Limits on population growth due to Health/Happiness

[Marshall Thomas]

Is it almost always wise to prevent population growth if it means that it will exceed your happiness and health limit? Is it a good idea to create specialist to prevent unwanted population growth? In addition to the specialist talent, one would also recieve an increase in Great Persons being created.

 

[Meffy]

1) As far as I (a not-very-sophisticated player) know, yes.

2) Yuppers.

 

[Artanis]

Yes, it's wise to prevent growth when you hit the Happiness limit, since any citizens beyond that limit will literally be worse than useless. Health is something to be careful about since it'll make you need excess food, but it isn't a "hard cap" like Happiness is.

Yes, specialists are a good idea when preventing unwanted populations growth. Specialists also come in handy you're trying to starve a city as low as possible before giving it to one of the AIs

 

[Marshall Thomas]

Does happiness work just as it did in Civ 3, except that instead of the city going into civil disorder- the city is for all practical purposes like a civ 3 city after one had assigned an entertainer?

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I let health determine when I choose to specialise-when I am about level in Health/Sick, then I try and specialise to prevent further population growth. It isn't quite as simple as that, though, as creating a single specialist can sometimes gain you less than you lose-in production and gold. That is part of what makes the game so good though, IMO!
@Marshall Thomas. When your happiness is exceeded by Unhappiness, you get an angry citizen. This guy consumes food, but doesn't produce anything in return. Every extra unhappiness point gives an extra angry citizen so, before long, you could end up with a totally unproductive city!!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

So is an unhappy city worse than an unhealthy city?

 

[Artanis]

Yes. An Unhealthy city can still keep growing and get usefulness out of its new citizens. An unhappy city might as well have not grown at all.

 

[warpus]

how can you tell if you're getting close to the 'happiness limit'? also, how do you know how many people in your city are unhappy and what effects this is having on your production/etc. ?

 

[Artanis]

The main way to check how close you are to the happiness limit is to compare the number of faces in a city vs. the number of faces. This can be done on the city screen itself, or from the city menu (the one which shows stats on all your cities at once). If the city goes over the happiness limit, a face will appear on the city bar on the main screen and smoke will rise from the city.

If you have more than in a city, the difference is how many non-working citizens you have there (i.e. having 6 and 8 means you'll have 2 slackers) On the city screen, there's also a line under the Specialist area that has a red-clad guy for each non-working citizen there.

As for effects on production, non-working citizens do nothing for your city. Add happiness, and those citizens will be able to become specialists or start working tiles, adding Food, Hammers, Commerce, etc. to the city. If you aren't going to be able to get any happiness to the city anytime soon, it's better not to let it grow over the limit in the first place, since the citizens who actually *do* work will have to divert from Mines and Cottages in order to feed the slackers.

 

[Marshall Thomas]

So I suppose the only reason to let an unhappy city grow is because you believe you will soon be able to make the these citizens happy. Perhaps even that is a bad idea.

Is it allright to let an unhealthy city grow? Can being cut off from health resourses result in starvation?

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Neither is particularly good to have, but I would say unhappiness is worse. Look at it this way-if a city has 10 Health to 11 sick, then it loses 2 food per turn. If you have a big food surplus, though, this is NOT going to hurt you. If you have a city with 10 happy and 11 unhappy, then you potentially stand to lose up to 7 food and/or 7 hammers and/or 7 gold (i.e., the maximum a single tile can normally produce). Worse still, that person still CONSUMES surplus food. So its not too hard to do the maths !

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[eg577]

Extra unhappy citizens are on the surface neutral. They don't give you anything and while they eat 2 food + 1 health point you can't really make use of that food, can you? Whatever you could do without that extra unhappy citizen there you could do with him there, except maybe he'll starve. If you don't have a granary then you don't lose anything starving back down. On the other hand, if you increase the happy faces in the future then your growth is artificially boosted by having those previously unhappy citizens already present.

The downside is that most bad things scale with pop, like WW and city upkeep. For example, by starving away 3 unhappy citizens you may end up getting 1 less WW unhappy face since your pop went down by 3. If you *do* have a granary then extra unhappies are bad because your stored food is wasted trying to keep them alive. Turning on avoid growth is pretty drastic since I can gaurentee you that you will lose turns of growth were you forgot to turn the darn thing off. It's probably better to just rearrange your workforce that make use of the extra food and accept 1 or 2 unhappy faces.