The fact that people are a resource does add another angle. Instead of a toggle that completely halts population growth, it can set the current population (or maybe even a player specified pop) as a target; if the population falls below that target, growth will resume until it reaches it again. If somehow the population exceeds the target (maybe you disbanded some old troops in the city) there are two things that could happen - the population could slowly fall off until it's back down to the target, or it could stay at the new level until you specifically do something to change it like train new troops. I like the latter, at least as a default.

That sounds good, too, as another option. The thing is I'm assuming unarmed peasants would still require some minor upkeep, so drafting excess population into a massive force of cannon fodder might not always be practical. And just as importantly, that would break the immersion for anybody trying to play a relatively benevolent leader

P.S. I'm desperately awaiting a new dev journal  

Turn the excess population into Soylent Green.

Ha ha ha, I'm genuinely surprised that the forum doesn't censor swearing  Having previously spent a lot of time on the CSS and TF2 forums you become instantly aware that there's censorship going on due to all the kids speaking in little pink hearts all the time. Here however I've been reading for months and haven't had cause to notice that it wasn't in effect.. I guess we're all just too damn grown up and civilised .... other than Luckmann that is 

Yes, Population control is nice.  Most games force me to do it with my buildings and general upkeep to keep population growth down.  Or I have to focus on building the infrastructure to Support the population they are growing too.

Even something we could do to half our growth to keep it more managable.  Especialy since we can turn population into troops!

And being one of those nice leaders I'd not like an army of cannon fodder either... Unless I was desperate!

"Go forth troops and destroy the invaders to defend our last city! And if you could pick up some chocolate on the way home that would be nice..."

Also if you disband units in cities, if part or all of that population then goes to the city they were stationed in then those hordes of peasants are both Emergancy cannon fodder AND they could be used as a way to transfer population around from city to city.  Got a city that produces swords but you build troops elsewhere?  Then build some cannon fodder since it doesn't seem to affect your build rate of buildings at all and Send them to your Troop town, Disband them and Poof.  Population control!  The Original Civilization kinda did this with settlers, You could drop multiple into a small city and boost it's pop. And it took a full population to make one.  They had limits so you could only get it up to like 4-5 or something (can't remember). 

If it's not included then it might be something we can mod.  Tech (Immagration)  You then can build a unit with the (Move population) power.  They go to the city they want to be in.  Use the power and it adds a % of the pop (1-100%?) to the city itself and consumes the unit.  So we got lots of way's to get that going.   Lol, I'm already thinking of mods to code and I havn't played the game yet!

Rawr!

Well the reason why I want this has nothing at all to do with realism (and, this is fantasy, so just because something hasn't happened in our own history doesn't mean it can't happen or we shouldn't be able to do it in a fantasy game). The reason why I want population control is because if there's no easy way to do it, I am always forced to manually fiddle with population-altering buildings and such. For example, in GC2 I might be able to support 15 billion people at an acceptable morale, but I can't produce just 15 billion units of food due to the way the farms worked. The result was horrible - either I'd have to settle for a lower population than I could technically handle comfortably, or I'd have to produce excess food and then manually deal with extra population (and the only way to do that was through Colony Ships, or being invaded...). It pissed me off. And if a similar thing happens in Elemental, it too would piss me off.

Now, if they come up with another way to solve that problem besides a toggle, fine. For example if I can very carefully fine-tune food production, including how much food to ship off to other places, as well as the ability to withhold food from my population. So long as I don't have to jump through micromanagement hoops to prevent my cities from revolting, I'll be happy.

Overall, stopping people from breeding isn't very hard. Just fine them into kingdom come if they get more than 1-2 child per pairing.

Edit: And I'm entirely with Pigeon on this. This has nothing to do with realism, and it's not that much of a stretch that you'll have to extert yourself to come up with a rationale. Ultimately this is entirely about game mechanics, no matter how much or how little I can defend the idea from the point of objective realism.

And a "childs per household" mandate would be fine, it limits rate of growth but doesn't put a hard cap on population. And I'd want there to be a trade-off in unrest or a monetary outlay (for your officials who keep track of that). Some acknowledgement by the game that laws cost something

I'm not suggesting it for realism's sake, but for gameplay depth. Having the ability to just say "no more than x" without any trade-offs (beyond the loss of production because you have less people) just doesn't sit well with me as a mechanic.

I want something better than GC2's population simulation as well, just not a "limit population to x".

It still isn't a hard cap though, since it's a dynamic balance between how fast people are born and how fast people are dying. Changing healthcare, for instance, would mean a rebalance or you could end up growing (positive healthcare change) or shrinking (negative healthcare change).

That's all I'm after, I haven't advocated no population management mechanisms, just not a flat "limit to x". I'd like options, letting them starve, providing monetary incentives (either to have kids or to not!), instituting childs/household laws, etc. with different tradeoffs. For example, maybe if you give people money to not have kids, perhaps that keeps the unrest effect down.

Options could be good. I wouldn't complain if we are presented with various options for achieving the same thing, each with a different tradeoff. Nonetheless, my point still stands - I want some way to manage my population without having to micromanage. I want to be able to tell my administrators to do what they need to do in order to keep a city's population stable. If there are options, I want to be able to say "Provide whatever incentives or disincentives you need in order to maintain a stable population" or "Let excess population starve." So long as I don't have to constantly fiddle with city populations in order to keep them at a good place, I will be happy.