- We're not in a golden age; but the TM is one turn from completion (it's in one of the island cities).
- Persepolis contains the MoM.
Do we own Persepolis? If yes, great!
- Making our conquered Persian cities a colony is going to do a few things :
It'll give a short-term boost to our economy.
I'm sure that it will. However, I am concerned that this fact will not really help us toward our goal of winning a Domination Victory. I'm pretty sure that we agreed we wanted to win a water map via Domination, which isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. It will be a nice notch on some players' belts.
As was said previously, liberating Cities puts us further away from Domination.
Also, as was also said previously, we don't really need much in the way of techs or money beyond Chemistry and keeping a good chunk of Gold at all times (say, 1000+ Gold) just in case our economy really starts to go sour, in which case we'll not lose our units to Strikes. However, this fact does not mean that we need to make a Domination Victory slower by liberating Cities, as doing so would just drag out the length of time that we would have to keep paying out Gold to our expensive military men and women.
It'll immediately give 2 military units a city (to our vassal), which allows our garrisons to join the fight before the revolt ends.
I don't think that we're that short on units and even if we are, we can just leave some Cities defenceless until we can whip a Longbowman or other City defender for each of these Cities in the Cities themselves.
It's not like an AI can build Galleons to attack our Cities.
Besides, think of it this way: how many units does it take to capture a new AI City? More than 1? Yes, most definitely! So, how does the math work in our favour if we give away 1 City just to get 1 more unit for the fighting? Likely, you'll lose 3 or 4 units just to capture a new City.
Thus, we would give away 4 Cities (which would count as half Land Area and Population toward Domination, so it would be like giving away 2 Cities) just to gain 1 City. That math doesn't add up to me.
Finally, since the AIs are on separate islands, the AI garrison units that appear will NOT SEE BATTLE. It would a different story if an enemy AI were sending a Stack of Doom at our newly-captured Cities and we only had, say, 1 Maceman or 1 Horse Archer to defend each of our Cities. In that case, it would be nice for 2 defending units belonging to our vassal to appear. But, that case is not what we see here, since it's not a Pangaea-type of map.
It'll lower our Domination land percentage, but might make the war faster.
How? Give away the equivalent of 2 Cities to capture the equivalent of 1 City?
Besides, once we give away those population points, we can't get them back. They will be in our Vassal's hands forever.
So, while Final Score does not matter on your deathbed, it can still be nice to end the game with a very good score. We will get a noticeably lower score by giving away population points in this manner.
Probably just leaving them as they are is the best choice long-term (being the 15 turns long-term we've still left) . It was just a proposition.
And it does make sense in certain cases:
1. If Domination is a long way off and you can't afford to keep the Cities would be one example
OR
2. If the Cities are under threat by another AI and you can't get defenders of your own there in time would be another example
OR
3. If the AI can do more with the Cities than you can. Generally, you're talking about an Immortal or Deity level game, where an AI can grow the Cities faster, build things faster, and do lots of things better than you can, so it can make sense to give back Cities (as long as you are certain that the AI will never break away from being your Vassal), since an Immortal or Deity level AI will make good use of those Cities. Unfortunately, on this difficulty level, an AI will just waste the Cities
So, it's certainly a neat idea, but it shouldn't be necessary at all. As long as we start collecting Gold after learning Chemistry (i.e. go to a 0% Science Rate after learning Chemistry), such that we are using our Sliders only really for a Cultural Slider if we start to see unhappiness problems, then we shouldn't have to worry about running out of Gold in this game at all, even if we keep all of the AIs' Cities on the map.