Dealing with puppets

[Slowpoke]

Supposing you are playing a balanced game, and don't go the ignore happiness/raze all, what's your strategy for dealing with puppets? For the most part, unless they have luxuries, wonders or their colloseum doesn't get burned down, they seem to do more harm than good. Quite frequently they will sit for several dozen turns without building a colloseum (building walls/monuments/granaries), forcing you to build the more expensive, draining happiness buildings in your normal cities to keep up. Then when you decide to build a courthouse, their efficiency goes down to maybe a mere +2 or 3 gold.

So if it isn't a useful city, is there a good way to get them to do what you want, should you sell them for profit, or raze them and rebuild? Selling for profit in theory sounds best, but this leads to pissing off whoever you sell it to because you are now close to them. I tried it out once and immediately the civ I sold it to went hostile.

 

[yanner39]

I usually see if it has a luxury resource or not and I pretty much put trade posts everywhere to limit it's production power so that I don't get a Armoury I don't want. I hate the fact that you can't see what building the Puppet has. Having a coloseum or a theatre would be a no brainer I think.

 

[Slowpoke]

I usually see if it has a luxury resource or not and I pretty much put trade posts everywhere to limit it's production power so that I don't get a Armoury I don't want. I hate the fact that you can't see what building the Puppet has. Having a coloseum or a theatre would be a no brainer I think.

Yeah the only real way to do it is to squint your eyes and look for a colloseum next to the city, or record your happiness before and after puppeting

 

[Perkus]

There are mods that allow you to view puppet cities. "View Puppet Visibilty", available now, and my own "View Puppets" which should be up here in Downloads soon and in the mod browser also.

In order to encourage puppets to build colosseums, circuses, etc. let your happiness drop below 0 - I'm fairly sure they do respond to cues of your empire's general state, it should be running the same AI logic that AI civs use to run their own cities. You should time it when the puppet is about to build a new city. If you can briefly artificially drop happiness for a turn or two, it should give you some control over their buildings. (Remove garrisons if using that social, removing a road to cut trade route if using that social, pillage your own luxury improvs, any other ideas?). I haven't specifically attempted to exploit this yet, but it seems doable.

 

[aimlessgun]

From the upcoming patch preview:

-City - Add a Puppet city strategy that turns off training buildings and emphasizes gold. (new 10/14)

Not entirely sure what that means. If it just means they will build wealth, build wealth is being buffed to 25% of hammers so it won't be totally worthless I suppose.

EDIT: My experience circumstantially confirms that if you are unhappy your puppets will go for Colosseums. Current game 75% of my puppets are working on Colosseums after I've been in unhappy for a while.

 

[Daniel D]

I'm thinking of pumping out a quick settler for every city I take and just razing/replacing in my next game rather than deal with happiness issues while the courthouse is being built and then have to lose all that productivity building the courthouse itself.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Actually, I think they'll just prioritize gold, instead "default" behavior. So less growth and more money.

 

[ccubed]

If you want to exploit what is surely a UI bug, you can hit F2 to get the production screen and click on puppets to change what they're producing. Again, this is clearly not intended, so use at your own moral peril (Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus sees what you do at night!)