Granaries and Population Growth

[Tidster]

I tend not to build granaries. Occasionally with a frontier province it’s nice to have a large food store to park larger armies, but for the most part other buildings seem much more important.

As I grow and hold more territories, it always seems like some interior provinces, especially those far from my enemies, never get slaves routed to them unless I chain them over. I’m wondering if there’s certain ways I might not have thought about to build up these provinces with granaries and policies to improve population growth in a way that isn’t a major trade off compared to simply enslaving more pops and moving them in.

 

[DukeLeto42]

As I understand it, province capitals (and especially the national capital) gain a boost to their chance to receive slaves, but overall slaves are sent based on migration attraction. This means building aqueducts (and to a lesser extent ports) is your best bet to get slaves sent there. However, since you're probably heavily developing your capital province and region, it's likely they'll keep getting high migration attraction and extra pop capacity, taking up all the slaves you generate.

I'd generally say granaries are good for very low-population provinces (and borders, as you note), where only a couple granaries can provide significant growth boosts. Past that, it might be worth trashing excess granaries for boosting pop capacity in the hopes of attracting some captured slaves. At the end of the day, though, it's not entirely bad that pops are getting funneled to built-up provinces where the extra buildings make the pops much more valuable.