Yeah, a growth domain would not help you. Unfortunately, in Dominions there is no minimum growth in a growth domain, and the maximal growth rate is .7% (or a doubling time of roughly 100 turns) so you can never regrow population in low-population provinces. By turn 40, if you started with a pop-300 province on turn 1, and had a growth-3 scale, you'd have 390 people. And that's assuming you can increase population in increments of less than 10 people, which I'm not really sure about... if the minimal increment is 10, then you can never increase population in a province with less than 1430 people, unless there's some randomness thrown in.
A lot of people seem to want more growth possibilities, but the developers are gloomy pessimists who like to dwell in dark, apocalyptic worlds
Which is nice because it brings interesting Blood and Death spells, but unfortunate in terms of curing battle afflictions and regrowing population. But maybe a base pop. growth slider will be added, or the scale effects will be adjustable with mods, or a minimum population growth per turn will be added (to abstract immigration) - with a minimum of 10 pop/turn/growth scale, your +3 growth, 300 pop province would hit 1470 by turn 40!
-Cherry
P.S. I also think that population should flow from province to province based on population happiness, which would be a combination of unrest, taxes, and scales... where growth, order, neutral heat, low unrest, high defense, fortresses, temples, and low taxes all increase happiness, and patrols prevent emigration. Death domains, taxes, blood-hunting, and patrols would still decrease population, but half the reduction would be to death, and half would be due to emigration.
[ November 15, 2003, 23:36: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]