Cities are unmanageable!

[Horst Nordfink]

I've noticed that when my cities reach a certain point, they become dank squalid cess pools, regardless of whether I have all the buildings to prevent this.

My once mighty, happy and rich cities are now running at a massive loss and everyone is up in arms.

Is there anything that can be done about this?

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

Build lots of public order buildings. Build few farms and no villa/latifundia. Increase the garrison. Trains spies, in case you are having problems due to enemy spies causing unrest. Edit the EDB to give greater bonuses to some buildings. Send good family members to unresting towns and bad family members to crappy or happy towns.

I don't like that problem with cities growing huge and causing unrest too. So much so that I made a mini-mod. You could try it, it reduces growth and increases many building's happiness/law bonuses:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=79775

[Horst Nordfink]

I have downloaded your mini-mod, hopefully that will make some difference. A very good idea, congratulations.

I have no idea how to edit the EDB, so I think the best thing to do is just give that a wide bearth.

Thanks for your help Marcus!

[Thaatu]

...and rich cities are now running at a massive loss...

They can't be running at a massive loss unless you use royal guards as garrison troops. The army upkeep of the whole faction is divided between the cities depending on their population, meaning huge cities will most likely be showing their budget to be negative, while tiny towns seem to give you all your cash. In reality, the huge cities produce most of your income.

[keravnos]

They can't be running at a massive loss unless you use royal guards as garrison troops. The army upkeep of the whole faction is divided between the cities depending on their population, meaning huge cities will most likely be showing their budget to be negative, while tiny towns seem to give you all your cash. In reality, the huge cities produce most of your income.

Yes that's true. The more money you lose the more this city contributes to the "common cause". This is what most people don't get and I sympathize, as I used to wonder about that myself. Now, the best way to work around the big/huge cities is ALL walfare buildings, huge walls, a governor with good administration, a lot of "cheap but plentiful" army like pantodapoi/roarii. This is assuming that the enemy is many territories away and your only real problem in that region are the rebels.

Remember, big cities are your cash cow. No matter their state, they are the ones that keep you afloat. Small settlements are there to keep you in the black, as they pay little to no amount to the upkeep of your armed forces.

However, if you don't feel like playing the "building and administrative" game, which admittedly can get VERY FRUSTRATING and want a straightforward thing, that little modification is your best bet.

[christof139]

Thanx for that explanation about how the city economy system works and editing the EDB. Chris

[Olaf The Great]

How would I modify files to give Barbarians/nomads the ability to create large and huge cities?
I'm kind of crippled in my barb campaigns once I get to a certain point :P

BTW can capitols revolt?

[Tellos Athenaios]

How to give your faction an imperial palace:

Step 1

Make a backup of your export_descr_buildings.txt (or EDB for short). One of the "modding rules of cool" - as Epistolary Richard has put it in his signature - is to always have a back up on hand. Just in case anything goes wrong. You never know till you've tested it and have seen it working beautifully.

Step 2

Select the factions you want to add. Go to descr_strat.txt - do a search for the faction you want. Say you want to give the Aedui a bit more imperial grandeur:
Open descr_strat in the imperial campagin folder; press Ctrl+F; type "aedui" (WITHOUT the quotation marks); and you'll find:

; ---------------------------------------------------------
; #########    gauls - Aedui   #########
; ---------------------------------------------------------

Apparently the internal name of the Aedui is "gauls" - again WITHOUT quotation marks.

Step 3

Find this piece of code in your export_descr_buildings.txt (or EDB for short):

        imperial_palace requires factions { saba, slave, romans_brutii, egypt, romans_scipii, carthage, parthia, numidia, thrace, greek_cities, macedon, romans_julii, seleucid, } and building_present government

Add your faction after seleucid (which is the SPQR faction in the campaign).
Like this example, in which I want to give the Aedui an imperial palace:

        imperial_palace requires factions { saba, slave, romans_brutii, egypt, romans_scipii, carthage, parthia, numidia, thrace, greek_cities, macedon, romans_julii, seleucid, gauls, } and building_present government

Mind you, you have to add the internal faction name. Extremely important as well, is that you keep the syntaxis EXACTLY the same. So you end each faction you add with a comma and a space. INCLUDING the last faction of your modifications: see the original "seleucid, " entry in the original code.

Step 4

Test it!

~~~~~~

Please keep in mind that from now on you're not playing with a clean build anymore. Also, if any weird error messages occur complaining about pieces of code missing and / or faulty code: most likely you've wrecked the syntaxis.

EDIT: AFAIK: Capitals can't, but I'm not sure about that hill and that building.

[Olaf The Great]

EDIT: AFAIK: Capitals can't, but I'm not sure about that hill and that building.
....Stupid spell checker

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

To give the gauls a huge city, they also need a strat model assigned and a city plan for huge sized city, no?

[The Stranger]

i actually didnt have this problem since i used EB... in vanilla this problem was a more urgent one... if you want to solve it, use the add_population townname -xxxx (-4000 being max) this way you take some population off. However, in a town when everything is built the town will easily stay happy. the point with good generals in big cities is that they generaly also are good for population growth, so when he dies the city has actually exceeded its limits but the bonus he provided masked that.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

To be honest most ancient cities were squalid cess-pools. Eventually your city levels off, the population goes neutral and everything is fine. If you're on low taxes that's pretty realistic actually because taxes were low back then and people are never really happy with their ruler.

In my opinion not building farms is a bad idea because with all those public health buildings your population is still going to go up and you're not getting the cash. Remember, a city with a blockaded port still produces farming income.

[The Stranger]

we were not talking about the farms, i think they were talking about the estates... I always build farms, never estates.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Well, if you ever want the Marian reforms you'll have to build estates.

[Olaf The Great]

I build estate buildings for the trade benifit -5 and 10% isn't SO bad.

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

In your empire's heartlands estates and latifundiae make sense. They boost your economy a bit, and their impact on public order is neglectable.