Stagnant City Problems

[Krunchyman]

I've been playing a game on King difficulty which has grown increasingly frustrating due to lack of growth in my cities. Despite my best efforts of terraforming and constructing food-giving buildings, nearly all but a few of my 15 cities are stagnant. The result is majorly hampered production along with a decline in science and the ability to produce units. I'm in the renaissance era and my best city produces a musketeer in 10 turns. Do I need to take control of my workers and reconstruct the terrain, building more farms to produce more food? It seems like growth is dependant on improvements and every time I build something that will give "+2 food", the city grows a bit and becomes stagnant once again. The terrain my civ inhabits is difficult too - a lot of hills and plains. The world is a huge pangaea map aged at 5 billion years. I'm playing French.

The AI seems to follow patterns as well. I have classed the civs into two groups: There are the ones with runaway expansion, large armies and 15 to 25 cities. Persia, Russia and Mongolia are the three ones I can think of. Then there are the weak civs with 2-3 cities that I hypothesize might have been cut off by the large civs early in the game. Rome and China are two of these.

 

[Halcyan2]

What is your happiness level? You get growth penalties when you are at negative happiness and very severe penalties at -10 or less. You mentioned you have 15 cities, which is quite a lot. It makes me think that unhappiness may be a major reason.

(In addition to constructing food buildings and a few key wonders and farming lots of tiles, you can also ally with Maritime City States or choose certain religious beliefs if you want to improve your growth rate).

 

[Krunchyman]

What is your happiness level? You get growth penalties when you are at negative happiness and very severe penalties at -10 or less. You mentioned you have 15 cities, which is quite a lot. It makes me think that unhappiness may be a major reason.

(In addition to constructing food buildings and a few key wonders and farming lots of tiles, you can also ally with Maritime City States or choose certain religious beliefs if you want to improve your growth rate).

My happiness strangely stays around 0 or -1, despite my regular construction of happiness-providing buildings and my military caste social policy.

 

[Pikamander2]

My happiness strangely stays around 0 or -1, despite my regular construction of happiness-providing buildings and my military caste social policy.

Any happiness below zero hampers your growth. Each city contributes 3 unhappiness, and each population contributes 1. If your happiness reaches zero, then you should "avoid growth" in each city until you can get more luxuries or happiness buildings.

 

[mintcandy]

I've been playing a game on King difficulty which has grown increasingly frustrating due to lack of growth in my cities. Despite my best efforts of terraforming and constructing food-giving buildings, nearly all but a few of my 15 cities are stagnant.

Umm...yeah. 15 cities by the Renaissance Age?

It's been awhile since I had that many cities under my own control in that era.

There are several issues you will have with increasing upward population growth.

Typically, the initial constraint on upward population growth is Happiness, not food, because food production drops way off if your happiness dips below 0.

There are three major factors that will increase happiness.

1. Luxury resources
2. Social Policies that increase happiness
3. Buildings and Wonders that increase happiness

Like the guy above me said, new cities have a base unhappiness rating (on King, it's -3...I think). Luxuries provide +4 happiness.

Thus, if you settle new cities that don't have access to new luxuries, then it's already a net loss to happiness. It's just not worth settling new cities that don't have access to new luxuries unless your happiness is above ten.

Having 15 cities by the Renaissance is SERIOUSLY going to cut into how many Social Policies you can acquire, some of which add SERIOUS amounts of happiness to an empire that has lots of cities. For example, Military Caste (Honor) and Meritocracy (Liberty) combined will provide +2 happiness PER city for the paltry cost of connecting each city to the capital AND garrisoning each city with a military unit (even cheaply produced units like Warriors and Scouts, hint hint).

My best suggestion: in your next game, try halving the amount of cities that you build. It will allow you to acquire happiness generating Social Policies at a much quicker rate, and reduce the amount of unhappiness you get from spamming new cities all over the place.

I know it's tempting to spam cities with the French because of the +1 culture per city that they get, but new cities increase the cost of Social Policies far more than the automatic +1 culture per city the player gets from the French Unique Ability.

