ThreeBlackSevens
Chieftain
Just a quick note on core population to add detail to what 1SDAN said, your core and non-core (called periphery) population are more like scores based on the population, that change because of quite a few modifiers that make it so that especially late game, you can have a rather extensive empire without a particularly large core.
Factors that increase core population are:
- Each era, the multiplier for your core population goes up. So the higher your era, the less actual population you need in your core to sustain the same periphery population.
- Each fully-grown town within your core adds 1 core population. I'm not sure if the multiplier affects this or not, and I'm 99% sure that the inverse is not true so you can still build as many towns outside your core as you want.
Factors that affect periphery population are:
- Depending on if your city is in a historical/contested area, or foreign/foreign core area, the multiplier for its population score changes. Historical and contested areas have a lower multiplier, so cities there contribute less to your periphery population score.
Jails and courthouses (and any UBs that decrease maintenance) also reduce periphery population score by the same amount. So, with no unique buildings but with jails and courthouses in every non-core city, you can essentially double your potential periphery population!
Two other things should be noted:
- Not having enough cultural control over a city can give you an expansion stability penalty as well, so watch out for that in border cities!
- The population is calculated by the number next to the city, so the population that actually has a game effect, not the population when you scroll over the city title in the city screen, so having 4 cities of size 5 has the same effect as 1 city of size 20.
Some tips for strategies I use!
- If you're at risk of overexpanding, it can be a good idea to put off expansion and instead focus on research to advance to another era and/or building jails and courthouses. If it's bad enough, you can even set periphery cities to avoid growth - for Japan's UHV, if overexpansion is a bigger problem than having enough production/GNP, it could be a good idea to restrict some of those Chinese or Korean core cities to just a very small population! Just remember that those cities will still increase your maintenance costs though, so it's a bit of a balancing act sometimes.
- Generally in highly expansive nations, planning your core area is a crucial thing to do at the very beginning of a game. You'll wanna try to maximise the total population + towns in your core, so this can be done by building another city or two to take advantage of more coastal space by your core or food-producing regions outside your core by placing cities right on the edge of it (this does affect your economy though, so it's another balancing act really).
- Negative expansion stability isn't the end of the world if you can make sure to have good stability in other ways to counteract it, like economic growth, religious unity, and compatible and contemporary civics.
- I find slower expansion generally easier to maintain than rapid expansion, generally speaking, because it makes it so that you can set up your cities to have good economic growth as well as having time to construct those Jails and Courthouses, and helping you snowball to have more power to actually expand in the later game when the modifiers make it easier.
- Consider the order of what you need to take - generally, you want to prioritise high value areas (lots of production/GNP) that are easy to keep (from war and Civ spawns/respawns) and have a low periphery score multiplier. Some priorities I would think of would be the Philippines as early as possible, since it's a useful area that's relatively uncontested (might have to watch out for Spain later though), one city in Korea (probably best to raze the other one), and Manchuria since Qiqihar is a BEAST of a production city. Might wanna wait until after the Mongols for the last two though!
I guess that wasn't a quick note like I said it was going to be, ah well
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