Quote Originally Posted by Napoleon Blownapart
1) What should the growth of my cities be early, mid and late game? In both my Julii games, in the early and mid games my capitol had a growth rate of around 3.5%, while Patavium with a higher tax rate and less population had 7%. I know different areas have different farming outputs, but what would you reccomend for early, mid and late game? I've heard that 7 is the magic number at huge city.

2) How does slavery work in 1.5? I've gotten 'Town Grows' messages right after enslaving a town. Does it dump them all at once?

3) Is there any trust factor? If I backstab my allies, will all the world refuse to get an alliance with me?

4) Didn't the time of the Pharoes end long before RTW's timeline? Alright, so it's off topic, but it's been bugging me.
1) Too many variables to answer, IMO. In vanilla RWT (BI is pretty different, as there are lots of built up cities to grab and best to keep them small as possible in pop) I aim to build up about 3 cities (and am apt to capture some others) when playing Romans. They rest I generally struggle to keep small, which means dodging as much as I can in building things that boost growth. But the game does a great job of making us have hard choices. We want denarii, so we build trade and farms and things that boost income, but some of the upper end also boost pop growth. Temples too have benefits, but the double edged sword of pop growth in some cases.

My typical pattern is struggle to maintain growth for the first decade or two, then fight to restrain it after that! It's easy to grow once you have a few armies (and lots of income) since you can manipulate enslavements and transfer population using units.

2) 25% goes to the Senate (as I recall), the rest is split up among all your cities with governors. So you can micromanage and have all governors but one step out to the farm while the combat/siege ends (plan ahead with sieges, silly AI can decide to sally early) so 75% of the slaves go to one city... or half to each of two, etc. Yes, from testing other have done, and my own observation, the pop boost happens all at once when you click enslave on the city capture menu.

You also get a period of increased growth (population boom) in the city enslaved and the slave resource to boost trade there and in its partner trading cities. I think that period is 16 turns.

3) Not sure on the trust, but I suspect backstabbing gets you a bad rep with everyone and making any sort of agreement with them gets harder. If it works as "normal", best to tempt the AI into breaking the agreement. I know I'm paranoid about making alliances with factions I KNOW I will go after. I may be too paranoid though.

4) Long is relative.