Boost hellenic cities

In my current Epeirote campaign, I at first had trouble with expanding my 2 cities on the Balkan to the 2,000 mark. Nothing I or any human player can't work around, though.
Taras is doing well btw, around 9,000 inhabitants in 261 BC and easily the biggest city in my kingdom.

But when I conquered Pella and latter Demetrius, I noticed they had only a couple of hundred of inhabitants. Probably that's because my basileus, Pyrhus, crushed stack after stack of those Macedonian mongrels and since the AI gets lots of cash they'd simply train some more, draining their cities of manpower.

When I looked south, Athens and Sparta did have a couple of thousend inhabitants (don't remember exactly how much), but that's not exactly much either (compare to Rome wich was stable around 15,000 inhabitants)
I'm playing on large settings, so if you're playing on huge it will be even worse :dizzy2:

I don't know if this had already came to your attention, so I mention it now because this probably hurts the AI a lot.

It does hurt the AI, but that part of the brain which tells you if you are in pain or not is missing, so the AI doesn't notice and just carries on doing it.

I believe something is in place now to stop the depopulating of cities at this rate. It happens elsewhere (Armenia) too.

I play on Huge, so the repopulation script only does half the work. However, it all seems to work fine for me, in fact the AI tends to have a higher population in their cities than I do...

I found Makedonian cities to be depopulated too (I'd been playing as Greece, just barely holding on against the Makedonian onslaught). I finally conquered those cities when the Makedonian stacks simply stopped pouring in. I suppose it's possible that they depopulated their cities, but then maybe the cities were also being exterminated back and forth in a war with, maybe, Pyrrhus. But it doesn't seem to happen with everyone (for instance, Rome and Egypt seem to have plenty of men to throw around).

As Epieros I cazn confirm that the Greek cities have tiny populations. One Macedonian town I conquered had a mere 400 people in. Taras on the other hand has a huge pop.

Whacky, I completely destroyed Macedon in the first couple of turns.

I pulled my leader back from Crete, drained Athens and Sparta of all units, besieged Corinth. Wiped it out, advanced the next turn to Demitros? Demi, whatever. Took that - then rolled back and took the island off the coast of Athens (I'm good with names, can you tell?).

Then waited until my finances were in the green and carried on. Macedon had no idea what was going on.

Oh yeah, playing as Koinky Hellschicken or whatever.