Stopping or controlling growth

[Rub'Rum]

Do you stop or control growth of your cities? Do you decide "okay this one must not go beyond 6 citizens", or do you try to achieve maximum pop in all cities?

One of the least fun parts of Civ 4, for me, was making sure that each city didn't become unhappy the next turn. So I had an alarm to tell me when a city was about to grow, and I had to manually go and look if it was about to go unhappy, then decide to avoid growth, and half the time I forgot to re-allow growth again... I hated this.

In Civ 5, now I only have one big number, but that doesn't change the fact that in theory, I have to decide which cities to stop growing. Or maybe you guys just rely on the penalty applied at low levels of unhappiness? What I mean is that once you hit -1 or -2 unhappiness, the only penalty is to make growth 1/4th of the normal speed. That is a kind of auto-control on growth... But is it desirable to accept -1 to -2 unhappiness? It certainly makes further expansion more painful.

If that's the case, then I still have to select some cities to mark as "avoid growth", and I'm not sure how to choose them. And of course, I will still forget to uncheck these boxes later because my short term memory is horrible.

 

[goodolarchie]

Global happiness pretty much killed strategically stymieing your growth to avoid unhappiness, because there's no hard cap on it per-city. If you reach a point where one more population is going to turn your civ unhappy, plan ahead better next time. There are so many ways of dogpiling up your global , and population is everything in this game, so by all means do NOT avoid growth!

 

[belengthy]

I don't see how you have to decide. If you happen to reach a point where don't want to loose anymore happiness, then turn off growth in all cities. When it spikes back up, turn it back on. If you really want to micromanage, you would maybe stop all but one or two cities when you get close to the limit you set for yourself. Just make sure you take a peak at your happiness every turn or two.

As far as working as an unhappy Civ, haven't tried it. I like Golden Ages too much.

 

[Rub'Rum]

I don't see how you have to decide. If you happen to reach a point where don't want to loose anymore happiness, then turn off growth in all cities. When it spikes back up, turn it back on. If you really want to micromanage, you would maybe stop all but one or two cities when you get close to the limit you set for yourself. Just make sure you take a peak at your happiness every turn or two.

As far as working as an unhappy Civ, haven't tried it. I like Golden Ages too much.

This is kind of what I've been doing. Consequently, I long for that one button that would stop growth in ALL cities instead of shifting through my 15 cities every time.

 

[belengthy]

This is kind of what I've been doing. Consequently, I long for that one button that would stop growth in ALL cities instead of shifting through my 15 cities every time.

Good point. Since they made happiness Global, there really should a be a Stop All Growth toggle somewhere.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Isn't the only thing unhappiness does that it halts growth? Halting growth to avoid... halting growth... is kind of pointless.

 

[belengthy]

Isn't the only thing unhappiness does that it halts growth? Halting growth to avoid... halting growth... is kind of pointless.

If that's all there was to it, then yes.

There's also the fact that excess happiness goes into a pool for a Golden Age. I would imagine going negative would take away from that pool (haven't seen it myself to verify), but either way I want that pool to fill up. Plus, if for some reason you can't find a way to solve the problem, your army begins to take the hit.

 

[vtaenz]

I don't see how you have to decide. If you happen to reach a point where don't want to loose anymore happiness, then turn off growth in all cities. When it spikes back up, turn it back on. If you really want to micromanage, you would maybe stop all but one or two cities when you get close to the limit you set for yourself. Just make sure you take a peak at your happiness every turn or two.

As far as working as an unhappy Civ, haven't tried it. I like Golden Ages too much.

I distinctly recall in one of the interviews that the devs said they were trying to get away from the city micromanagement. It seems like it's even more critical now than it was before since you absolutely have to maximize growth to a certain threshold and then shut down growth so as not to exceed it.

 

[BaronVonCP]

Is it really too much micro to set your cities to not have a food surplus? Work mines and trading posts instead of farms and/or run specialists rather than checking the 'avoid growth' box. Its quite a waste of your workforce to just be throwing the food they make into the ocean.


As someone else mentioned, short periods of unhappiness aren't the end of the world. However, golden ages are very powerful (especially when you are working mines and trading posts) so I would make it a goal to stay as happy as possible.

 

[belengthy]

Is it really too much micro to set your cities to not have a food surplus? Work mines and trading posts instead of farms and/or run specialists rather than checking the 'avoid growth' box. Its quite a waste of your workforce to just be throwing the food they make into the ocean.

The 'Avoid Growth' toggle does exactly what you suggest: it reassigns citizens to other tiles or as specialists.

 

[JWideman]

Unhappiness seems to be self-limiting. However, there IS a stage beyond mere unhappiness that cripples your entire civ AND military.

 

[helemaalnicks]

im still waiting for the game to hit my doormat, but this is my 2 cts anyway:

You have global happiness, which is disturbed by EVERY city and EVERY poppoint...

