Starving an AI city - won't work?

[Walter R]

Am I missing something here? I won my game by taking Monty's capital, but couldn't resist carrying on with the war. So I have taken all but his last city, which is 22 pop. Too big to capture with my happiness a bit low, so I pillaged everything in the area and blockaded the harbour, firing on the city every turn to keep it ready to capture. So just to be clear: this is G&K, he has no farms, fishing boats, pastures etc. etc. and no CS friends/allies passing him food (because they're all at war with him).
And that's been the way for ages, whilst I've got on with other stuff, but the pop has never moved. Now I'm pretty sure if he'd done that to me my city would be about 1 pop by now. What's going on?

 

[FeiLing]

Floating Gardens might help him a little bit. Maybe Hanging Gardens too?
In any way: You need to block every of his tiles with a unit permanently otherwise he can work it. And even an unimproved grass tile provides 2 food, so he won't starve (more with Floating Gardens). And there's also religion which might give him a tad more food.

Or just steal the land with a Great General. If you take all tiles of him and just leave him the city it usually starves down to size 2 rather quickly.

 

[Walter R]

Thanks, forgot about FG and religion. Well in a few more turns I'll get the commerce happiness boost, so I'll probably wait that out and then capture/puppet. If I'm honest I'm kind of putting off installing BNW by 'finishing' current game...

 

[Buridan]

sometimes the city just has a high reserve of food which needs to be depletted before cause the city to starve; it's not enough pillaging the tiles your units should finish their turn on a tile to prevent the city from working on them