Population problems

[Antinous]

So I am the averni in Ankyra and I have all greece most of turkey and parts of southern gaul. Now my problem is its 197 and my city populations are really booming now even without and farming or granary upgrades. Cities are staring to revolt. Any solutions that are quick boys?

[Brennus]

2 Possibilities-

1.Find an enemy city which has a plague. Send a spy in and wait until the poor fellow is infected, then have him lodge in your cities. This will bring your population down quickly but at the same time likely decrease your cities moral.

2. Train large armies of levies. Send them off into the wilderness and dispand them, the problem is this may take time, time which you dont have.

What are the causes of your settlments unrest? In my current Casse campaign my Belgic cities became increasingly rebellious due to a high profile Aedui spy that was moving between the territories, just double check your unrest isn't purely the result of overpopulation.

[stratigos vasilios]

Argh, I hate to mention it but...cheat? Use the add_population function.

From experience, sending armies of levies is what I tend to do in my Romani files when I move towards the North-Eastern lands.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Epic Celtic migratory waves are great fun!

Make at least three full stacks, each made up of 1 FM, 2 Leuce Epos, 3 slingers and 14 Levy Spearmen. On Huge unit size each stack is about 4,000 men. Then move them towards where you want to conquer and settle, keeping the stacks VERY close to each other, standing in a triangle shape, so that if one is attacked, the other two will join the battle. Or surround an enemy stack before attacking if you want to start the fight, so that all three of your armies join in.

In the battle you don't need anything very fancy, you can pretty much just pile in and swamp them with hordes of your bare-chested bravos.....your levy spearmen might not be very good fighters one on one, but with a numerical advantage of between 3 and 6 to 1, you can own any enemy army, no matter how good it is. Quantity is its own quality. Hundreds of your men will die bravely but who cares as long as you win?

If you plan to go a long way from your homeland, you might want to make 6, 9, or even 12 such full stacks before beginning your journey, so that at least some of your people make it to the end of the journey.

[FriendlyFire]

Convert them to Type-IV governments and recruit client rulers? In my experience client rulers start out at ~4 influence, and gain rapidly from there. Since you have Greece you should be rolling in money, so you could even recruit several client rulers per city, choose the best one, and then get rid of the rest (my favorite method is to send them off to build a fort in enemy territory and then die heroically in the resulting siege). Once the town is stabilized, the client ruler can spend a decade or two pacifying it (temples, festivals, law structures, ideally growing to the next level for the next governor's building), and then convert it back to a Type II or III for a regular family member to run.

Transfer ancillaries between family members (and client rulers) so that the most rebellious cities are run by governors with the best collection of unrest-reducing ancillaries.

Move your capital closer - you could even abandon southern Gaul entirely, and form a new Gallo-Hellenic empire.

As a short-term fix, fill the recruitment queue with cheap maximum-size units such as skirmishers or levy spearmen. This immediately reduces the population of the city - on huge unit size you can get rid of >2000 population by filling the queue - and can stave off an imminent revolt.

As a last resort, let a city rebel or gift it to an enemy with forced diplomacy, then reconquer it immediately and slaughter the population. This will give you a decade or so of relative peace, more than enough time to build up the pacifying infrastructure.

Also, bear in mind that some cities just have naturally high unrest - Halikarnassos took an age to pacify in my Pontos campaign, despite being relatively close to my capital.

And the advice about checking for enemy spies is very important. For a decade or so I thought Tarsos was also "naturally rebellious", until my own novice spy finally detected a veteran Seleukid spy stirring up trouble.

[Cambyses]

Take a look in your cities and see what is causing the unrest.

If the worst offender is "distance from capital" then move your capital
If its cultural, then booming populations is what you need, as building your own markets, temples and especially governor's buildings has a radical effect on cultural unrest
If its a high amount of generic unrest it could be an enemy spy
Maybe your taxes are too high
If its just massive squalor then you need health buildings

In the short term geting a decent governor in, recruiting lots of large units of troops and filling the build queue with +happiness buildings is probably the answer. Cities can riot but wont rebel if you have enough queued +happiness buildings that predict you a happiness score of 70 or more. Longer term you really need to get to the root cause of the problem though.

In my experience once cultural unrest has been taken care of its extremely unusual (although still possible unfortunately) to have further happiness problems.

[Geticus]

What Cambyses said.
If you rule much of Europe, try moving your capital to Mediolanum.
Aside from that, build temples of Essus in most of your foreign cities outside of the Celtic core areas, Essus tends to develop strong governors.
Levy cheap militia units like Sotaroas to garrison the cities.
With good governors, 20,000+ populations cities should not be a problem.

[Antinous]

Well see the thing is I do have a Gallo-Hellenic empire. I migrated by foot all the way from Gaul to Ankyra and only recently in the last 20 years during a failed expedition back to Gaul did I manage to keep a toe hold. Also I know that my unrest is from population, some cities are bursting right now. I only own three provinces in Gaul also. Even though I have Greece and Turkey I am only making 30,000 mnai a turn which I am spending all in a turn with all of my wars against the "Grey Death", Luso, Aedui, Romans, and Macedonians. So much of my cash is already being invested in my armies and in all of the cities with large unrest through squalor I have developed all the best health buildings. All of those cities are regal housholds.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Migrating early in the campaign means you should expect to lose your original homeland. Only with masses of happiness and law buildings and large garrisons can you expect to keep your original settlements, if the new faction capital is now half the map away.

[Antinous]

Well my Capital is in Ankyra and still cities aren't happy in Greece and Turkey.

[Blxz]

Maybe you want to mod in a small to medium happiness bonus (maybe 30%?) to your top tier core buildings? I think the averni can only build up to level 4 so keep that in mind. You can either do it for everyone across the board or just for your own faction.

Its as simple as typing in a single line in the export_descr_buildings file. Shouldn't damage anything if you do it right and if you make a back-up before you edit it you can tinker away to your hearts content without worrying about messing anything up.

That should offset most of your major problems without giving you a major advantage. let me know if you try it and what you think about it.

[Ibrahim]

2 Possibilities-

1.Find an enemy city which has a plague. Send a spy in and wait until the poor fellow is infected, then have him lodge in your cities. This will bring your population down quickly but at the same time likely decrease your cities moral.

2. Train large armies of levies. Send them off into the wilderness and dispand them, the problem is this may take time, time which you dont have.

What are the causes of your settlments unrest? In my current Casse campaign my Belgic cities became increasingly rebellious due to a high profile Aedui spy that was moving between the territories, just double check your unrest isn't purely the result of overpopulation.

you fellows have no imagination: just use the population cheat, and say that a plague caused it.

[Antinous]

What is the population decrese cheat? I can't find one.

[FriendlyFire]

Use add_population at the console with a negative number. e.g.
add_population Ankyra -4000

[Antinous]

Oh dude thanks I didn't know that.