How do you deal with Loyalty when invading other civ?
- Thread starter DontTread
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Chefofrats
Prince
The best solution is to rush the capital. I always try to plan my invasions along the closest route from the border to the capital. In the cities along the way I use governors and religious conversion to my religion to help with loyalty. Chopping food resources for instant population growth helps too, as does building/repairing monuments.
Also, why raze the cities? If any flip to free status, you can recapture them. Even if they flip further, back to the original owner, they will still be easy to recapture. It seems such a waste to raze, unless they are horribly located and underdeveloped.
Also, why raze the cities? If any flip to free status, you can recapture them. Even if they flip further, back to the original owner, they will still be easy to recapture. It seems such a waste to raze, unless they are horribly located and underdeveloped.
Are you capping cities before you have a governor? That will always be rough.
A monument gives loyalty, so always repair as your first build in the new city. If it doesn't have one yet you can rush buy it. A unit left in the city gives loyalty. A double promoted Victor helps a lot, but to put your first 2 gov promotions into him is probably too steep a cost. Capturing more than the one city will build up loyalty pressure or you could make your own settler and plop the city down close-by to give loyalty pressure as well. A governor in the city gives loyalty and there are a couple of cards you can plug in if you have them researched.
If the city rebels concentrate on retaking the city rather than fighting the rebels. If you take the city they disappear. If you do have to retake that city though it will have even less population, so it will be even harder to keep the next time around. Sometimes you have to leave it free and cap another city. The free city won't exert the original civs loyalty at that point.
If you are in a dark age and the civ you are attacking isn't good luck. Sometimes if you can keep retaking the civ and stalling into the next age you can get them to go dark when you are not and that helps immensely. If it's Eleanor it's a further pain in the rear since her cities flip directly to her instead of to free. You take a grievances hit every time you recap it.
That or just build more units so you can take a couple cities at once.
A monument gives loyalty, so always repair as your first build in the new city. If it doesn't have one yet you can rush buy it. A unit left in the city gives loyalty. A double promoted Victor helps a lot, but to put your first 2 gov promotions into him is probably too steep a cost. Capturing more than the one city will build up loyalty pressure or you could make your own settler and plop the city down close-by to give loyalty pressure as well. A governor in the city gives loyalty and there are a couple of cards you can plug in if you have them researched.
If the city rebels concentrate on retaking the city rather than fighting the rebels. If you take the city they disappear. If you do have to retake that city though it will have even less population, so it will be even harder to keep the next time around. Sometimes you have to leave it free and cap another city. The free city won't exert the original civs loyalty at that point.
If you are in a dark age and the civ you are attacking isn't good luck. Sometimes if you can keep retaking the civ and stalling into the next age you can get them to go dark when you are not and that helps immensely. If it's Eleanor it's a further pain in the rear since her cities flip directly to her instead of to free. You take a grievances hit every time you recap it.
That or just build more units so you can take a couple cities at once.
Naw dude, cities flipping to rebellion can be an opportunity; the rebels spawn, which are (in my experience) never corps/fleets nor armies/armadas, so they're easy to squash for exp 
free cities are generally unwalled and not particularly strong either, so again, easy exp!
But yeah, like most other posters have mentioned, you usually want to either get the capital first, or capture the city with the highest population that you can reach and put a monument + governor + garrison in that city asap. Victor is usually best for this, due to his faster establish speed, defensive bonuses and ability to pacify nearby cities.
The two big things to note are the following:
1. Capital cities exert a crazy amount of Loyalty pressure. I've heard that as being doubled, but I don't have any sources to cite, so I don't know of the exact multiplier.
2. Loyalty pressure is scaled on Citizens, and covers up to 9 tiles away (the Loyalty pressure becomes 10% weaker per tile out). Cities with low population will flip very quickly if there's enough popluation collectively within 9 tiles.
It's usually very tempting to just poke and cap the cities that are at the edges of an empire, as they're usually sticking out the most and lowest in defense, but the trade off is that such cities are usually undeveloped and are likely to flip due to low population.
free cities are generally unwalled and not particularly strong either, so again, easy exp!But yeah, like most other posters have mentioned, you usually want to either get the capital first, or capture the city with the highest population that you can reach and put a monument + governor + garrison in that city asap. Victor is usually best for this, due to his faster establish speed, defensive bonuses and ability to pacify nearby cities.
