@DanQayle, scaling pillage to target progress that might be a good compromise. I suspect that this is harder to program than just flattening pillage back to 25s.
I suffer from the fact that I both want to play for the fastest time every game and also don't like tediously cheesy tactics. My dream is that one day the game will reward planning and building up your empire over pillaging everything in sight. I can think of a few ways to shift the game back this way:
1. Space projects cannot be chopped. This would make building large high-production cities much more worthwhile. It subtly annoys me that you have to find tundra cities and chop the Lasers there - I just can't get immersed in the idea that a Gulag camp is somehow turning wood into advanced laser stations...
2. Re-scale pillaging (in one way or another). This would make other sources of gold and faith more useful. At present, it is stupid to ever build a Bank (except for the boost)
3. Nerf city-flipping. This could be done by either making Builders spend a charge to repair a tile (though this would make natural disasters way worse), re-scaling pillage to the base 25s/50g, or allowing tiles that were pillaged never to be pillaged again (even if repaired). "City Chopping" would still be strong though unless the re-scale was done.
@ATEX, yes you are right that Babylon can take its time conquering (and may even benefit, since cities might have built up some infrastructure if you wait). I was thinking more that outside of Babylon, it will be much harder to get fast times in violent games because those tend to rely more on the snowball of getting cities fast, and City State Levy or Horseman rushes seem to be too slow and risky now.