The AI seems to follow patterns as well. I have classed the civs into two groups: There are the ones with runaway expansion, large armies and 15 to 25 cities. Persia, Russia and Mongolia are the three ones I can think of. Then there are the weak civs with 2-3 cities that I hypothesize might have been cut off by the large civs early in the game. Rome and China are two of these.

....yeah.

Don't follow the AI's pattern of city spam, because the AI doesn't have the same happiness limitations that the players do.

Hope this helps.

 

[Browd]

Do I need to take control of my workers and reconstruct the terrain, building more farms to produce more food? It seems like growth is dependant on improvements and every time I build something that will give "+2 food", the city grows a bit and becomes stagnant once again. The terrain my civ inhabits is difficult too - a lot of hills and plains.

You can't rely on granary and water mill to get you there. In addition to happiness management, you need to take control of what tile improvements your workers are focusing on (automating workers is almost never a good idea). It sounds like you need to prioritize farms and other food-generating improvements (e.g., putting farms on riverside hills for food with 2 hammers of production -- after Civil Service, that tile becomes self-sustaining). Also, you need to make sure that you are managing the tiles actually worked by your citizens, to get the right balance of food and production (rely less on default focus and more on manually shifting between food focus and production focus, and get comfortable with locking your citizens into working food tiles).

 

[Tachii]

If you have 15 cities you don't really need growth in every city. You just need enough food to produce the university and utilize 2 citizens as scientists in each city. with some of your high-production cities churning out military units for conquer/defense and for wonders.

And like others said, happiness is often an issue to large number of cities. When you go wide you have to accept your cities will stagnate (regardless if you have happiness or not) and that you won't be getting many social policies (which in turn gets you more happiness). The point instead is to make them grow quickly in the early stages and give them enough to support specialized slots for whatever victory you're going for.

 

[wloff]

You can think of happiness pretty much like this:

Each Population takes one happiness. If you run out of Happiness, your cities basically stop growing.

If you have 20 total happiness, you can either have two size 10 cities, or ten size 2 cities, or something in between (roughly).

You can either have a lot of small cities ("wide" strategy) or just a couple of huge cities ("tall" strategy), not both.

 

[ifinnem]

Before you grow you need enough happiness

To grow effectively you need
excess food - granaries, farms, HG etc
growth boosters - beliefs, wonders, WLKD to increase the effectiveness of the raw food surplus
growth threshold reducers - aqueduct & med lab to reduce the amount of food for each pop growth

The biggest keys (apart from enough food excess) imho are aqueducts and WLKD as often as possible

On levels below Immortal TOA is doable and helps a lot as it boosts all food not just excess food

 

[Tachii]

And WLKD is...

 

[Browd]

WLKD is "We Love the King Day". When you connect a new luxury one of your cities desires, it enjoys a growth boost (I think 15%) for a number of turns. You get a notice when a city first wants the luxury and you can see the current demand just below the city name in the city view screen.

One technique to trigger WLKDs is to trade away one of your single luxuries (say you only have one cotton) for another civ's luxury that is desired by one of your cities (say, silk). Your happiness remains unchanged, but your acquisition of silk triggers the WLKD benefit in that city. During the 30 turns of that cotton-for-silk trade, one of your other cities will probably demand that you connect cotton. You can either trade another lux for some other civ's spare cotton as soon as that notice pops up or, if you don't see another civ that has spare cotton (the AI seems to trade off spares for cash at lightening speed), you can, when your original trade comes up for renewal, let the trade expire. You reacquire cotton for one turn, triggering WLKD, and then you can trade the cotton again.

This also works when CSs have posted a quest for a specific luxury or resource (I see this most often when I first research a new resource, like iron, but haven't mined any or, even worse, don't have any in my culture borders -- I just trade for one item of that resource and, voila, quest fulfilled). All the better when these quests are for maritime CSs, since fulfilling that quest results in a food boost (in your capital for friend status and in all of your cities for ally).

 

[chazzycat]

keeping 15 cities happy & growing is not the easiest thing. You really have to focus on happiness if you expand that much. Most likely if there's not a lot of unique luxes, it wasn't a great idea in the first place.

That being said, the easiest way to get over it is definitely religion. You can get up to +6 happiness PER CITY with the right beliefs. It's very powerful. So if you expand a lot, build some shrines, and maybe even take piety.