Population and power curve

[Southern Hunter]

I am only now getting into the later game (Turn 130 currently on my Rhodes game). I can still only imagine Turn 500.

I note that the map is full of people. The population overlay shows most of the world with 'High' population levels. This also means there are tons of buildings and trade goods everywhere, and the larger empires probably have tons of money (I know I do).

I do wonder if it shouldn't be more difficult to develop these large population centres, especially in areas of low fertility?

[MoLAoS]

I am only now getting into the later game (Turn 130 currently on my Rhodes game). I can still only imagine Turn 500.

I note that the map is full of people. The population overlay shows most of the world with 'High' population levels. This also means there are tons of buildings and trade goods everywhere, and the larger empires probably have tons of money (I know I do).

I do wonder if it shouldn't be more difficult to develop these large population centres, especially in areas of low fertility?

Doesn't appear to be any sort of climate system. Build green/blue buildings, apply pops to food, grow. However high population has loyalty/revolt penalties so it has got a soft cap.

[Pocus]

That's something we plan to add, an innate penalty to some regions to reflect how bad climate was, or if there was simply no room for a large city (for example Melita)

[Southern Hunter]

Well, that sounds good.

I wonder if the simplest 'quick fix' might be to simply alter the 'food excess required for next population point' curve (I think there is one).

Combine this by preventing farms and some other food buildings in desert areas, and altering the food return from different types of food buildings, should be possible to get more even results.

Secondly, there is, like most games, a certain idea of progress that happens throughout the course of the game, whereas progress in history was a lot less certain. Rather than populations (and trade goods) just inevitably rising all the time, there needs to be some 'sinks' for population as well (disease, war, famine, etc). It's true that Rome had more citizens at the end of the game period than the start, but I am not sure a lot of areas in North Africa did. And certainly some of them lost access to water, the environment crumbled and people moved away.

Shouldn't battles over cities do an amount of damage? Destroying pops, buildings and the like?