City Capture Consequences?

[gruther4]

Hey there,

I have a couple of outstanding questions about how things may work. I realize that the answers to these questions are probably not available yet, but if they are and I missed them, please fill me in!

1) It has been mentioned that "occupied" cities cause greater unhappiness. Does this penalty go away over time or is it permanent?

2) When you capture a city, does the culture reset to 0 (as in Civ 4)? If so, do you lose the tiles that the culture earned? In Civ 4, this mechanism often caused a captured city to be almost useless, as the surrounding tiles were all culturally dominated by neighboring cities, and it had no land to work. Alternatively, do the purchased tiles (culturally, or by gold) of a city go to a conqueror along with the city itself?

3) Relating to question #2... Since culture apparently can't expand beyond 3 tiles of a city (confirmed?), will this reduce the problem of newly captured cities being swamped by neighboring borders?

4) Relating to question #2 again... does 0 culture mean that you have no workable tiles (ie, do ALL tiles need to be "purchased") or do you have a ring of tiles around your city for free (like Civ 4)? I'm sure this is known from screenshots, but I haven't heard the answer.

5) Does razing a city have any long-term consequences (besides losing a potentially productive city)?

In Civ 4 I often found myself razing captured cities just to move them over a square or two by founding my own. This probably wasn't optimal, but I liked having well-placed cities. The relatively low value of recently captured cities helped make this appealing. I'm thinking that a potentially permanent unhappiness penalty from captured cities may make this strategy even more appealing, unless there are some additional consequences to razing. Also, idle speculation is fun.

 

[Calouste]

2 and 4: I have seen a puppet state city in a screenshot that seemed to have the 6 hex ring around it, but nothing else. Draw your own conclusion from that. You definitely start out with the 6 hex ring around your capital initially.

5: Razing now takes one turn per pop, so not really useful except for small cities.

Puppet states in general seem to be a good solution when capturing a city. The main drawback, assuming that the AI who runs it isn't completely random and pays some attention to city growth, is that you won't be able to build units there.

 

[Babri]

Hey there,
1) It has been mentioned that "occupied" cities cause greater unhappiness. Does this penalty go away over time or is it permanent?

I don't think that it would be permanent. Once your culture absorbs the population (obviously requiring several turns) the unhappiness would most likely be gone but the increase in unhappiness due to increased no. of cities would remain.
I hope that this time around newly conquered 10 population city would not starve to 1 due to no space for working tiles.

 

[Tylerryan79]

When you capture a city you get all of it's tiles, no more waiting for a border pop. As to it's culture, I don't know.

 

[SalmonSoil]

When you capture a city you get all of it's tiles, no more waiting for a border pop. As to it's culture, I don't know.

I thought that culture was now a civ wide value, not one assigned to cities.

 

[gruther4]

I thought that culture was now a civ wide value, not one assigned to cities.

I believe that there is both... a city-specific culture level that is used to expand borders, and a global cultural level that is used to unlock social policies. (Please correct if this is wrong?) My questions above relate to the city-specific culture level... I assume that capturing a city wouldn't affect your global cultural level.

Of course, the city-specific culture level may be something akin to the food in a granary, and therefore wouldn't be a big deal if it were lost on capture, as long as the tiles gained by previous culture were kept.

When you capture a city you get all of it's tiles, no more waiting for a border pop. As to it's culture, I don't know.

Is this confirmed (getting all the tiles)? That has some big implications for the game, in my opinion.

 

[12agnar0k]

I believe its confiremd that if you capture a city, it keeps its original radius and thus "culture/gold" spent border.

 

[AriochIV]

I believe that there is both... a city-specific culture level that is used to expand borders, and a global cultural level that is used to unlock social policies. (Please correct if this is wrong?) My questions above relate to the city-specific culture level... I assume that capturing a city wouldn't affect your global cultural level.

Of course, the city-specific culture level may be something akin to the food in a granary, and therefore wouldn't be a big deal if it were lost on capture, as long as the tiles gained by previous culture were kept.

That's correct as far as we know: culture is produced per-city and appears to drive auto-acquisition of new city tiles, but then it goes into the global pool and can be spent on social policies.

It's not clear what happens to a city's purchased radius when you capture it -- it would be tough if it went all the way to zero, but at least you can buy it back out quickly if you have enough gold.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Exploit alert:
How can it be that if you capture a city you get all its tiles?
Given that tiles can easily be switched between cities in your empire, what's to stop the victim from swapping tiles to a safer city? Or assuming the tiles "belong" to the city from where you purchased them, does this mean it will be important for players to try whenever they can to buy tiles from cities that are more likely to be safer from capture?

