Tiny Capitals

[Blastaz]

Is there any downside to having a tiny capital in a global empire?

In my games as both Rome and the Selucids my capital is absolutely tiny. Now in my rome game I can understand why as I have been steadily colonising from the Black Sea to Spain via Britain. But in my Selucids game I have just filled in the gaps in the SE corner of the map and stabalised my border in the Balkans. Yet in both games my capital consists of 0 citizens, 0 free men and just a handful of slaves.

Is this a problem or should I just dismiss it as one of the games idiosincracies? One of the effects seems to apply if your capital has a population of 200! Is this even possible?

 

[Cheexsta]

It's only a problem because your capital is usually your largest contributor of research points and manpower. If you have other high-population provinces with your primary culture, it shouldn't be a problem.

Warning: what follows is a stupid amount of explanation for a simple outcome. Skip to the end for the TL;DR version.

I strongly recommend that you wait until your capital has recovered from its last colony before sending out a new one. The time it takes can be figured out by this formula:

n = IP / ([CP * 2 + IP] / 2 * i)

Where n = number of years;
IP = intended population increase;
CP = current population;
i = population growth rate.

(Basically what you're doing is calculating the average growth rate between your current population and your target population, then taking the amount of population that you want to gain and dividing it by that average.)

So, in the case of Rome, you have 65 population with a 1% growth rate. Because it's a city, this growth rate is divided by 10. When you send a colonist, your capital population drops by 2. So, the formula would be:

n = 2 / ([63 * 2 + 2] / 2 * 0.001)

Which equals 31.25, meaning it takes 32 full years to get back to your original population, with a little extra. This is just a rough calculation, you can get a more accurate number by using a proper compound interest formula (which comes to 31.27), but I think this is simpler I'm sure a mathematician could come up with a more efficient formula (I'm a history major, not maths!), but this works well enough for me.

That seems like a long time, but when you start trading grain, the number of years required is reduced to a much more modest 8 years.

This same formula can be applied to other country capitals. Macedonia (35 pop to start, 33 after colonising), for example, would take a whopping 59 years without modifiers to recover; or 15 years with grain.

TL;DR: always trade for grain in your capital province, and just wait until your capital province has recovered before sending another colony!

 

[Achab]

I have another point of view here.

The capital depopulation is a weird game mechanism, but it shouldn't stop you from colonizing every available piece of land as soon as possible.

It's very true you lose citizens and freemen from your capital as they move to the newly established colony. It's true it harms you in a short term, as the colony has low civilization rating, so the citizens there produce less research, and the colony is usually not of your culture, so the freemen there don't contribute to your manpower.

This changes the moment your governor successfully finishes the colony and converts it to your state culture and religion. This event fires quite fast for a competent governor. Now the freemen in the province are ready to boost your MP.

Provinces under population 10 also enjoy 10x faster population growth than the bigger ones (actually the figure for pop growth applies for them as displayed). Both the citizens and freemen in these minor provinces enjoy massive growth and soon colonies become significant source of both research and manpower for your country.

The capital itself will fall under population 10 pretty soon, of course, so it gets the better population growth as well. It will be full of slaves because of barbarian bashing anyway, so by colonizing you actually turboconvert them to citizens and freemen.

 

[Blastaz]

Interesting difference of opinion.

I've certainly been of the colonise as soon as possible and my 9 slave capital is obviously the price I have to pay As the Romans I am racing to colonise Ireland and Sweden before the game ends so I don't have any other choice! As The Selucids your capital is actually pretty crumy to begin with, you can practically colonise provinces with the same civ value around the Black Sea...