Can't take it anymore

[Quirinus]

Putting a high influence governor with the "Poor Farmer" trait (easily obtainable by not building farms) helps a great deal, as it allows you to keep your taxes at "Very High" and reducing the pop. growth.

A quick way to remedy this is to open the console (~ key) and type: add_population [settlement name] -[number to reduce]. For example, if Patavium has about 50000 people, and you want it lower, type add_population Patavium -20000 in the console.

Or you can do what I did by giving governor buildings and walls law bonuses. For example, a 5% bonus on the tier 2 governor building, and with an increase of 5% every tier. And to the last tier ("imperial palace") I added a pop. growth penalty of 1% to reduce the effects of runaway pop. growth. For the walls I had 5% for the wooden ones, 15% for stone walls, and a 5% increase on the effect every tier (so epic stone walls would have 25% law bonus). You could also consider experimenting with giving highways a slight law bonus (5%?) as well as giving the academy line of buildings similarly-incremental law bonuses (5%, 10%, 15%).

The above does makes the game rather easy to manage on the empire management front, especially later on, but I like to roleplay a benevolent tyrant, and having to exterminate one of my core cities every few turns is really an immersion breaker.


EDIT: Ooops, saw your post, khaos83_2000. Ah well. >.<