Avoid growth button

[JeebusGreen]

To my understanding of it, the avoid growth button adjusts the city governor (the auto citizen manager) to reduce the amount of surplus food. But if there is still surplus food, the city will grow anyway.

I've just started micro-managing my citizens manually, and have noticed that if avoid growth happens to be pressed when the city governor is turned off the city will be 'growing in 1 turn' with a full food bank - yet never actually grow no matter how many turns pass. Until the button is unchecked.

Is it supposed to work like this? Or a bug (that may possibly be fixed in Warlords/BtS - I'm playing vanilla)

 

[FuRRie]

When the avoid growth button is active, the city will not grow, even with surplus food.

It's a feature

 

[Draknith]

Yeah it's best used if you have a city that is growing too quickly, resulting in unhappiness or unhealthiness. Of course you can whip a few citizens, but if your city grows back too quickly you can find yourself in a unhapiness problem real quick.

 

[Joshua368]

Yeah it's best used if you have a city that is growing too quickly, resulting in unhappiness or unhealthiness. Of course you can whip a few citizens, but if your city grows back too quickly you can find yourself in a unhapiness problem real quick.

It's best used never. It literally throws food away and if you use it, you're playing poorly.

Work low-food high-hammer tiles, run specialists, churn out workers/settlers, crack the whip, or any combination of the four. Don't just throw out food.

 

[Grey Fox]

Though, If used together with for example emphasize hammers it will usually try to get +food down to 0 to maximize hammer output. Can be faster than doing it manually. Though keep a lookout for when the governor messes up and micro when needed.

 

[Zeiter]

Unhappiness does activate certain random events, though, does it not? Don't slave revolts have a higher chance of happening with an unhappy capital? Still, it's better to re-assign the citizens to de-emphasize food, but just assuming that there's absolutely no way you could re-assign your citizens and still get optimal production and not manage to have a food surplus, and you really don't want the unhappiness (using the revolution mod is another instance where this would be important), maybe in those circumstances the stop growth button might become useful. But it would be very rare.

 

[Draknith]

Just because you hit the no growth button does not equal throwing out food.

By selecting it, the city will automatically change the tiles it is working to allow for less food being generated, thereby allowing the city to be more efficient without pushing you over the happiness or healthiness limit.

Of course you can assign your workers as you see fit if you don't want the governor to take care of it for you.

 

[JeebusGreen]

Damn, all this time I thought the avoid growth button with city governor on would just minimize food generated but not prevent growth if there actually was surplus anyway.

How'd I get it so WRONG my little Greek minions? All this time I could have let the wheat be harvested anyway and just neuter all the males and lockdown the immigration laws.