Population Loyalty

[Guyus Germanicus]

You will change your tune after you've played enough....trust me on that one


Certainly when you are trying to get to higher levels of development for cities, ZPG is definitely not a welcome thing. In fact, some cities need all the farms, growth temples, and governors with growth traits and/or ancillaries that you can get. Sparta or Rhodes are prime examples, though there are others. Sparta seems to 'hit the wall' at around 22.5k or so. You can certainly pump in 1.5k worth of peasants and disband them, but upon reaching 24k you will immediately suffer a huge negative growth rate and invite the spectre of plague...and then you gotta start all over again, not to mention all the expense and hassle.

Capua is an annnoying slow grower when you play the Scipii, and the Skippys only have two cities capable of instigating the Marius event - Capua and Messana. So you need to goose their growth any way you can. With Messina (Messana) it's difficult because you're recruiting a lot from that city if you choose to build a temple of Vulcan series there. Capua starts hitting its wall @ 17,000 to 20,000, sometimes even earlier. Having a helpful governor is key. You can help things out by not recruiting much from the city and building the public health buildings like sewers and public baths. I found another thing that helped me - Carthaginian temples of Tanit. I kept the temple of Tanit at Thapsus and made a habit of sending some of my more promising faction members there to governor the city for several turns until they acquired the traits of grower and farmer. Once they acquire those traits you can send them back to govern your more slow growing cities. Two key advantages accrue to your doing this - they help cities with their farm output profitability and growth ANNND . .. when you station them in other cities where your priority is to concentrate on the construction of military buildings, you can skip the usual 'interval' need to build farms, to avoid giving them a bad farming trait because they already have a good farm trait. They become immune to the bad trait. So bottomline is - don't be too quick to tear down foreign temples that promote farm production.

R-Samurai makes an important point about the 'let the city rebel - retake it- then exterminate the population' technique that some players use to deal with their large cities that are becoming public order pains in the arse. When you let a city rebel, there is no telling what the AI will do in terms of the kind of rebel garrison it bequeaths to the city. I've seen stacks of anywhere from 8 to 12 to 15 units of rebels in these cities. And they're not always weak units. sometimes they'll be peasants with gold swords and shields, somtimes militia hoplites, sometimes primo galdiators with the best armor. If you've ever noticed - there's a difference between Roman peasants and barbarian peasant units. the barbarian peasants are significantly better soldiers. Give them improved armor, and they're a real pain to deal with. So this technique is a less than perfect solution.