Unhealth and Wide Empires

As a game that promoes building / conquering a wide empire, getting negative health points for adding cities, is kind of weird. I always thought in the other civs that negative happiness for having a large empire was kind of dumb... but I digress.

This is probably a noob question, but at what point does unhealth actually become an issue? I run the Healthy Citizen mod (which helps out)..... but when you have a continent / world spanning empire, how do you handle the massive unhealth?

I have unhealth as low as -50 ish before....

The way you describe it is how CIV5 worked, in BE it's actually backwards: The more cities you have, the easier it is to get positive health (after a short period of unhealth).

Sounds weird? Here is how it works: Each population in a city creates 0.75 unhealth (less in aquatic cities), but at the same time it allows you to use a "+1 health" effect from your buildings and improvments. That means as long as you do not exceed your local health, each population in a city grants you +0.25 health. So the unhealth cost of a city reduces as the population grows and past a certain point (16 pop/local health for land cities), the city will actually add more health to your empire than it's creating unhealth.

The reason why each city has to create unhealth is simple: If it wasn't the case, you would just play an ICS (Infinity City Sprawl) strategy where you build new cities as fast as you can without any limits.

In BE unhealth becomes a nuisance around -10 and a problem around -20. Once you reach -20, consider improving your existing cities before settling new land. The main problem is that very high unhealth slows down your growth, which makes it harder to get out of unhealth (since you need pop growth to generate positive health).

"(after a short period of unhealth)" is probably the biggest understatement I've heard this month, but other than that yeah, the wider the empire, the more health will be available later on. If you end up in negative numbers instead you've either not grown your cities enough (going wide REQUIRES also going somewhat tall in Beyond Earth), or you're not using up your local health limits properly.

You may of course also have missed all the health bonuses from Virtues. Prosperity and Industry scale very well with wide empires.

Rising Tide actually has more sources of Health than ever. You can even get the Civil Infrastructure Agreement and treat all Strategics like they were Luxuries - if that was somehow something you missed doing.

GAGA Extrem said:

In BE unhealth becomes a nuisance around -10 and a problem around -20. Once you reach -20, consider improving your existing cities before settling new land. The main problem is that very high unhealth slows down your growth, which makes it harder to get out of unhealth (since you need pop growth to generate positive health).

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I agree. I don't like to go below -20 even during the early expansion phase as it often takes too long to recover. This usually means 5 initial cities followed shortly by 2 or 3 more.

In BERT health is only a soft cap on early ICS. Later it is the Science and Culture penalties that prevent 50+ cities from being optimal. Overall this is one improvement (in my mind) over Civ 5; bigger empires are encouraged without dragging the late game into a micromanagement quagmire.

Health is backward. Just ignore it while expanding, it will come trivially later.

As others have said just grow your cities, build health buildings, pick relevant virtues, enjoy unlimited health somewhere down the line.

Acken said:

Health is backward. Just ignore it while expanding, it will come trivially later.

As others have said just grow your cities, build health buildings, pick relevant virtues, enjoy unlimited health somewhere down the line.

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oh hey wassup acken!