Should I accept this trade? Can I convert traded cities into puppets?

Hey,
Story: I had a really terrible game, barbarians were taking away all my workers/settlers, I had no luxury/strategic resources around, everything was building so slow and every time 'great work' got completed, I was almost last in it. Suddenly, a rich civilization declared war on me, I had a good idea to take out all crossbows, musketmans and make a 'barricade' so they don't get past my borders (there were many mountains around and they would need to walk 3x more distance to get in by another way)..
Short story long - I killed around ~15 of their troops and lost only 3.. I rushed with every single troop (took all garrisons) to their borders and started capturing all cities one by one. They started flooding peace tready trades, but I declined all of them, wanted to puppet as many cities as I can (I was ready to lose all my troops, for the sake of better game and hope to not being below avarage)..

And now, after I captured their capital, this interesting trade popped up..


He's offering all his cities (except capital), resources and gold. That sounds delicious, but I already have too many cities and it's problematic to keep my empire happy, I don't want any more cities, that's why Im puppeting all of them. If im going to accept this trade, will I be able to convert them into puppets? Getting so many cities will only do bad in my opinion. I don't have enough troops to capture them all (for now), I have around 5 crossbows and 2 musketman left.

EDIT: I'm playing Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls) mod, no DLCs.

You are right to be leery of taking that many cities -- the happiness hit will be severe. You will get the option of puppeting them after the peace treaty is agreed. The better plan is probably to just take his gold, gpt and resources, and reject the cities.

those city names seem oddly familiar... is morrowind being sold in a peace deal?

It would be tempting to take some of them (maybe not all) and then sell the cities to other players. if you pass up on a couple of cities, ask for some GPT to the deal.

You would need to know ahead of time which cites were the most valuable in terms of lux ect.

If there are still 5 other players in the game, chances are good you could unload 5 cities, and that would basically eradicate this civ from the game, leaving you with the best cities.

JeSuisNapoleon said:

those city names seem oddly familiar... is morrowind being sold in a peace deal?

It would be tempting to take some of them (maybe not all) and then sell the cities to other players. if you pass up on a couple of cities, ask for some GPT to the deal.

You would need to know ahead of time which cites were the most valuable in terms of lux ect.

If there are still 5 other players in the game, chances are good you could unload 5 cities, and that would basically eradicate this civ from the game, leaving you with the best cities.

Click to expand...

Doing this optimally will transform your game. Offer the same city to everyone else, and you'll see who'll pay the most (naturally). Among those most interested, see if any of them have a lot of gold. Sell them the smallest city. And then sell them the next-smallest. You'll see that the amlount they pay jumps. By the time you get to a third or a fourth, you'll probably have cleaned out their treasury. Now move on to the next customer.

If I take cities and then trade them away, how will this affect research/policies? How about penalties?

As long as you puppet them and don't annex you'll be fine.

I accepted all the cities and made them as puppets.. I traded two away and according to my calculations, in ~10 rounds I could make my people happy (I currently have -17 happiness).. I'm thinking about keeping rest of the puppets for teh science!
Edit: I was right, I now have 0 happiness (meaning they're happy).

I believe there is a science penalty per city, which includes puppets. Food for thought.

If they are large in population and have universities, then it might be worthwhile to keep them. If you have the rationalism policy that yields science from trade posts then you can spam posts in the puppets and that will make up for the science penalty in many cases. Otherwise... you are realy only at science parity with a smaller empire.

still, i think the right thing to do is keep some of the better cities. Almost always worth it, especially when there are roads pre-built and you get lots of city connection gold.