Avoid City Growth?

[S.A.D]

Hello ladies, gentleman, peace-mongers, warmongers peeps!


I would like to know how I stop my cities from growing?! If I'm happy with 5 Pop or even 14 pop and I would like to keep it there how do I go on about?


Growing to 16, 35, 323, 22, etc isn't really for me and it causes a lot of problems!


So how can I avoid city growth? Is there a way to? like in Civilization 4?

 

[Puppeteer]

Crap, I hate when I lose what I typed.

Short version: Micromanage the citizens so they aren't harvesting excess food. Don't use the governor to manage cities, but the governor preferences are still useful for citizen auto-placement when growing or shrinking.

 

[Etain]

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[S.A.D]

Thanks for the replies! It works.

 

[Jivilov]

Thanks for the replies! It works.

Yeah but--you WANT your cities to grow, don't you? The more growth, the more tiles you can work in particular cities, the more production (shields) and gold (commerce). After awhile it snowballs in your favor. If you're worried about disorder and you can't trade, buy, or "hook up" (connect with roads in your own territory) luxuries there's always the luxury slider with your Domestic Advisor (hit F1 to access the gal; the "happiness" slider is just below the science slider near the upper right part of the screen).

Another way is to build happiness buildings (temples, marketplaces (if you've already got a couple or more luxuries), colosseums and cathedrals. If your cities don't grow you can hardly be competitive later on. So grow them cities!

P.S. Sometimes the period of anarchy between government changes can cause you to hemorrhage gold; one trick is to go into your cities ("zoom to city") and change citizens into taxmen (click on a tile, the citizen turns into an entertainer, then click on the entertainer to make a taxman to increase income; the same method can be used to increase research [click on the taxman, he turns into a scientist]). Once anarchy is over you can go back and click on empty city tiles to put the "specialist(s)" back to work (assuming you have at least as many happy as unhappy citizens afterwards).