Must I raze cities?

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ace99

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Sep 5, 2012
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I have an addiction to conquering large tracts of land, but it's not the land itself I want. It's all those sexy sexy cities I want to shove into the gluttonous maw of my obese empire.

Problem is it even though my economy stays strong, I keep up with techs and my civis are mostly ok, I find myself rapidly collapsing.

If I want to continue conquering sickening tracts of land, must I raze cities? Can I go half and half and raze the real crappy one's like I dunno Plymouth and Cherbough but keep Paris and Marsilles?

Also is there any circumstance where giving away cities helps? It seems to detrimental to stability to be of any use. I enjoy a good civil war as much as the next fellow but two or three in one game, while historical is perhaps too much.
 
Keep the best, burn the rest. If you want a large empire, it needs to be made up of fallen capitals. A city given away is counted as a city lost so its bad for stability either way, unless your liberating to your vassals iirc. Plus, as I 've recently been reminded, having more then one city in a core is asking for trouble from your enemies ressurecting.
 
You'll have to do some razing, yeah. Having more than one city in someone's core, especially a European, invites respawns. Portugal and Netherlands need only one city to respawn. However, the AI's city placement tends to be pretty bad, so you don't lose that much.
 
You get a -3 stability hit for razing by conquest. However you do not get any by disbanding after culture flipping.

So what I ususally do is capture the good city sites, raze useless cities until the civ collapse and the remaining cities turn indies. Then I wait and culture flip them as indies usually flip pretty fast.

This is how I understand giving away cities work: Gifting cities will give you a stability hit if you have under roughly 25 cities, even if you're liberating. The penalty is proportionnal to how fewer than 25 cities you have. So say you have 5 cities, it's a pretty big -stability hit. If you have 20, it's a small one. I you have more than 25, you get + stability.
 
iOnlySignIn said:
This has got to be the most unrealistic and stupid feature of RFC. C'est la vie.
Click to expand...

I think it's realistic, behaving like a barbarian should negatively affect your prestige. However it's really inconvenient because the RFC AIs settling habits are really awful. I suggested disabling the penalty a while back, until the AI could be improved in that regard.
 
Barbuesque said:
I think it's realistic, behaving like a barbarian should negatively affect your prestige. However it's really inconvenient because the RFC AIs settling habits are really awful. I suggested disabling the penalty a while back, until the AI could be improved in that regard.
Click to expand...

The thing is that because of the 1-city thing you're actually rewarded for burning and pillaging - and murdering, I presume. Why would anyone be more tolerant of your rule, and less likely to rebel, because you burned down most of the country apart from the capital?
 
Cosmos1985 said:
The thing is that because of the 1-city thing you're actually rewarded for burning and pillaging - and murdering, I presume. Why would anyone be more tolerant of your rule, and less likely to rebel, because you burned down most of the country apart from the capital?
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No one left to complain? :devil:

I view razing and founding of cities differently. Since we all know that there are cities and towns all over the map that we can't see, the cities in civ represent centers of administration. So when you found a city, you are setting up a "provincial capital" and when you raze a city your destroying an administrative center of the old regime, and trying and executing the old satrap. Leaving the old rulers and old centers of government intact is asking for trouble.
 
jammerculture said:
No one left to complain? :devil:

I view razing and founding of cities differently. Since we all know that there are cities and towns all over the map that we can't see, the cities in civ represent centers of administration. So when you found a city, you are setting up a "provincial capital" and when you raze a city your destroying an administrative center of the old regime, and trying and executing the old satrap. Leaving the old rulers and old centers of government intact is asking for trouble.
Click to expand...

Well that doesnt make any sense to me. You say that civilizations exist without cities. That throws out of the window whole consept of civ series and makes game largely arbitrary and impossible to define which ares of the world are inhabitet and wichs are not.
 
This has got to be the most unrealistic and stupid feature of RFC. C'est la vie.
Click to expand...
That's why I softened the stability feature in my games.
Keep in mind, there's also a stability penalty for the number of cities outside your core area, which is another incentive to raze. I cut it by 1/3, there're now some cool AI empires in my games.

Introducing buildings that giver per-city bonuses can also counteract that tendency.
 
Lone Wolf said:
That's why I softened the stability feature in my games.
Keep in mind, there's also a stability penalty for the number of cities outside your core area, which is another incentive to raze. I cut it by 1/3, there're now some cool AI empires in my games.

Introducing buildings that giver per-city bonuses can also counteract that tendency.
Click to expand...

Or just upping the stability bonuses from Courthouses and Jails (and increase the cap from 0 to +20 or something so you can build them while Stable and bank stability).

The biggest problem is the tech slowdown that comes from huge empires, which I suppose prevents the human player from steamrolling the world but seems like an odd balancing mechanism.
 
What if we scaled # of cities maintenance instead of tech rate? Maintenance should increase exponentially with number of cities, or at least more than it does now. This way, large empires aren't technologically penalized, but they have much more financial trouble, which sits with me better.
 
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