Civ 4 - Starvation & Overpopulation

[Lethann]

I'm new to Civ 4 and Civ in general, but I was playing my first game and I keep having the same two problems: towns complaining of being too crowded and not having enough food despite there being tons of farms around.

I tried going through the tutorial, but it keeps getting stuck and making me restart, so that's no help.

My cities all have trade routes established between them, but that doesn't seem to help other than bring in gold. I have gold coming out of my ears. I need food. What am I doing wrong? Is there a way to move people from one city to another? I have one with a population of 12 and another with only 1. A friend suggested trying to use a settler, but that didn't work.

Please help out a noob.

[Friendliest]

In Civ IV, u can't move pop any (direct) way that I know of. (Yes, in (some of?) the old games u could use a settler.)

If your 12-pop city is the one that has the farms, then I would guess either:

- you are farming land that doesn't have good food production to begin with -- i.e. it should be either plains or grassland

- there is this concept of "health" in Civ IV, and if your city is unhealthy, which is caused by overcrowding, among other things (pollution/fallout, jungles, water supply being poisoned by enemy spy), it causes a drain on your food.

things which can affect this (positively) are technologies, buildings, leader attributes, random events, having access to certain resources, etc.(?) sometimes it takes a combination of a resource + a building to get the bonus (e.g. grocer+bananas, harbor+fish -- don't quote me on these I'm not a walking Civ manual, but you should be able to see the exact details in the tool tips or in the Civopedia (F12))

things which affect it negatively are, as mentioned: population, pollution, jungles, poison, and skill level -- the harder the skill level you play, the more unhealthiness will be caused by population.

HTH

edit: yeah one more thing, relating to the farming -- make sure your farms are actually being farmed! on the city screen either manually control which tiles your citizens are working on, or just make sure the automated control is doing what you expect it to. there are various settings for automated control (pic) (http://www.georgeskleres.com/civ4/civ4dummies/game1/screenshots/Civ4Dummies_Game1-0004_T0-BC4000_CityScreen01.JPG) -- the various buttons under where it says "draft"

(edited out this last bit cuz I think I might have been wrong. haven't played in a while..)

[Lethann]

*nods* But how to I deal with over population? Am I just stuck with it or what?

[taste]

Overpopulation is the games' way of limiting what would otherwise be penalty-less growth. If there were no unhappiness and unhealthiness due to population, you could easily get 100 or more population by stacking food producing buildings.

If you have a high population and finding yourself starting to starve, that's probably because of angry workers. You can wait until the city starves down to a sustainable level, or manually change which tiles are being worked to starve it down faster. This can actually be beneficial as you can switch to working a few gold or production-heavy tiles and give yourself a nice production or research/money boost.

Further growth of your city is simply based on tech and buildings. There are myriad ways to boost city based or overall health: Buildings such as aduaducts, wonders such as the hanging gardens (improves health across all cities), Civics, eg environmentalism for health, representation, nationhood, free religion for happiness, etc.
Edit: Don't forget a granary. A granary is a great way to accelerate a new cities' growth.