Time to Expand!

(official post 1 on Population)

In Civ 5 population obviously plays a huge role. Indeed, I found that I really couldn't start playing the game or make much progress without first increasing population. The population very slow to grow in the beginning, which make sense because there was not really a huge supply of food to begin with. This I think is pretty true when it comes to real life civilizations through out history, they really could not take off and grow without first securing a stable food supply. In this respect I feel the game is accurate. Once I was able to produce a worker (which took a while) I immediately set the worker to clearing away some forest which would produce more production points, so I could build more workers in (slightly) less time. Once I had another worker I immediately began to build farms. The farms lead to more food which lead to more population. The increase in population lead me to produce more workers who I had produce more farms and clear away more forest for more production points. It did not take too long of repeating this process before my population finally had a boom.

Aside, from building farms to increase food production, to my knowledge (as of now) there is really no other way to control population. It will just keep growing little by little with each turn. As of this moment I am really not for sure if population can decrease or not. If not, then the game is definitely not accurate on this point. As we have seen through out history, populations do decrease due to natural disasters such as famine, harsh weather/climate, disease. As well as through man made disasters such as war. It is for events as those listed above that the game does not account for. As for the effect that the population increase had on my civilizations' historic trajectory, as my population grew not only did I produce workers, but I also produced military units and settlers. I would then send out the settlers and the military units in order to establish new cities, with the soldiers to defend said new cities. The founding of new cities thus increased my empire's territory. A must in order to serve my imperial ambitions. Long live the Great German Empire! Long live the Chancellor!