hanging gardens +1 pop questions

[johnny5000]

So you build the Hanging Gardens, and at the very worst, you'll have one additional unhappy person in your city, not contributing to your economy.
So lets say you had a pop of 5, and now you have a pop of 6, but the new person is unhappy and not doing anything, so it's kind of like you still have a population of 5, as far as production goes.

If you didn't build the HG, you'd still have a pop of 5, so what's the difference? Eventually you'll build something in the city to happy it up, so at that point you will have gained the benefit.

And if you don't have enough food to feed the extra person, they'll just starve themselves away, and you'll be back to 5 pop, right back where you started.

It might not make sense to build it if every new population that it gives you in every city is going to be unhappy, but that's unlikely. Chances are it will help you in at least a few cities.

 

[occam]

Every so often, I choose to build a city that has no nearby food surplus (for a resource or to control a strategic map point)... if I have a couple of them, the HG can make a big difference to my empire - a pop jump when it takes 40 turns to grow can be leveraged into making the city functional much faster.

But maybe that just means I am a bad civic planner!

- O