Something doesn't sit right we me. Either some guesses here are wrong, info we've been fed is wrong or incomplete, or there are going to be strange unintuitive gameplay rules.

 

[mjs0]

I've been contemplating exactly this issue.
I'm hoping that 'ownership' in this context will still be determined by which city has put the most culture into the tile, not by who did the original tile acquisition or who is currently working the tile.

 

[The Leviathan]

Exploit alert:
How can it be that if you capture a city you get all its tiles?
Given that tiles can easily be switched between cities in your empire, what's to stop the victim from swapping tiles to a safer city? Or assuming the tiles "belong" to the city from where you purchased them, does this mean it will be important for players to try whenever they can to buy tiles from cities that are more likely to be safer from capture?

Something doesn't sit right we me. Either some guesses here are wrong, info we've been fed is wrong or incomplete, or there are going to be strange unintuitive gameplay rules.

Basically you're going to want to *gasp* protect you're city from ever being taken in the first place, instead of building around the fear of ever being conquered.

Also this is not a situation of exploit in the slightest. Firaxis will obviously have a system to determine which city gets which tiles if there are overlapping tiles between cities and one of them gets taken. Most likely it'll go to the city with the highest culture or the defender will keep his original tiles if another city can already work them

that's my guess anyway

 

[PieceOfMind]

The exploit bit is if it's possible to prevent tiles flipping to your enemy by switching their city and the AI does not know how to do the same.

As for city with the highest culture, isn't it the case that cities don't accumulate culture individually anymore? And if you wish to base it off the per-turn rate of culture from cities, then you still have the problem that that is easily adjustable as well, assuming it's possible to employ a specialist type that generates culture i.e. artist.

I know I'm not offering up much by way of solutions myself, but there are lots of ways to do this thing wrong.

 

[Schuesseled]

I'd imagine the tiles that leave with the city would be the ones the city actually culturized thereself. And if thats the case, then your less culturizing cities will be on the outskirts of your territory which are also the likliest to be captured, therefore no big dealio.

 

[Thyrwyn]

Cities still accumulate culture - at least in the short term - to fuel border expansion. Since in this model it appears that tiles do not belong to the empire (collective), rather they belong to the city that claimed them. Under this model, it would not matter which city was working the tile, the tile would "flip" when the city it belongs to changes hands.

That said, it is also possible that newly conquered cities revert to their initial 7-tile area, and its culture is reset to zero - though this raises interesting problems with capturing/re-capturing cities: either the game keeps separate culture totals for each civ that has ever owned the city, or holding an enemies city for a few turns will erase their hard earned culture. I could see it working either way - though I suspect that "city keeps its culture" is the way things will work.

 

[AriochIV]

When you create a Puppet city there is the expectation that you should be able to safely Annex it some time later, so one would hope that it gradually converts to the culture of your civilization over time. The Civ IV split ethniticy percentage was straightforward and easy to understand, but I also liked the earlier version (Civ III if I recall) were each population point had an ethnicity assoicated with it. I haven't seen any indicator for this in Civ V, but then I don't think we've had a chance to see the population rollover tooltip in the city screen.

edit: Actually we have seen it, though not in the clearest of shots.

 

[gruther4]

I believe its confiremd that if you capture a city, it keeps its original radius and thus "culture/gold" spent border.

This seems to be the big, unresolved question! Does anybody know if this has, in fact, been confirmed, and if so, where?

 

[AriochIV]

This seems to be the big, unresolved question! Does anybody know if this has, in fact, been confirmed, and if so, where?

I haven't seen any specific confirmation either way.

The videos give conflicting evidence. In the official E3 gameplay videos, when the French capture Tokyo, it does not retain the same city radius (it doesn't even have the full first ring of hexes, even after it comes out of resistance). In contrast, when the Germans capture Tenochtitlan in the GameStar video, it appears that the Germans gain all the formely Aztec territory, even while the city is still in resistance.

 

[gruther4]

I haven't seen any specific confirmation either way.

The videos give conflicting evidence. In the official E3 gameplay videos, when the French capture Tokyo, it does not retain the same city radius (it doesn't even have the full first ring of hexes, even after it comes out of resistance). In contrast, when the Germans capture Tenochtitlan in the GameStar video, it appears that the Germans gain all the formely Aztec territory, even while the city is still in resistance.

Thanks for the info, and references... that's a very good summary! It seems that we will just have to wait and see. Not much longer now, anyways!

The above speculation regarding the consequences of both alternatives is interesting. I agree that it seems like there may be issues with new tile ownership model. They have explained how we go about acquiring unclaimed tiles, but not how we might capture claimed ones. In Civ 4 it was all handled with culture, but I'm fairly certain it won't be as simple this time around. I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle this.