Settlement Growth Rates

Settlements grow at an incredible rate in EB.74. In my Romani campaign, currently at 204 BC nearly every settlement is a large/huge city, and all barbarian settlements are cities. This is a big ridiculous when you have to fight Egyptian metropolises with gigantic walls in the middle of the desert. It also makes it very difficult to keep order in newly conquered settlements due to the squalor rates.

Perhaps population growth could be slowed down by giving the earliest form of Governor's Villa or whatever it is (the buildings that upgrade the settlement level from Town to Large Town etc.) a population growth bonus of -1% or so. Perhpas this could also be raised slightly for higher levels of these buildings. This should help to tackle the problem, if it is seen as a problem. Any views on this idea?

I've never been able to get negative bonuses to work, though I am not a very good mod'er. Though the base faming levels could be changed. I also like the idea of a low base farming level and then a bonus in the 'palace' building that is less with each town upgrade (also this could be used to not give the rebels the same bonus to prevent town growth explosions of independant towns). I am also a fan of restricting town size for certain places, though most people (including the EB team) don't like this idea.

That is a really good idea.

We actually drastically slashed base farm rates once already, although we may do so again in the future depending on other devlopments.

There's a few buildings in EB that already give negative population growth modifiers. The Colony thingamabob and a fair few governements come to mind. Shamelessly copying the proper syntax from those ought to be pretty easy.

I set the base fertility everywhere except Alexandria and Carthage to be zero. (I do that with every mod I play now.) It makes it feel much more realistic.

I haven't done it with EB yet, as the building code is more complicated than other mods, but I normally make changes to restrict farm upgrades etc in desert/steppe/wilderness regions for the same reason.

The romans have no problem with base fertility set so low but other factions with different building options might so it would require some testing.

(Imo the vanilla game is designed around having huge growth rates so the AI can spam units without depopulating their cities. So for this system to work it does need a script like EB's that adds pop back to AI factions when they recruit units.)