n00b question - Why are cities not growing?

Norogoth

Chieftain
Joined
Jun 11, 2012
Messages
2
I am going crazy! My population of my largest city has almost stagnated around 12 while my opponents cities are growing to 16 and beyond! I have farms surrounding all the adjacent tiles of my cities whereas my opponents cities have only a few farms. I've built all the farms I can and yet it's not growing! I already have a granary (Though I find the precise function of a granary very confusing).

WHY WON'T MY CITIES GROW!!?!?!?!:mad:

Thank you for your help.
 
The game tells you that you need an aqueduct for growing beyond size 8 and a sewer for growing beyond size 12 when your food box is about to be emptied.
 
There's so much to this game, it's easy to overlook little things like the need for sewer systems to get over size 12. You've come to the right place for help, here you get more than you asked for!

Your cities try to grow when their food box is full at the beginning of your turn. If the city is at least size 8 and doesn't have an aqueduct, or size 12 and doesn't have both aqueduct and sewer system, it won't succeed in growing, but it will empty the city's food box and you just lose all that food.

Granaries are less complicated than they seem. When your city tries to grow, a granary saves half the food in your food box; a 50% head start toward growing again. It's a very helpful boost for new cities, but there are problems. Granaries are very expensive to build, whether you're spending gold or shields, and they cost 1 gold per turn to maintain. That's not such a high price but it's usually all a small city produces. You're almost always better off building the Pyramids, which cost as much as 4 granaries and give the same effect to all your cities, with no upkeep at all.

And the bonus advanced tip: aqueducts, sewer systems, and granaries don't help you at all if your cities aren't growing. You need some of these improvements to reach that size, but once you get there, you can sell them. No more maintenance cost, and a quick bit of cash to buy more caravans.
 
Another bit of advice: If you don't have the Pyramids, find out who does, and which city it's in. Then conquer that city (don't destroy it completely). You'll get the Pyramids and as long as you control the city that has them, you won't need to build Granaries. You should also, by now, have some good trade routes going on, and a good road/railroad system linking your cities.
 
Another way to grow fast, and I recommend that you learn it, is to "celebrate". Basically what you do is ofcorse first make sure you have aqueducts and sewer systems as needed and lot's of food surplus. Then you make sure your'e in republic or democracy and you raise luxeries to a level where all the cities you want to grow celebrate "we love the x day". It will give you an amazingly fast growth in population. Every turn a city celebrates it will grow if it can.
 
I didn't have you down as a warmongering lady, Valka.
 
My former usertitle was "Warlady." ;)

I play Civ rather aggressively. I tried being nice... once. It was too boring. So I went back to killing, backstabbing, and using Diplomats/Spies to steal as much tech as I could. :viking:
 
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