Queuing units *might* affect population growth

[RedKnight]

This has probably been pointed out before, but I just did a little test of whether queuing units affects population growth.

Which is to say, if you queued up 10 peasants (which drops your city population by 600 immediately, if unit size is 60 men), will this differ from individually making 1 peasant unit for the next 10 turns? What will your final population be in each case?

In my little test case, carried out for 4 turns, I found that surprisingly I had MORE people in the city if I queued them, vs. doing them individually. The reason being - that queuing these 4 peasants reduced population enough to have caused growth rate to go from 1.0% to 1.5%!

I used a test city savegame which had 7500 people to start with. Growth rates actually bounced around some in both cases, but in the end the queued city had 7592 people, whereas the unqueued city had 7559. The queued city stayed at 1.5% the whole time whereas the unqueud city was 1.5% the first two turns, then went to 1.0%.

So, counter to one's first thought, the act of queuing units might (or might not) actually result on more population in the long run. It might have been unusual that I was right at a boundary that caused the city growth to increase. In any event, I would think that the way to tell is, if you see your growth rate go up when you queue your units.

This probably won't hold for fairly small populations though (a few thousand or less), unless the growth rate shot up incredibly (which I doubt it could). It probably also depends on the number of men in the unit you want.

[Bhruic]

Hmm, that would mean that you could actually 'exploit' growth in your smaller cities. Queue up enough units to increase the growth rate by as large an amount as possible. Then, disband all the units at once, and they get added back to the city.

Could be too much micromanagement to be useful in general, but worth looking into.

Bh

[Slaists]

Well, growth rate is exponential. Let's take a hypothetical example: 1000 population city. If queuing up 10 units of peasants take the population down to 400, 1% growth in that city will be only 4 people that year. Whereas the same 1% would have yielded 10 in the 1000 population city. Even if the game compensates by adding another % to the growth: 2% growth would yield 8 people increase rather than 10 with 1% growth and 1000 population. My point: by queuing up peasant units you should still be able to effectively slow down growth.

[RedKnight]

Slaist is undoubtedly right, Bhruic - I truly doubt it can work for smaller cities. Still if you're unsure (I have some HUGE growth percents in small exterminated cities), it just takes a little math to see if it would work - what's the percent growth increase (if any) when queuing vs. not queueing? How big is your unit? Use a calculator and see where you'll be in X turns with the higher rate vs. the lower.

That makes perfect sense, Bhruic - With small cities, it's clear that it would slow the growth. The population has to be large enough relative to the size of the unit made, that a change in percent growth makes up for some of the population being locked up in the queue.

In my case, I was locking up 60 people per peasant, 1% of which is 0.6 people (ok actually 1% of my 4 test units was 2.4 people) - that's the downside - but the additional 0.5% on top of 7500 was adding 37 extra people a turn. So I wound up with more people. Soon, though, it grew past the point where queuing could bump up the growth rate - I guess you can say it moves you past this growth edge even faster! So catch it while you can - IF you want to micromanage that much.

It seems like this is something that can only be exploited in large cities IF you find can find an "edge" to work with, and IF you want to micromanage - and IF you want growth to be larger. But in large cities, people usually don't want extra growth, no? To prevent extra growth from happening, you would not want to queue up if it causes the growth rate to increase.

All in all though we're talking fairly small percents. So somebody'd have to be a real micromanager to want to work with this.

Just the same, it was a surprise to see queuing result in a long-term increase! Not what I expected.

[Bhruic]

True, I forgot to take the decrease in overall population into consideration for the percentages.

Bh