Sudden Population Vanish

[Bearcat44]

I am playing Civ 4 BtS on Warlord difficulty. Something strange is happening each time I play. Late in the game, when I have been winning, suddenly my economy stagnates and it becomes hard to do anything. I keep on as usual, then, with no announcement from the game, suddenly many if not all of my cities lose a HUGE amount of population, in one turn!

What makes population go DOWN? I am talking drastic loss, going from a size 16 to a size eight instantly, and this is happening to at least two thirds of all my cities!

This seems like it must be a bug, because the game does not announce any disaster that might account for this.

Update: The little circles with numbers in them next to my cities that show the population number are changing color. I don't know what any of the colors mean, how they change, or what to do about it. This is something that really sucks intensely about Civ 4----you can't really look up stuff like this, the nuts and bolts mechanics of the game. You just have to guess.

Meanwhile, for some strange reason, as my economy slows down, more and more cities are showing the little faces. One is green for sickness, one is red for unhappiness. No matter what I do, these won't go away. The red ones seem to spread really fast. No change in civics seems to help. No change in spending helps.

Then, about one turn later, a HUGE cut in population, in almost all the cities. This really pisses me off, because before this weird horsehocky started going on, I was winning the game!

 

[Archon_Wing]

Chances are, you are suffering from emancipation unhappiness. The more Civs that adopt emancipation, the more unhappier civs without emancipation become. Usually what happens is that the AIs will all start adopting it over time. Unhappy citizens do not work, and thus enough of it makes you starve.

You can tell iin the city screen by mousing over the red faces on top. One of the reasons is "We demand Emancipation!"

Solutions include trading for happiness resources, building Colosseum and theaters (requires you to prop the culture slider for the later, which kinda sucks). and switching to emancipation.

 

[ztrapon]

This is something that really sucks intensely about Civ 4----you can't really look up stuff like this, the nuts and bolts mechanics of the game. You just have to guess.

What? Civ 4 may be a little complicated, but literally every mechanic in the entire game is available in plain sight, and modifiable.

If you hover over the Happiness or Health gauges (on the right side of Production and Growth bars) in the city-view, you can see what is causing what.

 

[elitetroops]

I would also recommend checking the Game Concepts pages in Civilopedia. There you can look up the basic concepts, like food and why cities starve. No need to guess.

 

[Windsor]

I would also make sure that you don't have Production Automation (button on lower right corner in the city screen) turned on. If that is turned on the city will automatically whip if you're in slavery. That would explain why you lost so many population points.

And as Archon_Wing says, check for emancipation unhappiness. Civ4 is NOT a game where you can ignore managing your cities from the city screen.

 

[Bearcat44]

I'm playing Civ4 BtS, Warlord difficulty. Im finding that late in the game, something drastic is happening to my population! Suddenly, like in one turn, population drops from about 24 in my capital down to only 8! This is happening all over my nation.

Before this happened, two things: first, my borders started shrinking suddenly, for no evident reason. Increasing the culture slider did NOTHING to change this!

Second, my two enemies Suddenly overnight in one turn RACED ahead of me in points, by like 200 each, in ONE turn! No idea what happened, as I had been nicely winning for decades before that.

 

[ztrapon]

No idea but you could maybe try some of the responses in this thread.

 

[Bearcat44]

Chances are, you are suffering from emancipation unhappiness. The more Civs that adopt emancipation, the more unhappier civs without emancipation become. Usually what happens is that the AIs will all start adopting it over time. Unhappy citizens do not work, and thus enough of it makes you starve.

You can tell iin the city screen by mousing over the red faces on top. One of the reasons is "We demand Emancipation!"

Solutions include trading for happiness resources, building Colosseum and theaters (requires you to prop the culture slider for the later, which kinda sucks). and switching to emancipation.

I tried rushing emancipation in a couple of games, and that seems to have helped. However, Im now playing a game where I've got Democracy and Emancipation and Free Speech,
yet AGAIN I'm seeing everything fall apart, in almost instantly!

First, borders suddenly erode. I build theaters, Colosseum, universities. NOTHING pushes the borders back! What the hell!
You do all the right things in this game, and NOTHING WORKS! You can't trade for happiness resources because all of the enemies are MASSIVE a ssholes! They won't trade for anything you need, and if they will trade, it's always a really really really bad deal for you, giving something good for something worthless.

Next, suddenly all opponents are doing WILDLY better, like 100 to 300 points better. Before this I was winning the game by a huge margin for the whole game!