Then obviously, you'll need to stop growth in cities that don't have the basic infra up yet. First, you need a library, then you can grow a city beyond the necessary amount of pop needed to build that library. In the meantime, you better grow your capital and other more developed cities instead, since if they get 1 pop, they probably still have landtiles left (unless the city surpassed the 18 pop level, which is unlikely), and/or have beaker multipliers/goldmultipliers/hammermultipliers up, that make extra citizens much more usefull then an extra citizen in a newer city. So basically, the cities that have the best infra, can grow infinite, and the cities that are new, and have worse infra, don't get the growth untill they build the buildings needed to get it to work.

Obviously, an infra can be lib/uni, OR market/bank, but also HE/bar/mil ac. You obviously don't need all infra in every city, but for a city to grow, it needs at least 1 basic infra.

EDIT: apparantly, each city can use 3 rings, which is a total of 36(!!!) landtiles now. This means that limiting growth to 2-3 cities in the early stage is probably best, other cities are mainly usefull for rescource grabbing, and don't need any infrastructure of population. Correct me if i'm wrong.

 

[tinstaafl]

This is kind of what I've been doing. Consequently, I long for that one button that would stop growth in ALL cities instead of shifting through my 15 cities every time.

Ironically, while this wouldn't have made sense in civ4, it would have required exactly 3 mouseclicks.

 

[Celevin]

Halting growth is basically needed to play Darius well... I think he's one of the harder ones to take full advantage of his UA.

 

[Kuthar]

im still waiting for the game to hit my doormat, but this is my 2 cts anyway:

You have global happiness, which is disturbed by EVERY city and EVERY poppoint...

Then obviously, you'll need to stop growth in cities that don't have the basic infra up yet. First, you need a library, then you can grow a city beyond the necessary amount of pop needed to build that library. In the meantime, you better grow your capital and other more developed cities instead, since if they get 1 pop, they probably still have landtiles left (unless the city surpassed the 18 pop level, which is unlikely), and/or have beaker multipliers/goldmultipliers/hammermultipliers up, that make extra citizens much more usefull then an extra citizen in a newer city. So basically, the cities that have the best infra, can grow infinite, and the cities that are new, and have worse infra, don't get the growth untill they build the buildings needed to get it to work.

Obviously, an infra can be lib/uni, OR market/bank, but also HE/bar/mil ac. You obviously don't need all infra in every city, but for a city to grow, it needs at least 1 basic infra.

EDIT: apparantly, each city can use 3 rings, which is a total of 36(!!!) landtiles now. This means that limiting growth to 2-3 cities in the early stage is probably best, other cities are mainly usefull for rescource grabbing, and don't need any infrastructure of population. Correct me if i'm wrong.

Well a city begins to grow more slowly as it gets bigger, so if you only ever have, say, one city, then its going to take a really long time to get a citizen to work a new tile after awhile. Whereas with a new city you can get up to 3-4 tiles pretty quickly.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

FYI, "avoid growth" doesn't stop growth like in Civ V. It merely assigns civilians to non food tiles if possible. You can still grow with that box checked.

 

[Syiss_]

Because of global happiness, avoiding growth in certain cities is more important than in Civ IV. You only get so much happiness, and its important to use that happiness towards getting enough population in cities where you can get some multipliers. For instance in a production city, you need to have enough citizens to work the farms and any mines or other production tiles, plus engineer specialists if you want. However, its also very important to grab as many happiness resources as possible, and that can be done just as easily with a 1 pop city as a 6 pop city. Granted, more cities adds unhappiness too, but if you focus your population into cities with good tiles and multipliers, you will get more out of your total happiness.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Isn't the only thing unhappiness does that it halts growth? Halting growth to avoid... halting growth... is kind of pointless.

That's what I was wondering, I mean, did people rely on the self-limiting growth that arrives due to the unhappiness penalty? Apparently not, reading other people's comments. It's always good to have spare happiness to grow or expand.

However, there is more than just growth reduction... I accidentally got to -10 unhappiness in my first game and my production was also greatly diminished.

Is it really too much micro to set your cities to not have a food surplus? Work mines and trading posts instead of farms and/or run specialists rather than checking the 'avoid growth' box. Its quite a waste of your workforce to just be throwing the food they make into the ocean.

For me, it kind of is. I never micro-ed like that, I always used the "focus" buttons. I rarely choose my own tiles. I was never interested in Deity or immortal level in Civ 4 because of that reason. I played Prince and.. what's the next one, Monarch? Anyway, as it as been pointed out, using the focus buttons kind of do what you are describing.

 

[s0nny80y]

Avoiding growth gives room for early settlements to grow, something I just realized after trying to avoid a domination run for the first time. What also helps is buying buildings for these frontier cities while the taller cities focus on wealth.

 

[livsbrand]

In BNW you lose production and combat strength for every point of unhappiness. I like it. I personally micro every citizen (except in puppets), at least until the game is already won.