Bit of context i tend to play huge marathon games, continents with 22 civs and 22 CS on immortal.
As a rule the general consensus has always seemed to be to puppet cities until they get quite big and then maybe annex them in the middle to late game but in my 2 recent games i have have large conquered empires and turned to annexing as soon as resistance has finished which i have found to be a much better way overall.
The game where i realised this was my first game which was a domination game so i had a huge puppet empire by the time i reached ideologies and obviously took autocracy and for most of the game i had really been struggling to keep my happiness in the positive with large periods of shutting down my founded cities to keep my happiness positive and as i started running out of options for my final push i decided to try annexing a few of the bigger cities so i could actually build happiness building which puppets never seem to do unless your empire is actually unhappy.
Short version is that i ended up annexing every puppet i had and queuing up all the happiness building they could build and quickly went from below 10 happiness to over 120 happiness so for all my cities past that point i annexed as soon as resistance ended and ended up with close to 200 happiness by the end of the game.
After that experience i decided in my next game i would deliberately annex every city as soon as resistance ended and tbh it is probably the easiest game i ever remember having. For the first time ever i actually was producing more culture than every other civ and also had more social policies than every other civ (info addict) by the end of the game i was 10 techs ahead of the closest civ and producing 3 times as much which was helped by the fact i had universities staffed with scientists in every city so was regularly popping scientist by by the mid game every 3 or 4 tech was bulbed.
I don't remember having less than 20 happiness for the majority of the game and never shut my cities down. As i was growing all my cities constantly i was swimming in gold and by the mid game i had control of most of the CS's although that didn't have as great an impact on my happiness as it could as most seemed to be coastal with whales but did help greatly with my culture.
I was helped in this regard as i was churning out so much culture i was able to fill liberty and take all the good patronage policies down to science from CS's before rationalism could even be opened as well as passively getting most of the CS quests as i was gaining the most techs, and churning out the most faith and culture
I managed to fill rationalism before ideologies became available when because i had such a tech lead already that i was able to get one out 150 turns before then next civ and also managed to get to archeology long before everyone else so was able to spam out archeologists with my numerous cities to gobble up all the artifacts not in other civs territories and was already familiar with most civs before the second civ chose their ideology which was order...they soon changed to mine.
I chose autocracy again as i had a huge puppet empire and was russia thus already had barracks in most of my cities and as most of my cities had courthouses which would then give an extra 3 local happiness.
I then switched most of my trade routes to internal either giving hammers to wonder building cities or food to help my cities grow quickly while turning out 150-200g per turn.
As i was already massively dominant i decided to take a culture victory which i managed just after reaching the modern age greatly helped by the vast store of faith i had accumulated with my religion and the fact that after taking 6 policies in autocracy i was able to quickly obtain the full tree of aesthetics so i could by great musicians.
This is only 1 and a half examples really but in future i am going to be sticking to my annexing policy as it just seems so powerful compared to the general annoyance of puppets, having to remove all their farms, having them building building you want and not ones you do etc. Using this way also i was even able to keep semi decent cities that could be built up into great ones rather than just keeping the best of the best to keep your happiness under control.
As a rule the general consensus has always seemed to be to puppet cities until they get quite big and then maybe annex them in the middle to late game but in my 2 recent games i have have large conquered empires and turned to annexing as soon as resistance has finished which i have found to be a much better way overall.
The game where i realised this was my first game which was a domination game so i had a huge puppet empire by the time i reached ideologies and obviously took autocracy and for most of the game i had really been struggling to keep my happiness in the positive with large periods of shutting down my founded cities to keep my happiness positive and as i started running out of options for my final push i decided to try annexing a few of the bigger cities so i could actually build happiness building which puppets never seem to do unless your empire is actually unhappy.
Short version is that i ended up annexing every puppet i had and queuing up all the happiness building they could build and quickly went from below 10 happiness to over 120 happiness so for all my cities past that point i annexed as soon as resistance ended and ended up with close to 200 happiness by the end of the game.
After that experience i decided in my next game i would deliberately annex every city as soon as resistance ended and tbh it is probably the easiest game i ever remember having. For the first time ever i actually was producing more culture than every other civ and also had more social policies than every other civ (info addict) by the end of the game i was 10 techs ahead of the closest civ and producing 3 times as much which was helped by the fact i had universities staffed with scientists in every city so was regularly popping scientist by by the mid game every 3 or 4 tech was bulbed.
I don't remember having less than 20 happiness for the majority of the game and never shut my cities down. As i was growing all my cities constantly i was swimming in gold and by the mid game i had control of most of the CS's although that didn't have as great an impact on my happiness as it could as most seemed to be coastal with whales but did help greatly with my culture.
I was helped in this regard as i was churning out so much culture i was able to fill liberty and take all the good patronage policies down to science from CS's before rationalism could even be opened as well as passively getting most of the CS quests as i was gaining the most techs, and churning out the most faith and culture
I managed to fill rationalism before ideologies became available when because i had such a tech lead already that i was able to get one out 150 turns before then next civ and also managed to get to archeology long before everyone else so was able to spam out archeologists with my numerous cities to gobble up all the artifacts not in other civs territories and was already familiar with most civs before the second civ chose their ideology which was order...they soon changed to mine.
I chose autocracy again as i had a huge puppet empire and was russia thus already had barracks in most of my cities and as most of my cities had courthouses which would then give an extra 3 local happiness.
I then switched most of my trade routes to internal either giving hammers to wonder building cities or food to help my cities grow quickly while turning out 150-200g per turn.
As i was already massively dominant i decided to take a culture victory which i managed just after reaching the modern age greatly helped by the vast store of faith i had accumulated with my religion and the fact that after taking 6 policies in autocracy i was able to quickly obtain the full tree of aesthetics so i could by great musicians.
This is only 1 and a half examples really but in future i am going to be sticking to my annexing policy as it just seems so powerful compared to the general annoyance of puppets, having to remove all their farms, having them building building you want and not ones you do etc. Using this way also i was even able to keep semi decent cities that could be built up into great ones rather than just keeping the best of the best to keep your happiness under control.
Annexing a city decreases happiness by a substantial margin until the Courthouse is built (or cash rushed); so if you wanted to delay a GA, it's more effective to annex the city early and just be tardy building the court house than keeping it as a puppet.
