Puppet cities need to be nerfed

[Antarion]

The biggest thing they have to remove is the ability of puppet cities to add to your cultural pool without increasing culture costs; totally counter-intuitive and easy to take advantage of.

thats simple not right. you dont get easier culture if you got plenty of puppets. ok in the beginning they often build a monument and even a temple or monastery if they can. but 1st this takes ages normally even if you build trading posts on hills, because puppepts wont growth then.
2nd i got enough experience to tell you that in modern times you will easy get 50 culture in your controlled cities and maybe like 5 in a puppet cose they dont focus on opera houses, museums and broadcast towers even with full power of railroads and communism it take ages to develop cultural buildings for them.

reaching a solid culture victory is easiest without many puppepts but focus on wonders in every city with an early democracy plus piety full in long term. some culture wonders in addition are great thats the most important way to get an culture victory.

only exception to this is imho some puppepts with songhai, cose of the ultra imba UB in the early game.

 

[Rohili]

I think there is nothing wrong with puppet city. Everyone keeps talking about 1 city capital and something like 10 puppet city... Obviously the problem is there.

It's way to easy to conquer the AI, in a multiplayer game this strategy would realy be dangerous (Like war should always be)...

Well, of course part of the problem is that it is too easy to steal cities from the AI, but making the AI more proficient in combat is much more difficult than changing puppet city mechanics. So it makes sense to focus on the latter rather than the former.

 

[Slowpoke]

Well, of course part of the problem is that it is too easy to steal cities from the AI, but making the AI more proficient in combat is much more difficult than changing puppet city mechanics. So it makes sense to focus on the latter rather than the former.

Well changing tactics so making it harder to conquer is impossible, but changing A.I. strategy to make conquering harder is easy, as most mods have done. But like I said, it doesn't cure the fact that puppets are just boring.

 

[alpaca]

thats simple not right. you dont get easier culture if you got plenty of puppets. ok in the beginning they often build a monument and even a temple or monastery if they can. but 1st this takes ages normally even if you build trading posts on hills, because puppepts wont growth then.
2nd i got enough experience to tell you that in modern times you will easy get 50 culture in your controlled cities and maybe like 5 in a puppet cose they dont focus on opera houses, museums and broadcast towers even with full power of railroads and communism it take ages to develop cultural buildings for them.

reaching a solid culture victory is easiest without many puppepts but focus on wonders in every city with an early democracy plus piety full in long term. some culture wonders in addition are great thats the most important way to get an culture victory.

only exception to this is imho some puppepts with songhai, cose of the ultra imba UB in the early game.

The point is: Your own cities increase social policy cost, while puppets don't. If you do the math, you will find out that your own cities turn a loss policy speed-wise if you even just run a couple of cultural city states, unless each of your cities produces huge amounts of culture (and I mean broadcast tower in every city huge). Puppets, on the other hand, just increase your policy speed, even if they don't produce a lot of culture. So you can have your cities that focus on wonders to get the +100% bonus AND puppets that generate money.

In my opinion puppets shouldn't produce culture and their science and gold output should be reduced to 75%. 25% and being able to control them is enough in my opinion to make you want to annex cities for long-term benefits (especially with purchasable courthouses) but not so much that keeping puppets around is just always wrong.

 

[Namaspamus]

The biggest thing they have to remove is the ability of puppet cities to add to your cultural pool without increasing culture costs; totally counter-intuitive and easy to take advantage of.

Agree. I don't think they should increase policies cost, but they shouldn't bring culture either.

I think a good way to address puppets would be to reduce their science, culture, and gold contributions to your empire by 50%. Then give one of the patronage social policies a dual role in allowing puppet cities to contribute 75% or even 100% (just like they are now).

Maybe even reduced by 75% without special social policies. They would be quite useless but:

-you weaken your enemies

-you get the resources if any

-you still annex whenever you want

 

[Scilly_guy]

What about if they auto Annexed after so many turns, lets say 100, or 75, on standard speed. It makes sense really, if you capture a city right at the start of the game, lets say 2000bc, by 100ad the people should have stopped considering themselves part of another civilisation.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

1) Put a cap on how many puppet cities a player can have. For example, you might be limited to 2 puppets for every non-puppet city you own. Players will then be forced to build more of their own cities (or annex enemy cities). That way, you can't have your cake and eat it too - if you want a large empire, you must be prepared to forgo social policies.