Next, suddenly at least half my cities lose, in ONE turn, at least two thirds of population! I was struggling, my economy was strong, my army was massive, and suddenly, overnight
population just VANISHES. I'm talking rage that almost made me smash the computer with the hammer from my tool kit.



I despise looking at the city control screen. I don't like it, I don't understand it, I don't want to deal with it. I don't know how to create specialist, or why to make them, or when.

I've looked, and NOWHERE is there an explanation of WHY AND HOW the colors of the little population number circles changes.

This game SCREAMS out for an hours-long interactive tutorial.

I hate hate hate the city control screen, but out of desperation have looked. The little red unhappy face says, as usual, that the jerks don't like being too crowded. Well, I've never seen anythign in the game except slavery that will reduce population, and the whole map is filled, so you can't build settlers any more. The rest of the red face explanation is, "The whole world thinks you are a villian!"

Well WTF !!!!!!!!!! I have never started a war. I've fought defensively like crazy. I've stolen tech, because the jerks won't accept any trades. I built the manhattan project but never launced any nukes. What makes ME the bad guy suddenly?

Moderator Action: Please do not use text that evades the autocensor. Corrected for you. leif
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[elitetroops]

You do all the right things in this game

...

I despise looking at the city control screen. I don't like it, I don't understand it, I don't want to deal with it. I don't know how to create specialist, or why to make them, or when.

If you do not know how to use the city control screen, then you are most certainly not doing everything right...

"The whole world thinks you are a villain" is because you have defied UN or AP resolutions. This seems to be the main reason to your problems. Don't defy the resolutions when they come up, figure out a better way to deal with them. Or if it really bugs you, turn of diplomatic victory and nobody can build them.

 

[lindsay40k]

If your borders are being pushed back, your neighbour might be going for a Culture win. This will mean they've built their culture multiplying buildings - cathedrals, broadcast towers, certain wonders - and they've also turned their Culture slider up, converting their commerce (as in coins on the map, not your surplus gold per turn) into culture and multiplying it through the above buildings. They may also have the Sushi and Jewels corporations and Sistine Chapel producing even more raw culture. In this situation, the solution is not to try to out-culture them to keep your land, it's a military invasion to force back their borders (and you will face stiff resistance from the population if not the army) and prevent them getting three cities up to Legendary Culture level.

There is a certain amount of micromanaging that is needed to keep your cities... stable. You don't need to dip into the intricacies of which specialists to use (though working on this will yield big rewards), but you do need to come in now and again and overrule the city governer and make sure that, if your happiness is the same as your unhappiness, you are not making a food surplus.

Converting farms to cottages and windmills to mines is the simplest method, but you'll sometimes find you even need to tell miners to become specialists to avoid overpopulation. Adopting State Property makes your Workshop and Water Mill tiles produce more food, so that might also contribute to an unmanageably high population.

The Sushi and Cereal corporations can also add a lot of food to a city - if your neighbour is an aggressive capitalist, you may need to raise the red flag or ban foreign corporations with Mercantilism to stop them drowning your cities with refined carbs.

The UN and Apostolic Palace can be very dangerous organisations to defy, if you are treading water with your happiness and storm out of negotiations then you could find yourself in a terrible situation until you return to the table and endorse a successful resolution.


And, sometimes, the governer will make an absolute mess of things. If a city has a riot (most usually because you recently took it from another player and they still have cities nearby) then when order is restored everyone will be playing silly buggers and working as specialists whilst the fields are unattended. It's an annoying bug, and one that definitely puts many people off trying to get the hang of city management. Also, if you already have some specialists and try to reallocate them, trying to add a scientist might reallocate an engineer instead of the miner you wanted to recall. If you click on the map tiles in the city screen to dismiss miners, farmers and so on, they'll become unemployed, and be the first priority for recruitment when you click the 'give me another merchant/etc' button.

 

[s.bernbaum]

Did you allow your income to become negative? If your research percentage drops to zero and your income is negative, your population will drop to decrease city maintenance. If this is what happened, then the other things that you mention will happen as a result of decreased population. I would suggest that you post a save game from the turn before it happened so people can look at what is going on and try to figure it out. If you did not save a game at that point, look in the autosave folder and post the last autosave from before the event.

 

[lymond]

Civ IV is a deep strategy game. While you can play it to some degree casually, it does require a bit more meticulous perusal of the info the game provides to understand your situation. You have received generous and ample advice here. Duplicate threads are not necessary. If you are unwilling to learn the game or take a deeper dive into the UI in order to understand why things are happening as they are, then this might not be the game for you.

Regardless, all of us can help you better if you post of the save showing the situation you are encountering. At least let us look at the information for you.

