Starvation in Cities

[Sanguinus]

Hey,

is it possible to implement a flag (e.g. "prevent city growth") that prevents cities from starvation by using any non-standard or non-food focus?
At the moment I have several cities in [v150] where I cannot easily go into production focus without locking every turn more and more workers on food tiles to prevent starvation.

Or: is starvation a critical issue anyway? How fast goes the pop loss? Does starvation generate unhappiness?

 

[Thalassicus]

I agree completely, but the city focus & citizen assignment code is in the game core only Firaxis has access to.

 

[Jaybe]

How fast goes the pop loss? Does starvation generate unhappiness?

Once your food 'basket' (you know, that green thingy in the upper left in the city screen) is empty, you lose 1 pop; and you will continue to lose 1 pop each turn that you continue to have a negative balance.

No, starvation doesn't generate unhappiness. It may contribute to net happiness, of course, depending on social policies/wonders which make pop contribute to less than 1 unhappy. Of course, in VEM the loss of 1 pop will reduce your science by at least 2.

 

[Sanguinus]

@Jaybe
The "food basket" you spoke of, was painted in red and above 100 in every city with starvation as far as I remember.
Does that mean it will take more than 100 turns to lose 1 pop in those cities? That would be irrelevant then, because every normal building doesn't take more than around 20 turns to build (marathon speed). After that, you could switch back to standard or food focus and wait for the next tech step...?

 

[Seek]

Not sure what you mean by "next tech step", but overall your post is correct. I will sometimes starve a city for a few turns while building something important. Aside from figuring it out manually, you can also hover over the food basket or look at the city from the regular map and the red number on the city plate - both will tell you exactly how many turns until you lose a population (like how the green number tells you how many turns until growth). Stay alert, though, because once you lose one pop the city will lose one pop per turn after that because the food basket will remain empty!

 

[Dunkah]

Remember in the original version of CivV they had a notification with a red "-" starving symbol that you were about to lose a point of pop to starvation? So you could see something bad was about to happen and go fix it before it took place!

Now we get a green happy "+" symbol that says you just lost a point of pop. Too late to fix it... sorry bunky! You may have not even noticed it because it blends in with all of the other growth notifications you get that are exactly the same and your city may dwindle to 2 pop before you notice...

This is probably the absolute largest per peave I have with this game! Drives me f'n bannana's!

Can you tell?

 

[Sanguinus]

Not sure what you mean by "next tech step", ...

Aka "next tech researched" to gain new units and/or buildings options.

 

[Seek]

Aka "next tech researched" to gain new units and/or buildings options.

You mean you're running out of things to build? That shouldn't be the case until the modern era - but I've never played marathon.