I might think going by population might be more interesting. Like you can't have more population in than non-. Or maybe I'm just over complicating it.

2) Introduce more disadvantages to owning puppet cities. Some possibilities include:

A) Puppets generate more unhappiness

If they generate too much more then there won't be much difference between and annexing, except greater control.

B) Puppets produce hammers/gold/science at a reduced rate

I think not being able to select what's built is already enough of a hindrance to . I'd leave alone. For they could bring back city maintenance for # of cities from civ4, or maybe corruption from distance from non-cities.

C) Puppets spawn rebels occasionally

That would be cool although having a garrison should prevent it, and with the fewer units it could be problematic to acquire more if you need to guard the old. And/or this could be combined with the existing rebel generating aspect of . It's currently 20 when rebels start to appear. What if the more you had the less it took to generate rebels? To the point where if you had far to many then you could generate rebels even with positive ?

D) Puppets have a chance of flipping back to their original owners

I don't think many people would like that. Not without a way to counter it like having a garrison, in which case the rebels idea is the more interesting option.

E) Puppets do not assign citizens to become specialists

Do generate great people? If so then I think they shouldn't, but should still have specialists.

My idea to add is that shouldn't contribute to policies. If gaining doesn't increase policy cost, then getting them and having them generate is a straight up bonus, the small disadvantage being you can't tell them to build culture buildings. Either they shouldn't generate except for their own border creep* or they should increase policy cost.

*In civ4 it was border "pop" I don't know if a colloquial term for border growth in civ5 has been established, but I'm going with "creep".

 

[President]

While I agree that the puppet cities should have the gameplay mechanics thereof improved, I am utterly against the erasure of the puppet cities altogether. The gameplay lobby has already been treated with the expulsion of the Pact of Secrecy and Pact of Cooperation for a simpler system of open declarations of friendship and denunciation, but the history lobby then should retain the puppet cities, which have largely been the biggest contribution this history franchise has to history in the games with city-states. No matter what, all throughout the first and second waves of imperialism, there have always been two distinctive styles of colonization --direct rule, as in Belgium over the Congo, and indirect rule, as with the salutatory neglect of England over the thirteen American colonies that would eventually cause the American Revolution. I fear that to take out puppet cities altogether is to renounce largely the growing trend in Civilization V, from what I've seen, to be more historically or realistically based with actual mechanics of history, not one the least being the subtle, historical assertion that multiple luxury resources of the same kind do not contribute to happiness, no matter how annoying to some gamers actually to have to participate in trade through diplomacy that mechanics forces for more happiness.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Anyone else think that captured wonders shouldn't operate unless you annex the city?

 

[Camikaze]

That could be a way to slightly nerf puppets, but it wouldn't follow the pattern of everything else counting for your empire.

 

[Tokira]

I think that a better solution would be reducing the costs of having annexed cities by for example removing courthouse and making the annexing penalty disappear in as many amount of turns as there are citizens in the city.

 

[Camikaze]

The idea though is that there needs to be a penalty for going to war and controlling new cities. I would've thought making puppet states harder to control rather than annexed cities easier to control would be the sensible way to go.

 

[tylor]

Why there should be a penalty for conquest?

 

[Camikaze]

I'm not saying their shouldn't be advantages, but there does need to be some potential drawbacks, or warfare will be the best solution in every circumstance.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

and currently it is the easiest way to win and once someone starts on conquest it's hard for it not to snowball and be unstoppable.

 

[tylor]

Settlers and food are dirt cheap and there is no penalty for razing. So, as of now best solution is a holocaust. Which is both unrealistic and disgusting, at least for me.

Both Civ3 and Civ4 had very good mechanics for conquered cities, btw.

 

[Trias]

Settlers and food are dirt cheap and there is no penalty for razing. So, as of now best solution is a holocaust. Which is both unrealistic and disgusting, at least for me.

This highlights a related issue. Currently razing and resettling is too attractive compared to annexing. To core of the problem seems to be that the cons of an annexed city vs a settled city never truly disappear.

The obvious way to fix this is to make the disadvantage disappear over time.

Another route would be to penalize razing in someway, for example by having it cost culture. (Behaving like a barbarian is not gonna get you closer to a culture win.)

Both Civ3 and Civ4 had very good mechanics for conquered cities, btw.

The mechanics of Civ4 had there own issues.

 

[tylor]

4 gpt is not that big deal, actually. Especially compared to spam of useless costly buildings that puppets build.