This game does take time to learn, but you can learn fast by listening to the experienced players here.

 

[leif erikson]

Moderator Action: Merged "Off the Cliff" with this thread as they are the same topic. Please do not start multiple threads on the same topic.

 

[Tatran]

Post some screenshots and/or savegames to see what's going on in your games.

Here's an example of 35 unhappiness because of defying resolutions :

 

[Archon_Wing]

If you do not know how to use the city control screen, then you are most certainly not doing everything right...

"The whole world thinks you are a villain" is because you have defied UN or AP resolutions. This seems to be the main reason to your problems. Don't defy the resolutions when they come up, figure out a better way to deal with them. Or if it really bugs you, turn of diplomatic victory and nobody can build them.

I have to agree. I can never say I do everything right. In fact I do a lot of stuff wrong but noble and below you should able to win easily without looking at the city screen, besides maybe assigning scientists early on. Heck, I don't micro most of the time on higher levels either past bcs.

If the ais are ahead on that difficulty, it is generally a factor of poor city settling working unimproved tiles along with a lack of trading.

Best thing to post saves of the first 100 turns. Problems usually start there.

That being said this game's way of displaying info leaves much to be desired. You would expect the game to list out the effects of defying but I guess not.

Also keel in mind many if us run some kind of UI mod The vanilla ui, as typical of Firaxis, is terrible.

 

[ArchGhost]

The little circles with numbers in them next to my cities that show the population number are changing color. I don't know what any of the colors mean, how they change, or what to do about it.

Green means the city is working enough food to grow eventually. Red means it will shrink. White means stagnant. It's so you can glance over your empire and get a general standing of the cities' growth status in an instant without having to look at each of them.

Honestly, despite your theatrics, that's something you should have known after your first couple games-- if you didn't avoid the city management screen, which is beyond counter-intuitive for such a complex game. Even the quick city HUD (the faces by the growth/production bar) are telling you they are unhappy and unhealthy, but you can't figure out why they shrink?

Enough tongue lashing, time to try to help you.

As a general answer to the cities shrinking quickly thing: major population losses in are most often attributed to sudden drops in happiness. Either from Emancipation, defying resolutions late game, over-drafting/whipping, or quite commonly, losing access to luxuries through trade deals or map control. Shaving even a handful of happy faces can cause a couple pop points to fall off; a major hit may see immediate starvation. Since you seem to be having trouble even trading resources around, it's most likely Emancipation switches from the AI or losing cultural control of resources on the map near border areas.

You could also be having health issues, but those tend to be less severely pronounced, as losing a citizen to unhappiness means you lose an entire tile that can yield as opposed to missing 1 food per unhealthiness.

Finally, if you make it to the point of using the State Property civic and are automating your workers/cities for production, they tend to farm and workshop EVERYTHING. This can lead to drastic drops in commerce and most cities will shrink a couple pop as they resettle into their new hammer-rich equilibrium point. But unless you are instructing several cities to build wealth so you can run your slider, or to build research so you don't have to, your research will tank.

Here's something to try: I can't assume whether you're automating cities or not, but CTRL+ Left Click on one of your city bars to select them all. Click the little buttons near the map (underneath DRAFT) that say "Citizen Automation" and "Emphasize Food." Do you see the cities' statuses fluctuate? Citizen automation is pretty bad but most of the time it's better than not managing your cities at all. If it helps out, click it a couple more times with all cities selected and leave it on. "Emphasize Food" will cause any of your cities running that way to try to grow as much as possible and automated workers will put mostly farms around them if you are having them run amok on auto and have the "leave old improvements' option unchecked in options.

 

[Bearcat44]

If you do not know how to use the city control screen, then you are most certainly not doing everything right...

"The whole world thinks you are a villain" is because you have defied UN or AP resolutions. This seems to be the main reason to your problems. Don't defy the resolutions when they come up, figure out a better way to deal with them. Or if it really bugs you, turn of diplomatic victory and nobody can build them.

Thanks, that's good to know. However, it's a CLASSIC example of a way that this game FAILS. I've played this game literally for years, and nowhere did it teach me this concept ahead of time. I had to have a nasty experience, living in ignorance. And NO, looking at the Civilopedia would NOT HAVE HELPED. You look under "Game Concepts" as you told me, and you will see NOTHING there about defying resolutions and getting unhappiness points.

So, really, you're FORCED to race to get the Apopolistic palace and the UN, even if you hate those things, to prevent the rest of the world from screwing with you.
That just STINKS. It should be possible to live in isolation and still win. Look at Ancient China and Ancient Japan. They went for centuries with no outside influence.