The two big things to note are the following:
1. Capital cities exert a crazy amount of Loyalty pressure. I've heard that as being doubled, but I don't have any sources to cite, so I don't know of the exact multiplier.
2. Loyalty pressure is scaled on Citizens, and covers up to 9 tiles away (the Loyalty pressure becomes 10% weaker per tile out). Cities with low population will flip very quickly if there's enough popluation collectively within 9 tiles.
It's usually very tempting to just poke and cap the cities that are at the edges of an empire, as they're usually sticking out the most and lowest in defense, but the trade off is that such cities are usually undeveloped and are likely to flip due to low population.
City flipping is nice. You dont fight the rebels, just straight hit the city, so this is immediate recapture. Once recaptured, city is no longer considered as occupied, so less greviances on paece deal.
The only nightmare is Eleonor, she takes back cities without free city stage.
And how to deal with loyality depends on a civ. Generally keep an unit garrisoned and bring in governor. Victor first, as he has promotion giving additional loyality nearby
If you have religion founded, convert the turn you capture city.
Some civs are better at loyality:
- Spain can convert on capture and immeditely place a mission
- Zulus get additional loyality from units, somewhere similar to Persia
- Cree can plant a trader and negate loyality problems by crazy rapid growth
- Ottomans keep more population in captured cities
- Brazil get bonus ammenities from working copacabana / carnival projects, so you can run them even in core cities, that will normally not reach enemy with their pressure
and so on
And do not forget about more universal:
- loyality policy cards, quite a few
- entertainment / water park districts projects in nearby/captured cities
- rushbuy monument/ repair is always a must
- go further and take many cities
- buy every luxury you can! stop growing other cities so they don't consume bonus ammenities
The only nightmare is Eleonor, she takes back cities without free city stage.
And how to deal with loyality depends on a civ. Generally keep an unit garrisoned and bring in governor. Victor first, as he has promotion giving additional loyality nearby
If you have religion founded, convert the turn you capture city.
Some civs are better at loyality:
- Spain can convert on capture and immeditely place a mission
- Zulus get additional loyality from units, somewhere similar to Persia
- Cree can plant a trader and negate loyality problems by crazy rapid growth
- Ottomans keep more population in captured cities
- Brazil get bonus ammenities from working copacabana / carnival projects, so you can run them even in core cities, that will normally not reach enemy with their pressure
and so on
And do not forget about more universal:
- loyality policy cards, quite a few
- entertainment / water park districts projects in nearby/captured cities
- rushbuy monument/ repair is always a must
- go further and take many cities
- buy every luxury you can! stop growing other cities so they don't consume bonus ammenities
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In case the OP didn't read the other loyalty thread here recently, my post there would be relevant to this discussion, particularly what you said lol:
I had to deal with this soooo bad on my recent emperor Mali game. Eleanor's France Dow'd my ally Norway, and so my other ally Inca and I went to war with her (it was quite the love-triangle we had going on). Now she was way ahead of us all in culture and had been culture-creeping across the whole continent with those great works. She'd eaten up most of Brazil and parts of Arabia already, and if we didn't stop her, I might not have allies left by the time my starship arrived at its destination. Well, culture might have been her advantage, but economy, tech and military might were mine, not to mention a juicy new fully upgraded GDR that needed some field testing...
View attachment 541886
But as it turned out, her culture pressure was INSANE the moment I started capturing stuff. Even putting a governor in my newly captured cities wasn't enough. I realized that I'd have to take every single one of her original cities within a handful of turns or I'd start losing them back. So that's what I did. Between my airforce and naval bombardments, along with my GDR and modern armor I blitzed through France like Hitler in 1939. I was taking a city every turn, stacking policy cards for maximum loyalty bonuses, parking a governor in each one, and generally just bulldozing everything. Honestly I think that's the only way to take down a cultural monstrosity like Eleanor's France. Any slower and those cities would have been revolting faster than I could take them.
One other tip to consider: If you can't blitz that fast, try this - bombard your enemy's city defenses down to zero, then bypass the city and go on to the next. Station a melee unit near each city that you've pacified like this, and then, once you've got several defenseless like that, take them all in a single turn! Have your melee units move in all at once, taking every city that you'd previously softened up, and then boom, no more loyalty issues cause you got them all instantly.
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