Can't capture a city - what's going on?

[Berrern]

Hi,

Long-time player here (since the original Civ 1!), still getting to grips with Civ7 - I'm about 190 hours in.

In my last game, I encountered a new problem - a city that couldn't be captured!

See for yourself:

Having destroyed all of the districts and units, the city wouldn't flip. So I kept sending in units until all of the city's tiles had a unit on it - and the city still wouldn't change hands!

What is going on here? Has anyone come across this issue?

Shortly after this I got the Manhattan project built and won the game, so I guess the next step is to nuke the hell out of Osage and see if that changes anything...

 

[kaspergm]

Not really an expert and can't read the map at all, but I remember there have been threads about this before where the issue was some wonder that also counts as a defended tile and needs to be conquered before the city being taken over. Could that be the explanation here?

 

[Berrern]

Good point! The tile circled in red here has such a wonder. But as you can see it's well conquered... Might be a bug?

 

[Berrern]

I continued the game, grabbed his other 3 cities around this one, and then used 5 nukes to ensure that the whole Osage area was destroyed.
But I still couldn't capture the city!!

I believe it's due to that wonder in the red circle, the Red Fort. For whatever reason, every time I end a turn, that tile pops out the message "District defenses destroyed", so I believe there's a bug related to this wonder.
I wonder if this is the same if the roles were reversed, i.e. if I built the Red Fort, would the AI not be able to conquer that city? Would be an interesting experiment - but I play on Deity and building wonders isn't exactly easy...

 

[Haig]

I guess it was your personal Stalingrad.

 

[MutilationWave]

I continued the game, grabbed his other 3 cities around this one, and then used 5 nukes to ensure that the whole Osage area was destroyed.
But I still couldn't capture the city!!

I believe it's due to that wonder in the red circle, the Red Fort. For whatever reason, every time I end a turn, that tile pops out the message "District defenses destroyed", so I believe there's a bug related to this wonder.
I wonder if this is the same if the roles were reversed, i.e. if I built the Red Fort, would the AI not be able to conquer that city? Would be an interesting experiment - but I play on Deity and building wonders isn't exactly easy...

I had the same issue with a city that had red fort. I did the same as you and had a unit in every tile. At the time I thought it was because I couldn't destroy the enemy aerodrome commander, but maybe the fort is bugged somehow.

 

[CivKirk64]

I just captured the Red fort in my current game, the city centre first and then the Redfort a turn later and the city flipped. So it's not a bug triggering in every instance.
If it helps, this happened last weekend, I haven't played post Pangea patch yet, not sure the timing on yours if this is new or since day one.