Question about puppets.

[nitecom]

Hi,

Normally when playing a game I tend to annex every city I capture, but towards the end of the game it gets a bit long winded managing every city I have so I decided to start puppeting my cities.

The problem I have is keeping my happiness above 0 , when anexxing cities I dont tend to have this problem as I build a courthouse in each city.

Is there anything real obvious im missing here or is it just a case of waiting for the puppeted cities to build courthouses?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Johan de Witt]

Hi,

Normally when playing a game I tend to annex every city I capture, but towards the end of the game it gets a bit long winded managing every city I have so I decided to start puppeting my cities.

The problem I have is keeping my happiness above 0 , when anexxing cities I dont tend to have this problem as I build a courthouse in each city.

Is there anything real obvious im missing here or is it just a case of waiting for the puppeted cities to build courthouses?

Thanks in advance.

The amount of you need to get a new policy increases with every city you build or annex. Getting puppets is a great way of expanding and still getting new social policies.

 

[michaeltrnka]

Puppets will never build courthouses but they will build other happiness producing buildings. I am generally very selective about which city's I concur. If I get a city that I don't need I generally raze it or sell it to another nation.

 

[nitecom]

Thanks for the quick replies

So I guess I should only keep the cities which have luxuries/strategic resources if needed?

One of the problems im facing at the moment with Japan is that I have conquered alot of cities very fast and my happiness has plummeted to -15 , this has obviously afected my production etc so should I slow down on my warmongering until the happiness is sorted?

Seems a bit weak if I have to do the above just to keep my happiness manageable and my civilization running at optimal....

 

[Nightshades]

You should never wage war if you have 10 or more unhappiness.
Because once you hit 10, all units gets a combat penalty.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

Also the courthouse is bugged. Currently in addition to removing excess unhappiness from being occupied it also removes the 3 from the city itself (unless they fixed it in the last patch, but I don't think they did). So that's another reason you were having less happiness issues with annexing.

Also when you puppet replace all farms with trade posts. This will help you keep your puppet population down.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

Thanks for the quick replies

So I guess I should only keep the cities which have luxuries/strategic resources if needed?

One of the problems im facing at the moment with Japan is that I have conquered alot of cities very fast and my happiness has plummeted to -15 , this has obviously afected my production etc so should I slow down on my warmongering until the happiness is sorted?

Seems a bit weak if I have to do the above just to keep my happiness manageable and my civilization running at optimal....

For your current situation you can burn a few cities to the ground. Be careful though because you have to annex before you raze and as soon as you annex your policy costs go up and doesn't go down again when the city disappears. Now it does remember how the max number of cities you had if you annex another one your policy costs don't go up again. So if you burn them down 1 at a time you won't gain as fast, but you won't have skyrocketing policy costs either

 

[nitecom]

Is there any written rule in regards to what cities you should keep ?

i.e always keep cities with luxury recources or is it situational?

 

[WeaselSlapper]

Is there any written rule in regards to what cities you should keep ?

i.e always keep cities with luxury recources or is it situational?

As with everything in Civ it's situational, but there are some rules of thumb.

Normally I'll keep cities that are pretty well developed and you capture mostly in tact. If it's good for production I'll annex it, otherwise I puppet it.

Keep it if there's a wonder worth keeping, or a new luxury.

Keep it (at least temporarily) if its strategically located.

Keep it if I need the pop for money and science and can afford the happiness hit.

Otherwise burn it.

 

[snarzberry]

Puppeting cities you don't want for one turn and selling them is also an option.

 

[Nightshades]

Start selling and razing cities.

The AI usually places his cities in a very crowded manner (too many in a too small area) and I always end up razing a few of them. Pick the ones that don't have wonders or which don't have as many buildings in them (especially try and stay away from cities which doesn't have any happiness buildings in them).

And try not to expand too quickly. It's very easy to get in a bad situation when you conquer a very large city - and ending up at -10 happiness in the middle of a war is not a very good position to be in.

