What to delete: - gpt and - happiness?

The real worry is when you're caught in a war while suffering extreme unhappiness. Its something you never ever want to be in at all costs. Defeating enemy units become very difficult and forces you to use alot of tactics to overcome the lemming rush trying to crush your now weak units.

You might survive or it might send you into a death spiral.

It happened to me several times but I survived due to the fact I'm fighting the AI not human players. lol

I'm saying that it is only manageable if you're suffering extreme unhappiness DUE to being in a war and capturing cities. As long as you protect your weak units such as artillery/ranged from mounted/armor units, you're fine. You can also solve the unhappiness issue by selling your razing cities to another AI. Either that AI will liberate, puppet or raze that city. Liberate is the worst possible outcome but can be avoided if you choose carefully who to sell to. Usually I can't even get back into positive happiness until capturing Forbidden Palace and/or passing world ideology to offset the ideology pressure. A good example is the recent CDG #4 as Spain where one of the achievement is to raze ALL non capital cities on the map. I frequently dipped below -20, and at its peak I was razing 14 cities at the same time, and wished cities would flip so that I can capture them again with much reduced pop, hence reduced unhappiness.
 
I have read the whole thread. I have one question for Browd. But contrary to most replies, I think OP is actually in fine shape! I do agree that OP should probably be razing more.

I know I might be scorned for asking this, but I haven't razed a city since the end of 2014. And now it appears that any city I conquer only gives me three options:

1. Annex
2. Puppet
3. View City

When and wear can I raze? Be gentle lol. :)
 
It only gives these 3 options if the city is un-razeble. Capital cities (including City States), and holy cities are un-razeble. A holy city can be razed after it has it's holy status removed by an inquisitor. If you already conquered a city and chose keep it, you can later chose from the city screen to raze it (there is a big button approximately in the center-down part of the screen); puppets need to be annexed first.

Keep in mind that cities in resistance do not produce anything, but they consume resources. So they consume your happiness, gold for maintenance, etc. But they do not produce gold from terrain and markets, happines from buildings, science, etc. So if you have many cities in resistance it is normal to go into negative happiness and gpt, and if you keep pushing with conquest you will always have a number of cities in resistance at any given time. If you want to fix this quick there is a simple solution: sell the cities you don't intent to keep to an AI that will never pose a threat. This way you get your happiness back, don't pay for maintenance, and get some GPT in return. You can even sell a building before selling the city, it will not affect the cost of sale for the city.
 
Also if you puppet the city first and decide to raze it later, the city produces no output during the razing, even if it's not in resistance. Note that selling a city to an AI results in it keeping all population (not halved) and it is a good way to drain AI gold/happiness. The time to raze a city is equal to the population obviously so it becomes a major problem when you're culturally influenced/dominant with a civ whose city you conquer, due to population. It takes a very long time to raze a size 30 city for example.
 
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