I am having difficulty figuring out how to get more food so my population can start growing again.

I have irrigated, put roads in, built a granary but because of the poor terrain, my city stagnates at zero population growth and goes nowhere.

How can I get more food?

Can I get a McDonalds franchise?
Should I revert to cannabilism?
:)
Enquiring minds want to know....

want more food, build on grasslands, especially near wheat and cows. irrigation is good, but it only helps after you move out of despotism. in despot-grassland with irrigation produces 2 food. in republic it produces 3... see, more food. also look for things like wine or game (each adds 1 food to their respective squares).

if you are on the coast, build harbors as they allow you to collect more from the sea.

try to avoid deserts. flood plains are nice if you can handle the possiblity of disease. irriagated flood plain in republic or democracy will produce loads of food...

also, remember that there are caps to how large a city can get. if you have fresh water (ie river or lake-inland sea) then you can go to size 12 before having to build a hospital. Otherwise, at size 6 you need to build an aqueduct. Also, if you have forest or jungle tile in your city radius, clear them and irrigate in order to increase food prodcution.

also, make sure that none of your pop are set to be entertainers (unless necessary) this could artifically limit you food gathering resources.

Thank you for your comments. They are helpful.

There are some cities that I have won in battle that have been built in an area where there is mostly mountains or deserts.

I don' t have the ability to build anything because of the lack of food or population.

I was looking for somehow bringing more food into the city from outside. I think I will try buildlng a colony and bring in some wine and game.

not sure that you can bring in food from outside. all city terrain squares generate 2 food, ie they support i person. you basically have to choose your city sites so that they have room to grow. If you captured AI town that are in crappy locations, just raze them instead of wasting you money and economy on trying to build them up. Now if they are in a strategic locations, such as an invasion point or a bottleneck into your area, then you may want to hold on to them.

colonies, these will only help you to bring in luxuries and strat resources-not food. By all means use them for wine to make you peeps happy, but you cannot build them unless there is a resource on the tile.

sometime it is just better to raze the AI cities and bring in your own settlers to build a descent city on a descent site...

The benefit to these desert cities will not be clear until you develop refining, and discover oil.

true, but i tend to build cities once the resource is available and not before if i can help it. Saltpeter always tends to appear in deserts in my games, so i have a few desert cities for that... but the only reason i would build on a desert is to 1) take a resource, 2) becuase I want to fill in the gaps between other cities, or 3) to strategically deny the area to the AI

Otherwise I would go for better building areas...

Originally posted by timesurfer
I was looking for somehow bringing more food into the city from outside. I think I will try buildlng a colony and bring in some wine and game.

There is *sorta* a way to do this... You can't actually bring in food, but you can grow the city. Settlers and Workers can Join a city, adding a population point to the city. This effectively allows you to move the *effect* of increased food... that is, population, from a city that has good food production to one that does not, for the cost of some shields (and time). This may be worthwhile if you have a tactical reason to build up a city with low food production. Just take care to be sure the surrounding terrain can support the increased population with enough food so that you don't have a shortage (negative growth)