[BTS] Developing caputred cities

[fid]

Hello all,

I've got a strategic question about the plans for captured cities. How do you treat them in general?
Especially in mid and late game, when I capture a city, it is quite useless... First, most of the buildings are gone (excluding the wonders of course), then the AI on Monarch (my current level) does pretty terrible job when it comes to tiles improvement. After conquering a several cities I end up with higher maintenance, divided and injured army and those several cities requiring dozens of turns to build the core buildings like granaries, libraries, courthouses, etc. and rearrange the tiles improvements, wait for the cottages to grow and so on. All this when each turn is valuable and several turns might change the game. This is really annoying if there's little food (like tundra or deserts+hills - the resources are nice but the city can't reach a size higher than .. 4-5 O.o)

how do you approach this problem? Do you still go for city specialisation, examine the city surroundings and decide how to develop it? Raze them? A 'junior-science city' with 10 beakers (and not much potential for higher values soon) is not worth the maintenance when my whole empire produces 500 beakers per turn...

Regards,
fid

 

[unas876]

There are a lot of different options depending on the situation but generally think of what Absolute Zero has taught a lot of us in his youtube playthroughs:

If you can't realistically reintegrate the cities into your own empire (say you're fighting against someone across the continent), you wait until the cities come out of revolt, whip them down for more troops and after you have vassaled the civ you just give them back to the original owner. Thats for your standard conquest type game. It makes your vassal like you more and you don't have to deal with the maintenance. You don't have to sit a bunch of troops on the city to prevent revolts but instead you can use those troops upfront and frankly: its less micro and less of a hassle.
But thats general advice and doesn't apply to every scenario.

As always, for detailed advice you're gonna have to post a specific game.

 

[rah]

Ditto except for a couple of items. If I'm planning on wiping out the civ then I'll just keep the cities and continue whipping the crap out of it for troops. If it's the first civ I'm conquering and there's going to be enough time left in the game, I'll take the time to develop a couple of the better cities. I man even build the FP in one if it's farther away.

 

[Pangaea]

It naturally depends on the game and your plans, and how badly the AI has managed it. If it's one of those knuckledragger cities where they've done cottage-farm-workshop-cottage ad inf, it's probably best to whip it to smithereens, or just give it away. Sometimes you get cities with plenty of cottages and a good bunch of surviving buildings, and these are well worth keeping. Tundra is a bit crap, so here it may actually be best to raze it.

Boring answer, but "it depends".

 

[lymond]

Depends on timing, ofc, too. If city has good land and it is early then I will developed it based on what it is suited for, or need. If quite later in the game, I probably just turn a poorly developed city into a workshop/watermill/windmill production city.

 

[6K Man]

I whip unhappy citizens and starving citizens, at the very least. Sometimes for infrastructure and sometimes for troops.

Building ‘core buildings’ means either pop-rushing (Slavery) or buying (Universal Suffrage) them, ideally. And once you get to Communism and State Property, you can ignore Courthouses. If I’m not running Slavery or SP or US I tend to raze more often.

By the midgame Workshops and Watermills start to become viable, and I tend to specialize captured cities along those lines. Even if you expect the game to last another 50-100 turns, Cottages are seldom worth building, unless it’s a former core city of an AI with mature Towns.

I’ve also found AI cities with 3-4 settled Generals, that are obviously a good place to build Military Academies.

 

[SnipedSoul]

If the game will last a while (space), then emancipation cottages are not bad. Otherwise, I will normally be in state property, so hammer spam brings cities online quickly. You don't really need many buildings. Just a granary, barracks, and production boosters will make any city pull its weight whether through units or building wealth.

Another strong strategy is to farm it up and use it for whipping and drafting. You usually have enough resources where you can stack a ton of anger before the city is not productive. Running the culture slider can prolong this even more in the final stages of a domination push. Biology farms and Kremlin-boosted whips are very productive.

If you are going to vassal the civ, just give the city back to them if you get crushed by culture.

 

[dutchfire]

Maximise production and build wealth is often the easiest. Often, I'm not really short on workers in the conquering phase (e.g. cuirassier break-out). My homeland was developed properly and doesn't need many workers any more, and I might have captured a couple of additional workers from the civs I'm conquering.