Squalor

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Cause

Squalor in Rome: Total War and its expansions is a direct result of the relation between the level of a city and its population.

Affects

Squalor has a negative affect on public order but is capped at 100% (thanks to patching). The affects of squalor can be viewed in the settlement details scroll and is represented by dark rats. Health buildings do not reduce squalor at all, they in fact increase it due to population growth.

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.
• 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.