Cities and Planet Population

Yeah, it changed a while ago, and as I recall it was in a change log.  Might have been when Crusade came out or shortly afterwards.  Brad talked about it on Discord at the time.  I believe I saw someone post here recently that it's documented in the manual (PDF), but I agree that it could be better documented in-game.

Thanks Publius, not sure how I missed that for so long... One of the things that is most frustrating is that you can't destroy cities, so once you've made them past the planet class, you're stuck with them... has put a major damper on the current game/match. Oh well.

Make them all destructible by editing ImprovementsDef.xml

Quite frankly, I do not understand the logic behind making any improvements indestructible. If you can build it up, you can tear it down. It is not like it adds any real challenge or strategic depth otherwise.

Thanks Nilfiry, I know I can edit the ImprovementDefs.xml file--but my concern is less about the fact that cities can't be destroyed and more about the lack of transparency regarding the relationship between planet class and population cap. Some kind of tool tip would be nice (or a few, for example, one on planet class and one on population--and maybe one on the city improvement). The better solution, in my mind, would be if the devs could add a mechanism that prevents cities from being built if the pop cap is maxed out.

I disagree that they should be prevented .. after all, planet class can be improved with terraforming and certain ideology choices.  However, some sort of warning (red text or some such) might be nice.  Cities (and all planet improvements, possibly with the exception of 1/galaxy wonders) should also be destructible.

I think the easiest way to fix this would be be to display the current population as "Current Pop / Max Pop (aka Planet Class)" with an explanation tooltip and how to raise planet class.