Should I have kept the city?

[Darth Tribble]

Hello!

It's been awhile since I have played Civ5, so I am starting on chieftain since I have not played it that much and am trying to get reaccustomed to things.

My current game is on a standard world with continents. I am playing as Persia and my neighbors are Arabia and China to the south.

For the most part, I have been keeping to myself by building improvements, mapping out the coastline of continents and battling barbarians.

Well, Zetian starts acting like my best friend and making generous deals and then later she pops up and wants me to go to war with Rashid. I agree only to avoid upsetting the only friendly nation on my continent.

I invaded Damascus near my border and after a few turns, I puppet it. Since I am trying to keep up my happiness, culture, and science, I give it to Zetian. A turn later, Rashid offers a peace treaty and also gives me his gold resource and diamonds. When I owned Damascus, my happiness was 20, but when I gave it up it became 25. As of my last turn, it is 35.

Was it wise to trade Damascus to another civ, or should I have kept it and took a small hit?

 

[darkskies]

Well capital cities are usually best kept for yourself as they often have good resources, did you check to see if it had good food/production luxuries or any wonders? At chieftain happiness is seldom a problem anyway. And if you decide to go for a military victory you'll just have to recapture it.

 

[Darth Tribble]

Well capital cities are usually best kept for yourself as they often have good resources, did you check to see if it had good food/production luxuries or any wonders? At chieftain happiness is seldom a problem anyway. And if you decide to go for a military victory you'll just have to recapture it.

It had a natural wonder literally right next to it but did not pay it much attention until I gave it away. Also, Damascus was not a capital.

 

[fyar]

If it had a natural wonder... then yeah, you probably should have kept it. But that doesn't mean you can't take it back from Wu at some point.

Don't worry, it sounds like you're well on your way to winning this game with or without Damascus.

 

[Darth Tribble]

Well, China wiped out Arabia and has the strongest military on the continent.

They ended up with "Guarded" as theor stance, so I swept into Damascus and puppeted it.

All the nations think I am a warmonger, Germany wiped out 2 nations and he and Rome have over 700 points while I am almost at 400.

We are in the renaissance and the year is 1600 something.

At first, I liberated Damascus and revived the Arabs but they still hated me, so I loaded up an autosave and kept Damascus this time.

 

[darkskies]

It had a natural wonder literally right next to it but did not pay it much attention until I gave it away. Also, Damascus was not a capital.

Ooops yes, not the capital I had capitals on my brain. Other points still valid of course. And the AI's sometimes build wonders in other than capital cities so always good to take stock of what a city has and it's future potential as well as any strategic value it might have (can it be a good base for future attacks etc.).

 

[danaphanous]

Best of luck getting back into civ! I wouldn't stay on chieftan too long though as the AI are quite slow at the lower levels. You may not think it but in a lot of cases you do better if the AI does better due to better trading. Did you do anything with religion? It can be fun to master that and it can help a lot of happiness enabling you to keep quite a few more cities.

 

[beetle]

At first, I liberated Damascus and revived the Arabs but they still hated me...

Hate does not matter. They will still give you WL votes. Liberating lowers your warmonger score so that is very helpful for pacing future conquests. But you won't really be challenged until you up the difficulty level.