0 Growth/Constant Prod. vs. Constant Growth/Slavery

[H20CivCooler]

Thanks to Civ 3 I'm having a lot of trouble not ripping down every tree around my city in order to build farms and cottages. That game instilled in my mind that every tile must be improved.

Because of this I'm finding my cities in serious health trouble in the middle of the game. In order to counter this I've been using Slavery to get the population back to healthy levels and then repeating this process. I'm wondering which strategy is more effective... Getting your population to a max level based on health and then getting rid of the excess food (eliminating population growth)... Or continually allowing your cities to grow and using slavery to keep them under the max health level.

I think health is going to be the biggest factor in determining the size of cities. Happiness is a cakewalk to manage thanks to religion. For health there are only a few buildings/wonders that will improve it or you'd better be blessed with some health improving resources.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on these strategies?

 

[ritterpa]

I think the slavery technique could be effective in the mid-game depending on how many citizens you have to sacrifice to be of value (maybe you could give me an idea; I don't usually use slavery because I don't use spiritual so I want to avoid useless anarchy).

Later in the game, you will get a lot of techs that help health, along with more and more resources via network and trade that will help it. So yeah, the slavery thing may actually be a good strategy depending on how efficient it is; otherwise I'd say it sounds like a good candidate for a specialist city.