Basic Guide on City/Province Growth

[CapnLanky]

This guide has been updated and added to the guides section on Steam. It can be found at: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=175439507

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So in Shogun 2, your food surplus was added to the income of every province, every turn. Managing a large food surplus over the long term was a viable strategy to earn a high income, in contrast to constructing buildings which consumed food for an immediate shot in the arm.

Rome 2 introduces a super cool dynamic city growth feature. Cities grow physically on the map to represent their growth accordingly. To take advatage of this feature though, you'll need to know how to grow your cities. This is a super basic guide to help newbies or anyone wondering what's different in Rome 2 vs Shogun 2.

Rome 2 uses a sort of "level-up" process for city growth. A group of cities makes up a province. Clicking on a single city will bring up the province it is a part of, and show the other cities in it. Each province has a progress bar that, once filled, will give you a surplus population to use to expand the city of your choice. You can find the progress bar in the upper left hand corner of the province screen. If you hover the curser over the green progress bar, you can see your growth broken down by growth per turn, current growth progress and the goal for growth to earn the next surplus population.

Once you've filled a province's growth bar, you are given a single surplus population to use. Keep in mind that the surplus population can be used once in any city in the province, and only once. Further surplus populations are earned the same way; after the province growth progress bar is filled. The bigger your population gets, the more growth it takes to fill the province's growth progress bar.

Your food surplus doesn't directly affect the income of your provinces like Shogun 2. Rather, it gives you a bonus to growth across all provinces, as well as increasing the rate at which injured units replenish. For example, if I have a food surplus of 24, that would give a +5 bonus to growth to all provinces, (as well as a 20% increase to the rate at which damaged troops replenish).

The growth given by the food surplus is a bonus applied on top of the growth already being created by buildings in the province. So to sum it up in an example using the before mentioned food surplus #'s... the province of Italia is accumulating 10 growth per turn from buildings in it's cities. Because the food surplus of 24 gives a +5 growth bonus to all provinces, Italia's growth would now be 15 per turn. If Italia needs 100 growth for a new surplus population, I know I will get a surplus population on my 7th turn.

What does this mean? Well, that you should manage your food surplus. Don't splurge on every building that consumes food just because you can. Obviously, theres a time and a place for food comsuming buildings. Often they provide decent bonuses, but at the city level. Excess growth is something that is a spread across all your provinces, something that you'll especially want to take advantage of in the late game when you (hopefully) have a sprawling empire. Consider if you really need to upgrade that City to a Colonia etc.; sure, that +2 local province growth and +200 income are nice; but it's at the cost of -4 food to the empire surplus. If you had a large empire, that potentially could be a -1 loss to growth across all provinces (including the one you just upgraded). By properly managing your food surplus, you'll ensure the cities of your empire grow, making them better functional and more pleasing to the eye.

Hope this makes sense and is accurate; maybe even helps someone out. Good gaming everyone!

[CapnLanky]

I'll try and get screenshots added here shortly...

[Gera]

Thank you for doing this. Greatly appreciated man!

[Romanswinter]

Thanks for this. I think this will be quite useful for me.

[Deltarno]

Many thanks for this, good to know food effects so much. Now, to try to figure out how to keep them happy...

[Kak]

My citizens are constantly mad... Most towns are -15, and even rome is -7
Tried building shrines and it didn't help. Dafaq

[DJ]

Nice! Kept being told I have insufficient population surplus, yet could not find this value anywhere and not in wiki. I will now have a look, thanks CptnLanky

[CapnLanky]

Hey all, I've done quite a bit more work on this and added it to the guide section.

It can be found at: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=175439507