evacuation

[Mewtarthio]

Originally posted by judgement
The problem with refugee/immigrant units that are free to build, however (and especially if you can build more than one per turn) is that it become relatively easy to move a large city over to an adjacent tile in a short amount of time. Simply build a settler, then abandon the city or whatever you need to do to make all its people into refugees/immigrants, then settle them all into the new city that the setller build right next door. You wouldn't do it for one of your own cities, since you'd lose all the improvements, but it might be somewhat of an exploit in a newly conquered city, especially since you could send the refugees off to your core, where they'd be unlikely to cause a culture flip, and bring in immigrants of your own nationality to instantly have a large new city of your own. This sort of thing should of course be possible, since forced relocations have happened throughout history, but it shouldn't be too easy, and I fear that might be the result of population-units that could be instantly built/drafted.

How about making a base gold cost for buiding a refugee? It would not be economical to move your captured citizens around. Also, if you are at war and make a refugee that has the same nationality as your enemy, you would have to guard them with military units or they'd flip over to their fatherland and try to run away. Also, you must keep a certain foreign refugee : military unit ratio, or the refugees may stage a rebellion. You could wind up with injured military units and all the refugees dead, or, if there are a whole lot of foreign refugees, your soldiers might die and the refugees take their weapons and convert into some new military unit that can join cities (guerrilla would be a good name for this, but that's taken). Refugee units of different nationalities might be able to occupy the same square, depending on various factors (culture, religion, etc.) If, say, your religion has a holy war against the other refugees, your refugees may try to kill the others. Also, refugee units could be captured, but they would have the same downsides as a foreign national refugee (since that's what they are). Finally, you can massacre foreign refugees under non-representative governments, but doing so would cause a reputation hit and would reduce war weariness in representative civs that are at war with you. It would also cause unhappiness in your own civ, unless you have a holy war against the victims, and it would have a chance of initiating a revolution (giving you a nasty period of anarchy).