I can't help but noticing, that this is the second time that you are slightly criticizing my posts
Actually my post was aimed at the first person to use the term (though I didn't say as much, merely left a universal request irrelevant of User Identity, however the fault was obviously the person who started using the acronym), which would be Schuesseled, who I can be freely appalled at for whatever reason I wish, for he is 10 minutes my junior and thus I am vastly more important, obviously.
So please don't accuse me of not reading the thread or signalling you out as I wasn't.
Toodle Pip,
......
Now if we can get back on track, It would be helpful if people used the "OFFICIAL" term as used by 2kGreg, but so long as everyone understands whatever term is used I have no problem, the fact that it wasn't understood says otherwise, such as with the REX acronym, if you wish to shorten your words to decrease time spent typing, your responsible for any lack of understanding of others reading, so if you do not wish for people to understand anything you type that's fine, but don't expect them not to complain about it.
As I was saying time to leave the Grammar & Acronym arguing alone now, it has been explained what was meant by the unexplained acronym, and onto the correct topic.
If it's true, it doesn't make much sense to create puppet cities, especially when you have the tech to build courthouses.
Not true, you may be at -9 unhappiness if you puppet the newly acquired city, if you annex a newly acquired city you will become very unhappy, this will result in a combat and growth penalty till you build that courthouse, what if the mighty army of Ghandi is knocking on your door, would it not be better to puppet the city instead of having your empire destroyed after loosing your army, you can always annex it later when you can afford to become very unhappy or won't become very unhappy due to increasing happiness to begin with.
Puppet cities will be very useful to keep happiness levels in the positive.
In fact I can put it in another context, have you heard of the short term loan websites, like "wonga.com", well on one of these TV ad's they say
"wonga.com should only be used for short term financial solutions and should not be used as long term financial loans."
Think of Puppet states as a short term loan website, sure not annexing will save your unhappiness accumulating, but in the long term, annexing will have this unhappiness removed whilst the Puppet States lack of control is not good for long term planning, as such you may very well want to only use it for the short term whilst still conquering new cities so you don't get a -50% combat penalty, but in the long term, switch to annexing so you get control over production.