High Population problems? read this

[Guyus Germanicus]

Indeed, I rarely exterminate (ever). I find enslaving to be the best option most of the time. more pop = more cash, and enslaving gives you even more.

I have to confess I have learned some hard lessons about exterminating too gratuitously, or too often. Some slow growth cities can take forever to recover from an exterminate. You run out of building projects, and then have to wait until the population gets up to the next threshold. There's a great deal of wisdom in enslaving. You can reduce the population, somewhat, of the city you just captured, and then essentially transfer some of its population over time to other cities where you have governors. So it can aid in the growth of other cities.

The fastest growing cities in RTW seem to be Patavium, Memphis, Alexandria, Thebes, and Carthage not necessarily in that order. Syracuse seems to grow modestly fast. And Larissa can take off after a while. And Cordoba, of course.

When playing the Greeks, you want both Syracuse and Sparta to get large as quickly as possible so that you can recruit the Spartan hoplites. I usually end up recruiting peasants in Corinth and Athens and releasing them in Sparta to aid the growth. Regardless of which faction I'm playing, if I capture Sparta, it usually becomes a recruiting center. So I leave the Temple of Nike in place, and have no problem with population growth since recruiting tends to keep Sparta's growth fairly static.

[mrdun]

Try to take cities which have grain as a resource, that adds to population growth.

[gaiusjulii]

as abad as this is going to sound I just plain cheat when My city hits 24000 once i have the highest upgrade i just use the population cheat to reduce it to 5000. solves all my problems even if a little unorthodox. I just dont have the patience to micor manage every province. i dont mind doing until 24000 but after that I jst get the hump. I also once i hit 10 provinces every province i take after that is exterminated. sorts a lot of problems out lol

[TruePraetorian]

if you guys really want to not have to deal with red faces and not massacering your plebians, just dont let squlaor build up. It's pretty simple, i never upgrade my farming past level 2..it may sound simple but try it out. Squlaor increases as the settlement grows very quickly. When you massacre the city, look at the squalor...it goes down by a great amount, and your population stays pretty happy.

So, farms = squalor and squalor =

[SSJVegetaTrunks]

I build farms as soon as possible in small towns, but in large cities or fast growing ones I try not to build any at all.

[Barbarossa82]

if you guys really want to not have to deal with red faces and not massacering your plebians, just dont let squlaor build up. It's pretty simple, i never upgrade my farming past level 2..it may sound simple but try it out. Squlaor increases as the settlement grows very quickly. When you massacre the city, look at the squalor...it goes down by a great amount, and your population stays pretty happy.

So, farms = squalor and squalor =

The reason squalor goes down when you massacre the population is because there is a small population relative to the size of the settlement's government building.

I always upgrade farms to the maximum extent possible, for the following reasons:

1. More grain = more money (from trading grain)
2. More grain = more population growth = more taxpayers = more money
3. More grain = population boom = bonus public order
4. Cities will eventually grow and suffer squalor-related public order penalties without the farm upgrades anyway. Think of squalor as representing the natural curbing of growth when the city reaches its capacity. With the money accrued for reasons 1-3, you have plenty to spend on fancy buildings to keep the people happy - temples, theatres, etc.

[Chaotix]

Here's a trick that I've learned that may help everyone out (credit to frogbeastegg for this): For any faction that can reach the huge city level, only let the positive population growth factor in the settlement details scroll reach 8%. Once the city reaches a population of about 24000, the squalor level will cancel out the positive growth to 0%.

For some cities, it's nearly impossible to do this (Patavium, Carthage, Alexandria) because of their ridiculously high natural grain amounts. To limit this, don't build any farms in those cities.