Manage Population in BI

[dkdnt]

effectivness of this strategy is becouse of peasants low upkeep. i dont know if i would use it in mod without peasant, maybe just for fast growning of one city, that would be region capital, or something like that. but since money isnt problem(or it is becouse of bad traits when u got lot of it) i cuold use perhaps levy pikemans, there not so cheap but they are not too expansive, and ther 120 soldiers on large scale.

[Braden]

I’ve used it extensively in Rome and now in BI the major drawback to this method is the fact that you have to micro-manage it. It isn’t enough to just queue up a full rack of Plebs. You have to re-visit the city every few turns to re-stack that queue AND then you have lots of “armies” of Plebs that you want to move to other cities…which takes a long time due to the distances.

Luckily, this is one of the major tasks of my navies in the game – moving great stacks of Plebs (Peasants) across the globe. I don’t tend to use more than two-three ships in each navy as if they sink, at least you’ve disposed of a great wad of unwanted people (harsh isn’t it?).

I much prefer to move proper armies about and fight battles than move stacks of Plebs about and avoid battles (though again, fighting an loosing a battle with a stack of peasants isn’t such a bad thing).

Edit - Peasant armies as anti-rebel patrols?

In short – this works but can be a managerial head-ache.

[Bob the Insane]

I often use the technique fairly early in the game to give a growth spurt to newly conquored settlements (to start building my cultures stuff).

But in the later game it in just too much micro management...

In fact, some to think of it I have never used the technique in BI because some many settles have a significant population already...

[dkdnt]

Edit - Peasant armies as anti-rebel patrols?

well i said i use them for that just in case they are extra outnumbered, for example they have one or two units and i have full stack of peasants.
check this picture

i had a full stack of peasant army near dumatha, and every bloody turn rebels pop up, so i cicled few plebs units to kick them and other to keep order i dumatha. and this 4 gained extra xp, others were not that lucky.

[Doug-Thompson]

The "emigration" idea's been mentioned a lot, but that's OK. New readers come to this forum, and it's not fair or reasonable to think they're going to find every important point made throughout the whole history of the discussion. It's new to them.

Once you get a city to "huge" size, there's no problem with having it produce peasant units continuously and send them to neighboring provinces. You don't have to take them all the way into the city. Just get them inside the province, disband them, and the population of the city in the province will grow.

There are side effects. For instance, sometimes a city that's not growing will see a small half-percent or so increase in growth rate if you que a bunch of peasants.

Also, queing a lot of units will reduce population and, therefore, unrest. I've often used this exploit when a city's simmering on the edge of revolt. Que a bunch of peasants, get one more turn of peace, and you get another turn for more garrison troops to arrive or a "happy" building to be completed. Then take the unrecruited peasant units out of the que next turn and get your money back.

In a fit of frustration, when a city got just to the edge of 24,000 and stopped growing, I sent the governor out, recruited some mercenaries and disbanded them. Only did it once: It was dumb and cost more than $1,000, but I had money to burn and didn't want to make and march a bunch of peasant units.