I guess you just gotta shut of the Diplomatic Victory option? I may just do that. Currently I'm replaying the same scenario trying to finally beat it.
Warlord, Pangea, Standard size map, only three random opponents, and all victories enabled except Time. It doesn't seem to matter which opponents the AI selects,
they all quickly become aggressive attackers and are pretty much impossible to invade successfully.

You can go to a screen and see simple, plain numbers that show you, for example, your percentage of world population versus the next rival.
But WHERE do you go to SEE A NUMBER RATING to tell you where everyone stands in Diplomatic Victory points? The squiggly-line chart is too vague, and
I have learned to my very bitter regret that the rankings at the bottom right of the main screen are an outright lie, deliberate misleading by the sadistic designers who deserve
to burn in hell for that.

The whole game feels like a game of Three Card Monte. It sucker punches, again and again. I'd go back to Chieftan level, but I can't. That's become so easy
that it's boring. So Im' trapped in the Warlord level, and just can't beat it.

In desperation, I suppose I'll eventually increase map size and go up against only one opponent.

 

[lymond]

wow

 

[Bearcat44]

If your borders are being pushed back, your neighbour might be going for a Culture win. This will mean they've built their culture multiplying buildings - cathedrals, broadcast towers, certain wonders - and they've also turned their Culture slider up, converting their commerce (as in coins on the map, not your surplus gold per turn) into culture and multiplying it through the above buildings. They may also have the Sushi and Jewels corporations and Sistine Chapel producing even more raw culture. In this situation, the solution is not to try to out-culture them to keep your land, it's a military invasion to force back their borders (and you will face stiff resistance from the population if not the army) and prevent them getting three cities up to Legendary Culture level.

There is a certain amount of micromanaging that is needed to keep your cities... stable. You don't need to dip into the intricacies of which specialists to use (though working on this will yield big rewards), but you do need to come in now and again and overrule the city governer and make sure that, if your happiness is the same as your unhappiness, you are not making a food surplus.

Converting farms to cottages and windmills to mines is the simplest method, but you'll sometimes find you even need to tell miners to become specialists to avoid overpopulation. Adopting State Property makes your Workshop and Water Mill tiles produce more food, so that might also contribute to an unmanageably high population.

The Sushi and Cereal corporations can also add a lot of food to a city - if your neighbour is an aggressive capitalist, you may need to raise the red flag or ban foreign corporations with Mercantilism to stop them drowning your cities with refined carbs.

The UN and Apostolic Palace can be very dangerous organisations to defy, if you are treading water with your happiness and storm out of negotiations then you could find yourself in a terrible situation until you return to the table and endorse a successful resolution.


And, sometimes, the governer will make an absolute mess of things. If a city has a riot (most usually because you recently took it from another player and they still have cities nearby) then when order is restored everyone will be playing silly buggers and working as specialists whilst the fields are unattended. It's an annoying bug, and one that definitely puts many people off trying to get the hang of city management. Also, if you already have some specialists and try to reallocate them, trying to add a scientist might reallocate an engineer instead of the miner you wanted to recall. If you click on the map tiles in the city screen to dismiss miners, farmers and so on, they'll become unemployed, and be the first priority for recruitment when you click the 'give me another merchant/etc' button.

Thank you. The information you provide is ALL NEW to me, and should have been included in a long interactive turorial built into the game.
I've played this game literally for years, hundreds of times, and never had the tiniest clue what was going on with population. All I knew was that I tried to
be a nice guy, feed my people with farms, and in return, they end up complaining that it's too crowded. Immensely frustrating.

I hate the idea of having to deal with this on the level you describe, but I'm going to give it a shot.

I thought a governor was something you COULD turn on, but you seem to imply each city has a governor turned on by Default? Ugh. Now I gotta figure out
what all those buttons do.

 

[Bearcat44]

Civ IV is a deep strategy game. While you can play it to some degree casually, it does require a bit more meticulous perusal of the info the game provides to understand your situation. You have received generous and ample advice here. Duplicate threads are not necessary. If you are unwilling to learn the game or take a deeper dive into the UI in order to understand why things are happening as they are, then this might not be the game for you.

Regardless, all of us can help you better if you post of the save showing the situation you are encountering. At least let us look at the information for you.

This game does take time to learn, but you can learn fast by listening to the experienced players here.

Im sure you mean well, but the game FAILS to provide essential information. Look up this thread, and see my post in reply to the suggestion that I look at the
Civilopedia pages on Game Concepts. NOWHERE does it say anything about gaining unhappiness if you defy resolutions.