Squalor

Dictionary: Squalor - Noun - The condition of being squalid; filth and misery.

• A filthy and wretched condition or quality.

From the Latin squālēre (to be filthy).

Cause

Squalor in Rome: Total War and its expansions seems to be a consequence of 1) total population, and 2) whether you're over the population limit for your city size. Any two cities of the same population with the same governor's building will have identical squalor. A comprehensive examination of the causes of squalor by therother is at the Guild.

Effects

Squalor has a negative affect on public order but is capped at 100% in the 1.2 patch. Growth penalties proceed at a tenth the rate of public order penalties (e.g., 15% public order loss is 1.5% growth penalty), and are capped at 25% (at least before the patch). The effects of squalor can be viewed in the settlement details scroll and is represented by dark rats. Health buildings do not reduce squalor at all, but they do counteract it. High levels of squalor can cause the plague.

Prevention

There are a few ways to reduce the affects of squalor, they are:

• Train lots of units in a city. This reduces population.
• Try not to build high level farms early on, as this can rapidly increase the population without improving public order to compensate for the resulting squalor.
• Extermination. Some players tend to let a city with high squalor rebel, then capture and exterminate it, hence reducing the population. This method is very useful in newly captured large/huge cities where you need to reduce the negative affects of squalor so you can combat the culture penalty.
• Increase taxes to prevent population growth

While the above tips reduce the chances of getting high squalor levels, they will also hinder the development of your cities. Squalor can be dealt with later on when you have huge cities and access to more public order buildings. You just have to find the right balance of public order and population growth to control it.

Of course, you can also counteract squalor, through any mechanism that increases public order.