Yeah, but the alternative is to intentionally make our cities horrible places to live. With our focus on public health, that seems ill advised, never mind the plagues it would cause from all the failed health rolls.
To be clear, aqueducts in random towns only increase the EE threshold by one for themselves alone, and our policies have never built baths outside of a city. The issue is that we need baths and aqueducts in our cities, and those trickle down to other city candidates, increasing their EE threshold.
If people don't want more cities, then they need to focus on keeping our EE up, not keeping our city infrastructure down.
Actually no, our policies have been accelerating city growth quite a bit, and we've been egging them along there. Note that while they hadn't built baths outside of cities yet, they HAVE been building aqueducts and palaces in cities that normally wouldn't have spawned yet.
So lets see our cities:
-Blackmouth
--Policy built a governor's palace, which began the process of forming a city, driving up population density, which led to building an aqueduct, which turned it into a city, which led to cities below it on the chain moving up.
-Sacred Forest
--It was already going to become a city due to all the pilgrims so the aqueducts and baths just filled a need.
-Stallion Pen
--Ever since they built a temple as a Subordinate it was going to become a city, so the aqueducts went in to fill a need.
-Valleyguard
--This is Policy inflicted, they weren't going to become a city candidate until policy put aqueduct in.
-Lower Valleyhome
--This is Policy inflicted, they weren't going to become a city candidate until policy put aqueduct in.
-Redshore
--This was becoming a True City regardless(we'd have saved a lot of pain making it the capital though), but while the policy only fulfilled a need in the aqueducts and baths, the Governor's Palace was a later addition.
-Redhills
--This was becoming a True City ever since we put the Ironworks in, the policy only filled the need.
They are fulfilling a need, but the needs fulfilled both generate new needs AND compound further issues. 4 out of our 8 city candidates were directly enabled by policy.
Yes and no.
Baths are straightforward - they consume fuel. The impact of it is discussed to death.
They are not Industry, but they strain our capacity to sustain it.
Liraries, salterns, gymnasiums - no question, sure. I don't recall them being built all too often - in fact, I do not think they've ever built saltern, though my memory is bad.
Walls, Block Housing, Temples and Palaces....weell, that one is trickier. They are not industry, but they give us yet more problems to deal with - namely, risk of disloyal city, governor, urban poor, redlining RA and so on. All problems of course manageable - but they do need to be mamaged.
Aqueducts increase chances of TS spawn, so they have, again, their drawback - namely, juggling all the cities.
Ironworks are industry: useful but catalyzes upheaval and carries costs (see second aqueduct just to keep water clean).
Marketplace: have not seen them yet in action, but likely has Ironworks-like costs throygh lens of money and trade. That is, again, societal upheaval, changed balance of powers, some issues with currency while we are strughling in vague direction of banking or so....
I think that's all?
Point is - yes, all the drawbacks are manageable. As long as they come one by one.
Now imagine if we had 6 policies. Imagine them building Ironworks in two different cities and us facing a choice not whether to build aqueduct 2, but in which city to build it and from which eat riots.
This is a crude example, but I hope it does translate my point: with current pace of policies we can keep up and solve issues in timely manner; the more policies we have, the harder it will be.
Yeah, basically. We're just FINALLY getting the natural brakes put on because the level 2s are revealed and will take more time to achieve.
Note that we have
time to build all these things:
-Guilds we have
2 turns.
--Next Main turn the passives will build 3/6 of the ironworks, we make sure there's enough fuel for that. Redshore is very likely to commit it's 1 progress to this as well, it's Relevant To Their Interests.
--The Main turn after, the passives will build the last 3/6 or 2/6 of it. Or even 1/6 of it if Redshore will pony up their personal allotment twice. Quest completes and cashes out.
-Urban Poor have
3 turns
--Next turn nothing will be done for it unless Redhills feels like starting their own market 1/3. They might.
--The turn after, the passives will build 1/3 or 2/3 of it for Redshore. Redhills plugs away with their personal allotment to reach 2/3.
--The last turn of it, we spend a Main action for Redshore Market level 2, the passives will pay for the last progress of level 1, and Redhills finish their market too.
Not counting any mid turn or province actions taken.
We're fine.
Although dubbing them all 'industrialization' is a misnomer, apologies.
Urbanization would be more accurate.
It's not like the current problems wasn't anticipated!
All the way back when we first got infrastructure policy, I made it a point to highlight how the urbanization loop would inflict stress on our polity, fuel supplies, and that we'd need to develop coping mechanisms or burn.
AN all but explicitly said pretty much at the day we met them (or was it when they started pushing mercs button?) that they are riding sotta super duper efficient gimmuck which us going to blow them up once they stumble wrong way. Which is what happened: they were explicitly only civ in region who were able to outright blow up from nat1.
Mercs more or less. They have a trait specifically for getting unlimited mercenaries, and you don't get THAT without using a shitload of mercenaries first.
It's amusing how we're flirting with a Golden Age one or two turns after we were flirting with our civilization totally falling apart.
We're also flirting with our civilization totally falling apart at the same time.
