Greetings, emperors!

Last time I introduced the new population system, the living communities inside each of your cities. Today I want to talk about what happens when those communities send their citizens off to war.

Under the new system, your soldiers are recruited directly from city populations. When they march off and fall in battle, they do not return. The city they came from loses those people, permanently. A city of 5,000 citizens that loses 500 soldiers in a major engagement will feel it. That’s a 10% loss in a single battle. Fight several of those in a short campaign and your cities will visibly shrink.

Fight a long and costly war and you’ll start to notice your cities growing quieter. The workshops slow down. The streets empty. The recruit pools shrink. Sustaining victory becomes harder the longer the war drags on.

This creates a completely new kind of strategic pressure. It is no longer enough to simply outnumber your enemy, you need to ask whether your empire can sustain the losses.

Workshops are also affected. Each workshop needs civilian workers to operate at full capacity. The more developed your province, the more workers each workshop demands. Conscript too many people into the legions and your production suffers, armour, weapons, equipment, all of it depends on having enough people at home to make it. A city under heavy impressment, where nearly one in five citizens is in uniform, will noticeably struggle to keep its workshops running compared to a city relying on volunteers.

Migration adds another layer. Overcrowded cities will naturally push surplus citizens towards smaller settlements, helping you grow new territories. But if loyalty collapses, perhaps because of brutal conscription and heavy war losses, people simply flee. You also have direct control over this. In the city view you can order a population group to send settlers to a chosen city, and set the intensity: gentle sends a steady trickle of around 2% of the group per month, moderate pushes that to 5%, and forced migration moves 10% per month. Useful for rapidly growing a newly founded frontier city, but be careful, most races deeply resent being forcibly uprooted, and forced migration carries a serious loyalty penalty. Dwarves and skulks are especially unhappy about it.

And when you capture an enemy city? Expect it to lose a portion of its population in the chaos of conquest. The first citizens of your race to arrive won’t come as soldiers, they’ll be the slow trickle of settlers and merchants who follow in the years afterward.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about grain, the new resource that feeds both your armies and your cities, and the fascinating strategic choices it creates.

Cheers!