Speeding up growth

[Delphi456]

I conquered a city that had 1 irrigated grassland and realized the nearly 50% increase in growth (post Despotism). It got me thinking about the benefit of irrigating 1 grassland tile in my other towns. After ~10 turns the increased pop would outweight the temporary 1-shield loss. Has anyone experiemented with this concept?

 

[Bartleby]

In core towns, I'd be balancing growth and production. Often I'd be speeding growth in low-food towns by adding workers. Outside the core, so long as the towns are growing faster than they're producing workers I'm not really bothered.

 

[da3dalus]

I tend to mine most of the tiles in my city radius and leave the worker/settler creation to cities on rivers/coasts with wheat/cows/game in their radii.

Someone on this forum made the point, sorry can't remember who it was, that growth isn't important in each city because once that city has reached its maximum growth, any irrigated tiles are being wasted. Better to focus on production, and like Bartleby just said you can always send workers to join slow growing cities.

 

[Spoonwood]

In general, I'd think it'd actually work out better to have one grassland tile irrigated as opposed to everything mined, but it'll depend on the avaible terrain. Desired victory condition also should get taken into account.

 

[Lord Emsworth]

I conquered a city that had 1 irrigated grassland and realized the nearly 50% increase in growth (post Despotism). It got me thinking about the benefit of irrigating 1 grassland tile in my other towns. After ~10 turns the increased pop would outweight the temporary 1-shield loss. Has anyone experiemented with this concept?

Yes, of course. Placing a few irrigations is much cheaper than building granaries.

 

[Daeron]

If there is the opportunity, I actually just keep a settlerfactory or worker pump running to grow those cities quickly to their max size. The growth from 7 to 12 without granaries is so slow, compared to just merging workers and settlers.

When you've left despotism, it should be easy to find a city for that purpose that wouldn't be wasted as a pump.

 

[Optional]

When you're still waiting for your Golden Age, the usual way to improve grassland is to have bonus grassland irrigated, and ordinary grassland mined, so that both types will benefit from the extra shield in a Golden Age.

 

[Rodrig0]

I try to build a worker factory very soon, to help my cities grow. Later, when I start conquering city, turn many of them into worker factories. The AI tends to irrigate a lot, so instead of mining terrain for no use, due to corruption, I use those cities to help my other, most productive cities grow.