Civ/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/Working with Cities

Managing Citizens

Basics

Each citizen requires two units of food to sustain them. Any surplus is accumulated. When sufficient surplus has been accumulated the city will grow. Citizens are of three basic types:

Drones - discontented citizens
Workers - who bring in resources from squares being worked by the city.
Talents - who do not work squares, but can boost the city's psyche rating, research, economy and so on.

Drones begin to appear when a city reaches a certain size, or a specific number of cities have been founded. The exact point where drones start to appear depends on the difficulty level and the faction being played. When the number of drones exceeds the number of talents, a drone riot will occur - during this time the city continues to produce food, but does not generate energy or build anything if the minerals are available. As such, cities are not productive when they undergo drone riots and controlling them is an essential part of game strategy.

Controlling Drones and Drone Riots

There are a number of ways of controlling the numbers of drones - and hence the number of drone riots.

Building Base Facilities

Certain base facilities directly reduce the number of drones. Examples are:

Recreation Commons - these reduces the number of drones in a city by two
Hologram Theatre - these reduce the number of drones by 2 in a city and increase the psyche rating of the bases by 50%
Research Hospital - these reduce the number of drones by one in a city, increase psyche by 25% and labs by 50%
Punishment Sphere - the ultimate way of controlling riots. Once built, the base has neither drones or talents, but lab output is cut by half.

Certain base facilities indirectly reduce drones.

Tree farms increase psyche by 50%, economy by 50% and boost forest squares from one nutrient to two. They also eliminate half the environmental damage from terraforming
Hybrid forests (cumulative with tree farms) increase psyche by a further 50%, economy by a further 50%, boost food to three from two and boost energy from forest squares from one unit to two. They also eliminate half the environmental damage from terraforming. Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests are essential to a builder strategy

Increasing Psyche

The energy devotes to psyche will reduce the number of drones. This is done on the Social Engineering controls, where the amount of energy being generated can be split between the economy (accumulating energy credits), psyche (making citizens content) and labs (research). The optimum mix varies by faction and the strategy being followed. Every two units of energy being devoted to psyche either turn a drone into a worker or a worker into a talent. The effect of energy being devoted to psyche is also boosted by certain based facilities such as Hologram Theatres or Tree Farms.

In the vary early game building Recreation Commons and increasing the Psysche Rating to 20% is generally sufficient to keep the drones under control for most factions.

Special Abilities=

The 'Non-Lethal Methods: x2 police Powers" special ability (available after Intellectual Integrity[E3]) allows one military unit to suppress two drones, rather than one.

Social Engineering

Social engineering allows players to suppress drones in two ways; one direct, one indirect.

The direct way is to increase a society's POLICE rating. This can vary from -5 (two extra drones for every military unit outside of your boundaries) to +3 (three military units suppress 6 drones). Society models that boost police ratings are Police State (+2) and Thought Control (+2). Other society models can drastically reduce it - such as Free Market (-5).
The indirect way to reduce the number of drones is to increase the efficiency or energy output of your society. This means less energy is lost to inefficiency, and hence more of the energy allocated to Psyche goes to keeping citizens happy. Society models that increase efficiency/energy production are Democratic (+2 Efficiency), Free Market (+2 Economy), Green (+2 Efficiency), Knowledge (+1 Efficiency), Wealth (+1 Economy), Cybernetic (+2 Efficiency), and Eudiamonic (+2 Economy).

Typically, if you go for a higher police rating, the efficiency/economy suffers, and if you increase efficiency/the economy via your social engineering choices, you are likely to upset the more militaristic factions.

Special Projects

Some special projects decrease the number of drones. These include

Ascetic Virtues (Planetary Economics [B6]) +1 police
Clinical Immortality (Matter Editation][B12] One extra talent per base
Human Genome Project (Biogenics [D1]) One extra talent per base
Longevity Vaccine (Bio Engineering [B5]) One or two drones less per base depending on society model in use
Telepathic Martrix (Eudaimonia [E12]) Drones never riot.

Summary

The optimum way you control your drones will depend on your strategic approach to the game - momentum, builder or hybrid. The more militaristic factions will crank up their police rating, avoid building many drone suppressing facilities and try and over-run any nearby builder factions before they've got their infrastructure and research up and running. Builder factions will be going for big cities and research and will fight defensively until that's been achieved.

Golden Ages

If the citizens in a city are contented - no drones and the number of talents equals or exceeds the number of workers - the city will enter a Golden Age. This boosts the 'Economy' setting by +1. At a minimum this can lead to +1 unit of energy per base; with society models such as Free Market or Wealth, it can lead to bigger economic benefits. A Golden Age thus results in more cash and faster research. A Golden Age also boosts 'Growth' by +2. At a minimum this will add 20% to you growth rate, and if allied with the Planned and Democratic society models, could result in a Population Boom.

To create a Golden Age build base facilities that eliminate drones (such as Recreation Commons and Hologram Theaters), and then increase the amount of energy devoted to Psyche until the number of talents is the same as (or more than) the number of workers. A Golden Age will not confer the same benefits as a Population Boom (which it can play a role in creating), but it will still help your faction out-compete others

Growing your Population by Boosting your Growth Rating

Your Growth rating (which can vary from -3 to +6 dictates how fast your cities grow. The higher the growth rating, the faster the growth and the stronger your faction.

Facilities Affecting Growth

A Children's Creche gives cities that have it a +2 boost to the growth rate.

Society Models that Boost Growth

Planned (an Economics society model) and Democratic (a Political Society model) both give a +2 boost to your faction's growth rating. The Future Society Eudaimonic society model also gives a +2 boost to growth, but this only occurs late in the game.

Golden Age and Growth

A Golden Age occurs when a base has no drones and the number of talents equals or exceeds the number of workers. This condition can be achieved by building base facilities that remove drones (such as Recreation Commons and Hologram Theaters), and then increasing the amount of energy devoted to Psyche until the number of talents is the same as (or more than) the number of workers. Once a Golden Age starts in a city, it will receive a +2 boost to its growth rate, plus a boost to its economy.

Speeding up the Growth Rate

Assuming there is enough food available for a city to grow, you can boost the growth rate to faster than the default rate by:

Building a Children's Creche (+2)
Running Democratic (+2)
Running Planned (+2)
Engineering a Golden Age (+2)

Each of these individually will boost your cities' growth rate; two in combination will boost it faster. For example, if you have a growth rating of +4, your cities will grow 40% faster than the default rate.

Population Booms

The ideal is to engineer a population boom. This happens when you have a +6 growth rate. Then, providing you have the requisite food available, each pertinent city will grown by one size per turn. Population Booming is essential to making your faction one of the leading ones.

The easiest way of engineering a population boom is to build a Children's Creche in the majority of your cities then run both Democratic and Planned.
if you faction cannot run either Democratic or Planned, build Children's Creches, select the society model that you can run and engineer a Golden Age.

The downside to running the Planned or Democratic society models is that other factions may take exception to those. If you are using a Builder strategy and you don't want to precipitate a war with an adjoining faction that dislikes those choices, run a Population Boom for a few turns, then switch out of those society choices for a number of turns before switching back fr a few further turns.