The Food Problem

[allypower]

This is one of the major annoying problem - well minor but if they keep occuring then it becomes major!

This problem concerns the food vs. population growth and it has happened in all previous Civs 1-4.

Here is an example:

My city has size 23
It's total food capacity: 47

which means my city is still growing (47-2 x 23 = 1), good.

Well when my city size grows to 24, well, my city is starving! Eventually it will go down to 23 and up back to 24 and keeps going. It's annoying!

I would like to see my city stay at either 23 or 24 with "stagnant growth" i.e., not growing at all at this point.


A possible fix

If you change the rule to make it so that each citizen only requires 1 food and then this is no longer a problem but you have a massive inflation of population everywhere.

Otherwise

In civ 1-3 I don't think there are other way to avoid this problem.

In Civ 4, you can fix this problem by adding an extra great merchant (i think) to the city hence your food capacity is now 48 and the city stops growing but not dying either. But you have fix this manually.

So my question is in Civ 5 are we going to run into this problem again. If yes is there an automatic mechanism within the game to fix this or we have to fix each city manually like in Civ 4.

Sorry if this sounds like OCD but this problem is really annoying.

 

[PawelS]

There is a social policy that makes specialists consume 1 food.

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

Toggle the avoid growth button !

 

[Polobo]

1) Rework the improvements to increase production and decrease food.
2) Toggle the "Avoid Growth" Option

Both these work in 4 and 5.

 

[PawelS]

Toggling the Avoid Growth button may have bad consequences if you forget to toggle it back when you have more food.

 

[bhavv]

There is a social policy that makes specialists consume 1 food.

Why is that any good?

Just take citizens off food tile and put them on production.

 

[allypower]

Thanks for the answer. This is great.

 

[Polobo]

Toggling the Avoid Growth button may have bad consequences if you forget to toggle it back when you have more food.

Agreed; annoying in 4 since each city had its own limits but in 5 with empire-wide happy you will probably want to eventually say that cities A,B,C are only to be a certain size anyway and let the added population fill up those cities that will benefit more due to buildings and such.

With 30+ tiles and global happy any city should be able to grow at any time (if any of them can grow). If you have an odd amount of food just farm another tile for 3 food and increase the population a couple.