Plunder City

[Redaxe]

Should "plunder city" be implemented in the next Civ 5 expansion? (should we see another expansion, and I really hope we do)

The way I would see it is when you capture a city you get the option to sack the city where your Civ plunders treasure, destroys buildings, take great works of art (not writing or music) to place in your own cities and in the process the population of the city is slightly reduced. Plundering a city takes maybe 25% of the city population in turns to complete. I.e a 8 pop city takes 2 turns to plunder.

You need to keep a military unit in the city to complete the sacking. Once the city is plundered your occupying unit is withdrawn out of the city. The host city cannot be plundered again for maybe 30 turns but it can be recaptured and destroyed, puppeted or annexed but no further gold will be obtained by doing this. The city will not have a ranged attack for 3 subsequent turns but will be restored with 50% strength.

You may get some negative diplomatic penalty from nearby civs which would be expected to increase the more cities you sack and if you sack the same city repeatedly you increasingly risk being labelled a bully.

But this could be either used to punish or weaken nearby civs with less diplomatic penalty then capturing or destroying cities.
Alternatively you can use it for cultural victories to plunder other cities cultural artifacts and don't pretend this hasn't happened in human history, the British did it to Beijing and the Egyptian Pharoah Shishak did it to Jerusalem in the Old Testament book of Chronicles. Plundering cities is something that has been done from the ancient world to the 19-20th century colonial wars.

 

[DudewiththeFood]

I like this. I think there should be a way of crippling rivals without taking cities but that's kind of covered by puppets. I think that if you plunder a city then all/most of the buildings get destroyed, the population takes a massive hit and you take any great works with loads of money but don't actually own the city. To balance that, a plundered city can't attack for a number of turns but the health points are automatically set to full to stop people puppeting cities they have just plundered.

So basically plundering means you get loads of free stuff but you don't actually get to keep the city.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Something HAS to be done with plundering cities.

In Civ5 cities are automatically plundered (pop halving and sum of gold), but I think the benefits (for balance purposes I guess) are not sharp enough. For example a civ could live very well just plundering cities. The gold you get out of it in Civ5 seems anecdotic too much. You basically never conquer because of plundering, you conquer because it's good strategically. It could be good that a civ with no enemies, no need of space and with some extra units goes to plunder the enemy just to take its gold, like the barbarians did with the Roman Empire.

Plundering should grant great benefits but have drawbacks. For example, your reputation would be terrible once you plunder, and get more and more terrible if you plunder more. You would then become a hostile civilization in the eyes of everybody. Depending on how the AI is programmed, it could be very problematic.

If any addition of troups morale is done in Civ6, plundering could raise your troops morale. It would have a side effect : your soldiers would become troopers and be disappointed if you don't plunder more. Instead of raising morale, capturing cities would make morale variation more random, troops could even have a lower morale if not plundering. Your troops would be more self-centered also. Everything would be good with a good morale, but they would disband more easily with low morale. Maybe not all of your troops. Maybe only the general ruling them. You could have generals plundering and generals more serious. Or simply make it unit by unit.

To balance that, a plundered city can't attack for a number of turns but the health points are automatically set to full to stop people puppeting cities they have just plundered.

So basically plundering means you get loads of free stuff but you don't actually get to keep the city.

Not sure if I understand well. You mean you could punder a city without having captured it ? I assume that when you plunder a city, it's your own and you make it what you please.

EDIT : I think there's something to be done with walls/fire as to conquer/plunder cities. I think it's strange when soldiers throw flames above full fortified walls at the only strenght of their arm. I think big fortifications, tall and in stone, could not be attacked this way. So I think there could be something done with constructions in wood/stone and the size of the fortifications. Definitely like in Colonizations fortifications should be size differenciated. Additionnally any construction should be in wood or in stone, knowing that constructions in stone resist more to fire but cost more. (and you must find stone deposits)

 

[DudewiththeFood]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. The way I suggest it be implemented is when the city is reduced to 0hp and the screen comes up and you click plunder, the city reverts to the original owner. However, it can't ranged attack for a number of turns and most of the population is gone and all the buildings. The person who attacked gets any great works, loads of gold and a bonus to culture/science/etc equal to whatever the owner was making before it was plundered. The HP of the city would switch to full to stop it being immediately retaken and without walls/high population the defending strength would be lower anyway. Also, any units are captured or destroyed.

This would make a trade-off for whether you want to keep the city or whether you want a sudden boost or to cripple your enemy. This way there is an option akin to sack of Rome by Gauls and events like it.

 

[steveg700]

So I plunder the city, get a bunch of benefits on the spot, and then leave the loser the scraps to rebuild. After he rebuilds a bit (but not enough to have good defenses) I can come plunder him again. The alternative is to pass on all the instant benefits and keep the city, having to rebuild it myself so it can gradually start to generate gold, science, culture, etc.

What is the trade-off here? It's like playing the lottery. Who actually doesn't take the up-front cash option?

The problem with capturing cities isn't that plunder is unrewarding. It's that keeping cities isn't terribly rewarding, because terrain is simply not that important. The unhappiness of having city offsets the happiness created by any luxury resource it might have. As for strategic resources, the units that require have largely been nerfed into the ground. It's very rare to see a particular stretch of land as being precious in Civ V.

This is intentional design. Players complained about getting dealt bad hands by the map generator, and the dev response was essentially to make all hands fairly tepid.

 

[Redaxe]

Well I think the devs would have to implement a system to stop players abusing the 'plunder city' option. It shouldn't promote a city being repeatedly plundered and there should be very high diplomatic penalties for plundering the same city more than once.


Maybe the city can be flagged as plundered (where the flag icons for puppet or raze city are) for many turns which either prevents you from looting the city during that time or sharply reduces the amount of loot you can take.

But once a city has been plundered why would you want to come back and do it again soon after? You've already cleaned the city out and coming back again will risk heavy diplomatic reprisals