Capturing 2nd-hand cities

[Afterburner]

In my current game, I am playing Arabia. My Byzantine sometime-ally has cities that are placed in very obnoxious locations as far as my own territory is concerned. I would like to remove them, but now is not the time to open up hostilities between myself and Byzantium.

China, however, has foolishly declared war on both myself and Byzantium. And they just captured one of the cities I'd like to get rid of. And they're probably going to capture the other next turn.

My question: How angry will it make Byzantium if I capture the cities back from the Chinese and then raze them to the ground (in order to ensure that no underground Chines resistance remains, of course)?

 

[Seth the Dark]

I dont believe that it will make them angry. I've done that several times and I don't really notice a difference.

 

[Puppeteer]

I doubt there's resistance--there should be no Chinese citizens yet! And you're not at war with Byzantine. No prob I say. Keep the city.

 

[tR1cKy]

If there's more byzantine nationals than others, and you raze the city, you suffer an attitude hit toward byzantines.

 

[sealman]

To avoid the attitude hit, capture the cities, create workers and once the city is down to size one and has your national in there, disband it.

This is assuming that you don't want these cities yourselves. Oh, and you can always "gift" those workers back to the Byzantines to boost their attitude.

 

[Renata]

Most of that's wrong, Sealman. Starving a city will never get rid of the last foreign citizen. Best you can do is let it starve down to one, then either join one (or two*) of your own workers or let it regrow to pop 2 (or 3*) before abandoning it. Also, I don't think that gifting back a civ's native workers helps their attitude, at least not any more than giving them an equivalent gift of gold would, anyway.

I do agree with you in questioning why Afterburner would want to abandon them at all -- why not just starve them down to minimize the flip risk and keep them?

* I can never remember whether the criterion is half the population or majority of the population.

Renata

 

[Afterburner]

I do agree with you in questioning why Afterburner would want to abandon them at all -- why not just starve them down to minimize the flip risk and keep them?

1) My current borders would expand past the location of the cities in question if they were gone.

2) I could then build two new cities in better locations. These are pop 2 and pop 3 cities, perched in some really unproductive terrain (jungles and mountains) that the AI has yet to take advantage of. Seems silly to keep them when I could poop out a couple settler units from another nearby (native) city and build two new cities in more optimal locations.

 

[Theoden]

If you raze a city where they have the majority of the population then you will suffer a mayor attitude hit. Razing two cities of their nationalty will easily make them go from gracious to annoyed or from polite to furious. If it is really bad they might even change directly from gracious to furious.

 

[Renata]

1) My current borders would expand past the location of the cities in question if they were gone.

2) I could then build two new cities in better locations. These are pop 2 and pop 3 cities, perched in some really unproductive terrain (jungles and mountains) that the AI has yet to take advantage of. Seems silly to keep them when I could poop out a couple settler units from another nearby (native) city and build two new cities in more optimal locations.

Okay, that makes sense, particularly if they're closer to your capital than some half-corrupt towns in better terrain. Personally I'd probably keep the jungle town, though -- all that potential grassland is great stuff in the long run.

Renata