So, back to Civ IV

I’ve got a question. What do you do if your city complains that it’s too crowded?

Make sure you have enough happiness bonuses to offset the unhappiness? There’s nothing you can do about “Too Crowded”, IIRC it’s equal to the size of the city.

I really disagree. Golden Ages are very handy and can be a good use for GPs once or even twice. It depends on the GP you get (compared to the victory you’re going for), how early in the game it is, and what tech the GP will give you. But with some frequency I’ll get a GP who just isn’t that useful – if it’s mid- to late-game, settling him as a super-specialist just doesn’t pay off enough, the tech he gives me is something I don’t particularly want or can easily get on my own, and his special ability isn’t useful (e.g., Great Artist ability is useful but not great if you’re not going for culture victory; Great Prophet ability is useless if you haven’t founded a religion or have only founded unsuccessful religions OR if you’ve already built all the holy buildings you want to; etc.) The only GP that is always useful is the Great Engineer.

I often end up “saving” a semi-useful GP (like a Prophet whose building I don’t want) and seeing what the next GP is. If it’s another marginally useful one, I’ll trigger a Golden Age, which is a much better use of two Prophets than settling them in 1920 or whatever.

You build happy buildings. There’s no way to reduce the crowdedness.

I think you have to have different types of Great People to start a Golden Age. I always have an excess of Great Prophets later on.

Slavery, which allows you to use up your population to hurry production will reduce the crowd, then you can freeze growth until things balance out again. That’s one way. Starvation would be another.

I put in a request for population migration between cities (for whatever penalties that may apply) to Firaxis to see if that’d make it into an expansion. I don’t like it that slavery and starvation are the main population controls.

Just ask L. Ron Hubbard…

Hmm, but you’re okay with forced migration?

“Okay, all you people pack your things! We’re evicting you and you’re moving to Poughkeepsie!”

-Tom

Well, he didn’t say forced migration. But migration of population between cities or countries might make for interesting dynamic. Cities with poor health might lose population to nearby cities with higher culture. It would also lead to more “international” cities, which will almost certainly present problems regarding the flipping of cities.

You would have to have a lot of min/max factors in effect, of course. And I’m not sure it necessarily resolves the “problem” of overcrowding - setting population limits works just fine for my purposes.

Troy

You could manually do this in other Civs by reintegrating workers and settlers. But Civ4 sort of boogers that up by not costing pop for those dudes.

I suspect population redistribution was intentionally left out of Civ4. In fact, my guess is that Firaxis wants you to have to deal with health issues rather than just shuffling your population around.

-Tom

It’s just frustrating to have a complaint that you can’t do anything about (directly anyways). I woud think building cottages would get their buts out of the main city.

I see their cries then get into Sim City mode and I want to build them a nice comfy residential area with a few parks.

Almost certainly correct. But you could put population movement out of the direct control of the player. If you jack up the pollution in one city, there would be no guarantee where they end up. So there is no micro-calibrating population levels, though I’m sure someone would figure it out by comparing migration axes and the like…

It could be interesting. It could be more trouble than it’s worth.

Troy

Starvation works. It’s better though to keep an eye on the maximum happy citizens and then to stop growth, ideally by increasing production or creating specialists, or if that is not possible by using the ‘don’t grow city’ button. Don’t forget to turn it off again when your city can support more citizens though.

On GPs for Golden Ages - I wasn’t arguing that people shouldn’t use spare ones to trigger one, I was arguing that one shouldn’t save them deliberately for a golden age, which is what I thought JMR was asking. I still think it’s better to manage your specialist cities to produce GPs that you have a use for though - Great Artists to culture bomb if you are going for culture, Great Scientists if you’re after a tech/space race win etc. If you have a city that can only produce Great Prophets that you have no use for, then yes, save a couple and use them for a GA.

The Nomadic sorts of cultures that did this kind of population migration aren’t represented in Civ4 at all. Civ4 is complex enough that it’s probably a good thing they left population migration to the current elegant Settling mechanics – how often did enough (non Nomadic) people migrate away that population actually shrank anyway?

Heh, no, not quite in that spirit. Troy’s idea was right; I wasn’t meaning ‘forced migration’. It’s a matter of how I’d expect the population would shuffle around normally. If a place is overcrowded and there aren’t opportunities and people are so unhappy, they’d go someplace less crowded with more opportunities, etc. That’s the idea behind the migration concept. It allows you to balance your citizens how you like while providing your citizens with some freedom to choose where they want to live.

I just didn’t like having Slavery and Starvation as the only way to combat overcrowding. Sure, there are ways to prevent it (and those are ways I most often use), but forcing your population to starve or become a slave to sacrifice by working them to death doesn’t seem very nice.

yeah, we had to lose the “join” feature when we dropped the population costs of settlers and workers. Actually, I don’t think we every even coded the old way as it was always problematic, both for new users (who couldn’t understand why their city wasn’t popping out a settler even though the box was full) and veterans (a high percentage of pre-Civ4 exploits had been based on the ability to move population around). Which is not to say we didn’t lose a little bit of gameplay there…

I’d say rather you gained some gameplay, by forcing people to deal with population expansion, rather than just simply balance all their cities to the same size.

well, you’re always better off with less rules and more gameplay - that can be tricky though as everyone has an idea about what’s the most important x things from history to include.

Absolutely true, and you guys have done a stand up job of selecting the complex bits that are truly worth their weight in interesting choices, and sifting out the chaff like population migration. You make it look damn easy too… color this would be designer green – and I bet I’m not the only one!

Hopefully you can keep it up for your next project. :-)

The confusion seems to come from page 167 of the manual: “On the lowest difficulty levels, it takes the AI civs longer to train units, construct buildings and wonders, grow their cities and research technologies. On Noble difficulty they play under the same conditions as the human players, and on higher difficulties they receive discounts on these items.”

Still a great game, even if the computer does cheat. :)