Puppet ---> Occupy

Bridger

Prince
Joined
Nov 10, 2005
Messages
318
What i've been doing recently is puppeting any conquered city until it stops resisting, then occupying it and instantly buying a courthouse.

I don't see any reason why you'd occupy a city immediately upon conquering it since you can't build/buy anything until it's done resisting anyway, so why not keep it a puppet for 5-10 turns and avoid the super-unhappyness?

Am I missing something?
 
There is no reason to ever occupy immediately on conquering.

There are reasons NOT to occupy as soon as resistance is over; the courthouse is expensive to buy, and if you build it you take a happiness hit during construction, and occupying + courthouse increases the cost of social policies and national wonders.
 
Right, but to raze you can just push the raze button, you don't need to occupy first. The occupy button on capture is entirely redundant. If I would have designed the game, I would have two boxes; when you capture the city, you get: do you want to raze? Y/n. Then you get a second dialog box when resistance wears off; do you want to annex, or puppet?
 
There is no reason to ever occupy immediately on conquering.

There are reasons NOT to occupy as soon as resistance is over; the courthouse is expensive to buy, and if you build it you take a happiness hit during construction, and occupying + courthouse increases the cost of social policies and national wonders.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that there were not reasons to leave it as a puppet.

Technically razing a city occupies it first, but other than that, there's no reason to occupy before resistance is over.

Then why even provide the option? Seems silly to say "well here, do you want to occupy or puppet?" and new gamer X says "well, I see the advantages of puppeting, but I'd really like to control what this city builds, so I'll occupy it" and suffers through extra unhappyness until he figures it out. Very counter-intuitive.
 
I think basically because they didn't want to have to have two dialog boxes, but they did want a dialog box that presented the option of occupying, so that new players could always see that they did have the option of occupying.

Also remember that unrest in vanilla is pretty short, relative to what it is in VEM.
 
Is it possible for the game to differentiate between occupying a city while it is in resistance, and when it is no longer in resistance? If it is, it might be fun to make it so that if you occupy a city while it is in resistance, it drops the population (and the resistance timer) like in vanilla, and the previous owner gets a partisan unit for every population that was subtracted from the city. I think it would make sense for more of the population to try to escape a blatantly military occupation than a marginally less noticeable puppeting of the city government, and to want to fight back. If a city is puppeted past its (normal VEM length) resistance instead, and then occupied, that could reflect the city being more gradually assimilated, at least to a degree.
 
In v107 I removed the "Occupy" button from the city capture popup. If puppeting is the only option, the popup does not display (-1 less click). In the rare situation we actually want to occupy the city while it's in resistance, we can click it after capture and occupy at that time (+1 extra click).
 
Technically razing a city occupies it first, but other than that, there's no reason to occupy before resistance is over.

I've noticed that the city stays in rebellion while its being razed, so if the population is large enough you never get the negative social policy and national wonder hit during razing if the razing finishes before rebellion ends.
 
Razing and rebellion take the same amount of time. The policy and NW penalties are affected by all occupied cities, and I'm mostly certain razing cities are occupied. If razing did not occupy the city, an exploit would exist where we could temporarily start razing each turn to alter these variables, then stop razing before the turn ends.
 
Speaking of the UI, it would be very nice if clicking a puppet would just take you to the city screen, and you'd click a button form there if you want to occupy your puppet. Just like the Raze option which you can turn on after conquest.

I find myself quite frequently looking into my puppets, and have come to rather resent the very unnecessary popup.
 
I'll have to keep a closer eye next time I take a city, and raze it. There are a couple games where I've noticed my culture points required for the next SP have not gone up when I take a city and it starts razing with rebellion going on.
 
We're unable to directly alter the resistance timer without the game core only Firaxis currently has access to.

Sorry, I was half-asleep, and could have been clearer. The resistance timer is controlled, at least in part, by the population number of the conquered city, correct? What I was suggesting was to have the city's population reduced by half if immediately occupied, which would also reduce the time spent in resistance. The enemy getting more partisans, combined with the shorter resistance would hopefully make the choice between immediately occupying a city or puppeting it for a while into a choice between being able to quickly integrate the city into your empire at the cost of a more difficult war and a weaker city, or having the integration have less of an impact on the city but taking much longer, almost ensuring that the city wouldn't be useful in the current war.
 
@zarakand
In the map editor you can place cities, units, and so forth to test these things.

@Jorlem
It works like this:

  1. City captured
  2. This variable takes effect: CITY_CAPTURE_POPULATION_PERCENT
  3. Resistance timer calculated.
  4. Mod stuff takes effect, including any mod-added population changes.
In other words, things we do in mods can't affect the resistance timer. The percentage variable applies globally to all cities.
 
Razing and rebellion take the same amount of time. The policy and NW penalties are affected by all occupied cities, and I'm mostly certain razing cities are occupied. If razing did not occupy the city, an exploit would exist where we could temporarily start razing each turn to alter these variables, then stop razing before the turn ends.

I'm 95% sure that razing directly from a conquered city is treated *differently* from razing an already occupied city: Directly razing a city doesn't increase policy costs (at least it didn't used to - I wish I could find the reference post) while occupy+raze does.
 
Im playing the latest beta and its automatically occupying all cities instead of puppetting them. So much for my culture victory :cry:
 
@Jorlem
It works like this:

  1. City captured
  2. This variable takes effect: CITY_CAPTURE_POPULATION_PERCENT
  3. Resistance timer calculated.
  4. Mod stuff takes effect, including any mod-added population changes.
In other words, things we do in mods can't affect the resistance timer. The percentage variable applies globally to all cities.

Ah, ok. Thanks for explaining that. I didn't know it worked that way.
 
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