Is puppeting really cheaper than annexing with a courthouse?

[Kaigen]

As far as religious culture-generating buildings go, you have to weigh the cost of spending that faith on those buildings (just to offset the penalty) vs. using that faith on, e.g., late game Great Persons.

True, and that depends a lot on which era you are in determining how long it will take the building to pay itself back, and whether you need to pay down your faith reserves (pre-industrial era) to avoid generating a Great Prophet you don't need. In addition, if you are warmongering and conquering a lot of cities, you might need the happiness those buildings can provide more than anything.

Annexing also means that you can focus more of your empire's hammers towards international projects (I find that unless I'm playing Venice it can be difficult to get puppets to switch over to these), which can lead to free social policies and large culture boosts.

 

[Resipsa]

Representation says: Each city you found will increase the culture Culture cost of policies by 33% less than normal (not 3.33%).

Okay let me do a bit of math work; in BNW each annexed or found city increases Social Policy cost by 10%. Representation reduces the cost of policy acquisition of each new city by 33%. 10%incremental Social Policy Increase*(1-.33 reduction from Representation)=6.67% reduced incremental social policy cost

 

[Fragamemnon]

I've been a huge fan of puppet empires before BNW but the per-city science hit on them really hurts if you are trying to get ahead in the tech . If you care about staying ahead I strongly suggest annexation. Even with Secularism and free thought on trading posts the science output from a normal sized 7-10 puppet is pathetic. Two pathetic puppet outputs basically nullifies the rationalism opener.

edit: This, along with the need to invest in Merchants of Venice instead of early academies, is one of the reasons why I really don't like deity Venice very much. Thank heavens Industrial Espionage exists in Autocracy.

 

[Browd]

Making the 5% penalty even worse for puppets: not only do puppets not prioritize science buildings or work scientist slots, they have a 25% haircut to the science they do generate.

 

[Staal]

In my opinion the 5% penalty is a good thing. Made no sense that there was little to no reason to annex a puppet. Now it is a steady balancing act. Not too fast expansion and puppet when happiness allows. It makes sense that you should WANT to annex but can puppet if you gain too much too quickly.

 

[joncnunn]

Scanning the thread; I didn't see anybody mention the real cost of annexing which isn't the 4GPT, but is instead that congratulations, you now have yet another city that you need to have built the buildings for all remaining national wonders that you haven't built yet.

For me, that city must be really good, such as a former capital. City states married via Austria's UA may also count.

If you're going to do this, you should probably establish an internal sea cargo hammer route to the city to help catch it up on basic buildings that burned down during the fighting that haven't been reconstructed.

Note that puppets appear to love to build the basic buildings that allow you to store great works already; that's typically not a reason to annex. It's often getting it to build science buildings.

 

[bc1]

The main issue with annexing is the hapiness hit / courthouse costs. 10% increase in policy cost means the new city must be able to contribute 10% of empire culture per turn to break even, which is achievable

 

[stoz]

Does anyone know how the 10% additional culture cost stacks?

Eg:
* Next policy costs 1,000 culture and I only have my capital (1 total city).
* I add a new city, now the cost is 1,100 and I have 2 total cities.
* I add another new city. Is the cost now 1,200 or 1,210?

So is it 10% of my base cost or 10% of my current cost?

 

[Deau]

Representation says: Each city you found will increase the culture Culture cost of policies by 33% less than normal (not 3.33%).

I think the extra Social Policy cost is quite a difference if you annex, and like others have said, the SP benefits can be quite powerful depending on the timing of when you acquire more cities.

33.3% of the normal increase. The normal increase is 10% per city. Hence, with representation, the increase is only of 6.67%. In GnK, it was 15% per city - 10% with representation since 33% of 15% is 10%.


As for my contribution to the OP. The beakers cost increase applying to puppets from the get go has made me use the following strategy: of all cities I would've kept in GnK, Annex all that have some real self-sufficiency potential and are not broken far isolated. Raze or sell/gift the others with the following exceptions:

Puppet a deemed average or bad city if there is an emergency need to heal units for fast paced progression or if it's the only way to achieve bomber range on next target city.

The 5% science increase is really minor when going wide since its linear but at the same time, puppets don't really increase your SP rate anymore. The -25% penalty is such that by the time puppets actually build culture infrastructure, it has built nearly everything else possible. And I just don't see +10 GPT from a lame puppet with the inherent risk of a GM pop from GPP worth the 5% beaker cost increase.

 

[Deau]

Scanning the thread; I didn't see anybody mention the real cost of annexing which isn't the 4GPT, but is instead that congratulations, you now have yet another city that you need to have built the buildings for all remaining national wonders that you haven't built yet.

For me, that city must be really good, such as a former capital. City states married via Austria's UA may also count.

That's almost only relevant of early game captures. Mid game + ones you should already have all the essential nat wonders and oxford is a non issue since even with only an average annex, uni and pschool will be a bare minimum.

Or rather, I know I tend to get NC/EIC/Circus before I begin to annex but then again, I don't do so much early game rushes.