Gifting cities to vassals

[dalamb]

I'm resuming an old Earth 18 Civs game where my Spanish are demolishing most of Eurasia but have vassalized Mansa, Saladin, and Asoka. When I conquer cities near their borders that aren't particularly good, I can either raze them or take them and gift them to my allies. Are there any guidelines for how to pick?

For example, here's my current target, Persia.

I was thinking of gifting Susa to India and Ecbatana to Arabia. I intend to keep Gordium in the NE partly for keeping contiguous territory, but the other northern cities look quite poor. Should I raze them or give them away?

[Stewie0416]

I had the different but related question in R&F of Civ. Of course, I wanted to gift a few cities to my vassals because my stability was near collapsing and I found that I actually couldn't! But onto your game, its seems like a pretty good idea. I would pretty much do what you said except don't keep those northern junk cities. Just trash them!

[dalamb]

It turned out that I was able to gift Susa to Asoka, but not able to gift Ecbatana to Saladin. Apparently there was no Arabian culture on the city tile -- I captured Ecbatana, then tried to trade with Saladin, and it didn't get listed as one of the choices. Whereas when I captured Susa, one of the options was to "liberate" it to India.

[Foamy7]

Keeping the junk cities is probably a better idea than razing them. Other AI's can't resettle there, and it counts towards the domination limit.