 

[Alpedar]

Imo pupetting and anexing should not be mixed (much). If you anex a lot, SP cost go high (but you have more cities to produce culture, so its not so bad, only culture bonuses from wonders and cultural CS become meaningless), but you can manage size of those cities and make sure you are hapiness neutral or positive.
With pupetting, you don't have such controll, so you even more need happiness bonuses from SP, which start to come faster (not skyrocketing cost & culture from puppets), so even with less control, you have more rough hapiness.

 

[Nightshades]

Yea if you are warmongering, then you should only annex a city if you REALLY need control over the production. Say that I'm trying to conquer a new continent and I need a city to produce military reinforcements for my army: then I'll usually just annex the first city I capture and use it as a type of "beachhead".

 

[Snuffleupagus]

In addition to the above, don't forget to build over those puppet's farms!

The puppets will work commerce tiles first, but if a puppet is on river with farms it might grow faster than you want for happiness purposes. I almost always replace all of a puppet's farms with trading posts right away.

Like people said, raze cities, check how developed they are (especialy if they have happiness buildings), and if you're puppeting you should have more SP's, so use them to get policies that add happiness.

and trade for luxury resources like a crazy person.

 

[diz2]

Imo pupetting and anexing should not be mixed (much). If you anex a lot, SP cost go high (but you have more cities to produce culture, so its not so bad, only culture bonuses from wonders and cultural CS become meaningless), but you can manage size of those cities and make sure you are hapiness neutral or positive.
With pupetting, you don't have such controll, so you even more need happiness bonuses from SP, which start to come faster (not skyrocketing cost & culture from puppets), so even with less control, you have more rough hapiness.

I always try to puppet as a rule, but there sometimes comes a point where the end is near and you're not going to get many more SPs anyway but happiness is slowing you down (e.g, flirting with -20 if you keep conquering.)

At this time it seems like you can manage happiness better by annexing a higher pop puppet, start razing it, and buying a courthouse. When you get the pop down to the level the happiness buildings can cover you can stop razing and turn off the pop growth.

 

[rudibr]

Ive recently won my 2nd immortal game (both with Rome), by conquering everything, anexing everything, never razing and still settling on every bit of available land the map could offer.
I only puppet if its temporary to continue the war the next few turns without reaching -10, then asap anex and rush courthouse.
First game I won by conquering the entire map, the second by sniping the last two capitals of the last 2 standing civs with a horde of guided missiles and a couple tanks.

I dont have much to compare since I never won by science, culture or diplo...but just warmongering non-stop and endlessly conquering did the trick well. Im playing with China now on same settings (immortal-continents-rest is all defaults), and its going the same route, except that im conquering and scoring a bit quicker...but the late game will probably be harder then with Rome without the extra 25% production bonus.

One of the few things Id do is always rush the courthouse (any courthouse) if I could, even if I had to trade / dump units for gold.
Set the whole empire focus to gold except for 2 or 3 cities on production.
Rely on maritime CSs almost exclusevily for growth (I hope maritime food gets nerfed in future versions).
Prioritized money and happiness buildings, science if theres no money/happy building left.
Completly ignore building wonders or culture buildings, unless theres nothing left to build.
Eventually getting Order SP. Even if you have no culture buildings and a huge empire, eventually you get a few SP's to pick and the order ones will make your huge warmongering empire of brutes happy as a puppy.

Maybe someday Ill try and win in some other way and try all this stuff im learning from reading from the pros here...seems like I always end up taking my games down to that gory path.

 

[ahawk]

For non-warmongering games, I'll sometimes keep a city or two I don't want as puppets merely because they can act as a buffer, especially if the Civ I fought signs peace with me but could still be a future problem. This usually happens if I'm trying to go tall and I have a lot of science but few units. In these cases (at least on Prince), I will sometimes get a DoW from a tech-backwards civ that has lots of low level units. Next thing the AI knows, I buy a more advanced unit each turn (longswords vs spearmen or whatever), and defend myself until I take a city of his. At that point, the AI will usually be more open to sign peace, and I can either puppet the city as a buffer, or if the city becomes a drain, sell it off to a Civ that hates the Civ I originally took the city from. And after all that, back to going tall.