Managing the food bar (a case study)

[WuphonsReach]

I'm playing as Tokogawa in this game and I have (3) cities, all moderately developed. What I don't understand is why some of my cities show a blank food bar, while others show "Stagnant". Here are my cities:

Kyoto: 6 (capitol)
Food: 12/12 - Stagnant (mouseover: 24/32)
Prod: 8P (which will finish my Archer in 1 turn)
Health: 10>6
Happy: 6>6
- I have this city set to stagnant growth so that I don't exceed my happiness. All of the little doodads in the lower right near the worldmap are turned off.
- I have 6 tiles being worked and 1 citizen specialist.

Osaka: 5
Food: 0 - blank food bar (mouseover: 5/30)
Prod: 8F+4P = 12 (finishing my Settler in 4 turns)
Health: 9>6
Happy: 5>5
- Changing which tiles are worked just changes the amount being applied to production.
- I need to stop this city from growing until I get something that makes happy faces.

Tokyo: 2
Food: 0 - blank food bar (mouseover: 15/24)
Prod: 5P = 5 (finishing my Worker in 5 turns)
Health: 6>3
Happy: 5>2
- This city has room to grow still.

Now for my questions:

1) Why is my food bar blank / empty / zero?

Answer: Because I'm building workers and settlers in those cities!

(I had the epiphany while writing up this post. What I wish is that the food bar would explain *why* it isn't showing anything while I'm creating a worker/settler. The manual and the help screens didn't do the job of connecting those two concepts together, at least from the food bar end of the question.)

2) If I don't have anything to add happy faces to my cities, I should stop them from growing?

 

[Roland Ehnström]

EDIT: Never mind.

-- Roland

 

[Mujadaddy]

Glad you figured out the settler/worker thing

As far as Question #2---- You'll find that almost no one below will agree with me, but I simply do not care how unhappy my cities get as long as there is more population!! I can trade for and for Health ... I can tech-up and build improvements for both... but I have to WAIT for population... In the WORST case, say I have 15 pop, but 5 unhappy people in the Classical era, I just "Slave away" my "problem"

 

[eotinb]

Also, Hereditary Rule allows you unlimited happiness (well, limited only by the number of troops you can afford to use as military police).

 

[abj9562]

uhmmm, perhaps the fact that the color of the food bar shows up in the production bar is a clue

 

[Good Omens]

2) If I don't have anything to add happy faces to my cities, I should stop them from growing?

There seems to be alot of debate about this. Personally, I'm trying to get in the habit of taking a city to even food (i.e. no growth) when it's about to go unhappy, and making a specialist or two with population no longer working on the land. At least then the people are contributing. Of course, it depends on the situation.

 

[Astax]

I stop my cities from growing all the time. You can try to turn on avoid growth but duno how well it works. I preffer to manually balance my cities. Problem with free growing cities is they dont have as much production as cities you stop from growing by shifting to less food more hammer tiles.