in my campaign and I haven't even moved to sicily yet. I'm just about to start sending legions to the lacerdaemon area in order to outflank the Maks because fighting a defensive bridge battle passed Patavium over and over and over again is getting really old :/

Oh, and I don't even use the very high tax setting. Only high. Definitely make sure to destroy population growth initiative buildings as those IMO are worthless.

[Fridericus Rex]

Very good advise - thank you all.

I do already know most of the things recommended. But Mediolanum and Patavia are the worst of the bunch.
I shall try to lower the basic growth rate in the descr_regions file and hope to improve the situation this way.

Has somebody tried this before?

[Tesla]

I shall try to lower the basic growth rate in the descr_regions file and hope to improve the situation this way.

let us know if it works out, maybe i'll give it a go aswell

oh and suburbs actually don't work, they actually remove squallor and thus increase pop. growth.

it was said somewhere on the forum... i'll have to look it up

[Alavaria]

It doesn't, or the EBD says anyway.

It gives you a negative population growth bonus, tax income bonus and sometimes trade. I still don't think it reduces the growth from a variety of factors, making it pretty pointless most of the time.

[Fridericus Rex]

So, are you saying that suburbans are not working as designed?

Having revolts in several cities (approximately 10) at the same time with everything build (it's my play style) is not contributing to the pleasure of playing this game.
I am trying to keep the growth rate (GR) down by taxing Very High and building everything "under the sun", and avoiding buildings with GR, such as temples with GR, or the Via Consularis, etc.

This is a late game breaker for me and causes me to abandon a late game for a new start.

I wish, members of the Mod-balancing team would contribute some of their experience.

[Alavaria]

So, are you saying that suburbans are not working as designed?

You might want to carefully define that.

They reduce your population growth bonus. But most cities don't have much, or any population growth bonus. Check out your core government building - it gives penalies of up to -4% on population growth if your sewer line/farms are not high enough level.

Basically, your "bonus" can go to zero, but not negative. So if you have oodles of (espeically) health, but also base farming, yeah, it'll go high. And one of my cities had 7% from slavery because I was going around enslaving every settlement in sight (including said city). There's no way to push it down except maybe taxes.

Definitely runaway pop growth is an issue if you 1) Are not at 100% squalor and 2) relying on garrison. If you're at the squalor cap and not needing any garrison, there's no problem at all.

[Calvin]

Members of the mod balancing team (which number maybe 1 or 2) are currently reeeeally busy with RS2.

[13lackGu4rd]

with such huge populations I gotta assume that you're all also swimming in money. in that case the basic solution will be to mass produce armies, Legions in the case of Rome, other troops for other factions. also depending on how much money you gain you may wish to go for big units rather than the most expensive ones, to optimize your negative growth to negative income balance.

however if money is infact an issue than raising endless armies wont be possible. in that case I agree that letting your cities revolt than exterminating them will be your best option. repeat the process more than once per city if neccessary. cause really, population growth does get insane and there's not that much you can do about it just with infastructure.