HELP on conquering opponent's cities

[hwynboy]

Does anyone else have a problem when you start to attack another civ where you take a new city conquering their civ about one city every 2-4 turns and you end up going broke? I have all my sliders turned down to zero and I am so negative because of all the new cities maintenance and my army population as I keep building more army with my established city.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[johncross21]

Only keep the best cities (and avoid overlap)

look out for strategic resources, lots of grass land, wonders

Raze the rest.

 

[Silence101]

If you're taking one city every 2-4 turns, then it sounds like you don't have a problem with warfare. Still, I'm curious how your economy was before you started the war. You'll take an economic hit when you capture new cities, but it shouldn't make you go broke... keep in mind that you get a nice payout for taking a city. Taking a city every 2-4 turns should be turning a nice profit, I would think.

Still, over the long haul, you may need to be more picky about what cities you keep. I usually only keep about half of the cities I take... the well established ones with high populations. The crap cities that the AI builds can be easily replaced and cost more to upkeep than they're probably worth.

Playing a warmongering strategy means more than always being at war. For me, it means that I'm always either at war, or I'm preparing my war. The preparation means building units, looking at neighboring territories, comparing tech and diplomatic relations, and strengthening my economy. You need to take time between your advances to occasionally rebuild and strengthen your economy. As your empire gets bigger, you'll probably need to do this less and less as your economy should be exponentially more powerful than it was in the early years.

 

[xanadux]

You should only attack another civ if it is better than not attacking, and only keep a city if it is better than not keeping it. If a city is going to cost too much, and isn't going to contribute any time soon, better to raze it. If your economy isn't really ready to expand, you don't need more cities.

Sometimes you need to go to war and invade even when you can't keep cities. You may need to weaken an aggressive neighbor while you have an advantage, or kill a civ so you can later use their land.

One thing you could do is only keep enemy cities if they are in really key spots, or if they have high enough population to whip a courthouse (takes a size 8 city with a turn of production on it IIRC). High production cities should be kept because they can usually offset the maintenance temporarily by running wealth (one of the reasons currency is so important for large scale expansion). After the war is over, you can keep slavery for a while to try to whip some courthouses, and then switch to caste system ... then you can run merchant specialiasts to help out.

You should also remember that city maintenance has 2 components: distance from capital, and # of cities. Adding a city increases maintenance in all your cities. So don't keep that junky city in the desert that will never be worth anything, or even small cities that will take forever to contribute. You can usually just resettle the land later.

Also consider shorter wars, keeping only 1 or 2 cities at a time, then develop your economy, then another war.