City Growth in MedMod

[The Humble One]

I've played the Medieval Mod a couple of times, where some of the cities begin growing too fast. The cities are over 20 in population, and will show a "-1" or "0" growth rate, but still they grow almost every turn. I've tried slowing them down by allocating population as laborers, shopkeepers and scientists, but to no avail. Without simply building up every available space with farms, or building Settlers to offset the population growth, what can I do? Some of the cities eat their surplus food, while other cities seem to do fine and actually increase their surplus! I've noticed this with Fundamentalism and with Monarchy, so it doesn't seem to be driven by the government choice. It doesn't matter if the city is on the ocean or surrounded by mountains! Any ideas, anyone? Thanks

[J Bytheway]

Could you give details of the city improvements in the cities and their happiness levels.

[The Humble One]

These cities have built every building available to them: stockade, granary, aqueduct, marketplace, academy, bank, et al, regardless of Effect. (Usually there is no choice what building to build, since there are no more available.) The happiness, if I remember correctly, is over 80, sometimes in the 90s. If possible, they don't build units, since these work against the Gold amount. I'm fairly frugal about surplus and excessive units.

I've tried slowing down cities from the beginning, allocating population in the Labor tab, as soon as applicable, but at the beginning I really don't want to slow the production rate too much by removing too much population from the fields.

In the long run I usually build a decent number of fishing nets and advanced farms, and then let the city start starving until it balances out at a decent population level. I'm sure that does havoc on my game rating, but without actively building more settlers (I try to limit the number of cities I have), I can't figure out an effective alternative strategy! Unfortunatlely Beef Vat and Pasteur Clinic are not available for awhile, so that's out of the question early on.

It might be that they're simply too happy!

[J Bytheway]

I'm fairly sure that this is to do with the happiness, and the effect it has on growth rates at values at least 80. Unfortunately, AFAIK, noone knows exactly what effect this is. I think that the 50% requirement cut from the granary, the 20% food bonus from the aqueduct and the celebration bonus from the high happiness combine in a strange way to produce this effect. Unless you've the CTP source code to hand, we'll probably never know for sure. Possibly the aqueduct is unnecessary.

I have noticed this myself, and I'm fairly sure that it always stops when the city leaves celebration. If you really want to stop city growth (though I can't imagine why) then sell your granary, but otherwise just let it grow until happiness drops below 80.

In the late game, a good trick is to use this to get big cities (especially space & sea cities), then build a beef vat and a mind controller, then you can sell all the happiness and growth buildings which will save you a fortune and change all food tile improvements into production tile improvements. You're left with a city which, when put on max production, is very good. I had more than 90,000 production once, but that was in Technocracy with all the pertinent wonders and city improvements (especially the nanopedia), in an undersea city with two volcanoes and some trench, etc.

John

[The Humble One]

I've never considered selling improvements! I've always tried to keep the population as happy as possible! (Of course, I finally realized it's not so important to keep the other civilizations happy, either!)

Thanks for the suggestion.

Ben