Raze or capture?

[Yaniv]

I'm playing a regrent civ game and I'm winning the war. But when I capture cities, I don't know what to do with them. If I capture the city, I will be passing my optimal number of cites, and my corruption will increase (I'm not sure about this, correct me if I'm wrong). If I desroy them, my rivals will hate me and they will also have open space to build new cites.

Ant ideas? And someone please explain this "optimal number of cites" thing.

 

[Aeson]

Your corruption won't increase in your already founded cities, except for those that are farther away from your capitol and/or forbidden palace than the newly aquired city. The exception is in Communism, where the number of cities affects all city's corruption rate.

You can think of corruption by number of cities as a list of all your cities, ordered by distance from your capitol/fp. As you go down that list, corruption increases. If you insert a city somewhere in the list, the cities after it are pushed down a slot, and will have slightly higher corruption. The inserted city gets the same corruption rate as the old one in that place. All the cities above it remain unaffected.

 

[Yaniv]

Originally posted by Aeson
Your corruption won't increase in your already founded cities, except for those that are farther away from your capitol and/or forbidden palace than the newly aquired city. The exception is in Communism, where the number of cities affects all city's corruption rate.

You can think of corruption by number of cities as a list of all your cities, ordered by distance from your capitol/fp. As you go down that list, corruption increases. If you insert a city somewhere in the list, the cities after it are pushed down a slot, and will have slightly higher corruption. The inserted city gets the same corruption rate as the old one in that place. All the cities above it remain unaffected.

Oh, I see now. Is there any way to view that list?
By the way, where did you get that from?

 

[Aeson]

You can get a pretty good idea of how each city ranks just by eyeballing the distance between the city and your capitol and/or forbidden palace city. It's not really important to get the exact rank though. If you want to look at corruption more indepth, check out Alexman's corruption thread.

By the way, where did you get that from?

From lots of city building.

 

[BiatchGuy]

I don't like razing. It's bad for your reputation and in PTW it leaves those ugly, perfectly square ruins. Before PTW came out I would raze a lot though, because of culture flipping, but thankfully now you can switch that off -- yay!

 

[Hurkyl]

Back before they reduced the effects of corruption, it was an awful horrible thing! For example, on Deity level, you could only have something like 8 productive cities on a tiny map, and that was if you had a forbidden palace!


After being frusterated a few times of having one of my powerhouse cities suddenly converted to 95% corruption, I said down and tried to figure out how it works and figured out that list rule (though I didn't explain it quite as nicely).


I haven't hung around much since then but it sounds like the devs spill a lot of the secrets too about how the game works.

Hurkyl

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by Yaniv
someone please explain this "optimal number of cites" thing.

The first part of your question had already been answered, so I'll only anser this second part.

The OCN has two effects: The first is that you need to have at least half of the OCN to be able to build a Forbidden Palace.

The second is that as you count cities ouward from you capital/FP (as Aeson explains), the corruption will increase twice as fast for cities that have more than the OCN number of cities closer to the capital/FP.

I.e., if the OCN is 8, the corruption will increase steadily for city 1-8, and twice as fast for cities 9+.

This is btw. a good time to mention corthouses and police stations. Their effect on this part of the corruption is that a city with a corthouse "thinks" that the OCN is 25% higher. So that single city will have corruption as if the OCN is 10 instead of 8 with a corthouse, and as if the OCN is 12 if also having a police station.

 

[Stapel]

Yaniv,
Another way to solve your problem: Starve the captured city down to 1. Then let it grow to 3. Then disband it.

A city with more then half the population being your own, will not cause ant bad effects when disbanded.

Yet another option: give the city away to a friendly civ which is far away......

 

[JAWiseman]

Most of the time I raze and then place a new settler in the opened area. I find a lot of times on Emperor that the other Civs culture is higher than mine and these recently taken cities flip back to the other civ after a certain amount of time.

However, razing causes significant problems with diplomacy, so after razing you had better be prepared to do your own research.

I guess bottom line is it depends on where you are in the game and whether or not you can fire out your own research after razing the cities.

On the other hand, if I was fighting a civ whos culture is much lower than mine I will probably keep the city.

In addition, if I do not think I can hold the city througout the war, then it is a prime candidate for razing as well.

You have to watch out when razing, becuase if a lot of space opens up, the other civs will rush over with settlers to build cities in the now "opened up" areas. Gotta keep an eye on that!

 

[tomart109]

Originally posted by JAWiseman
However, razing causes significant problems with diplomacy, so after razing you had better be prepared to do your own research.

You have to watch out when razing, becuase if a lot of space opens up, the other civs will rush over with settlers to build cities in the now "opened up" areas. Gotta keep an eye on that!

Yes, the newly cleared areas can be a magnet for everyone's settlers, very annoying....

I like to keep most of the captured cities anyway, because I'm here to Control The World!!! Mwahahahahaha......... (But that does depend on location... if they planted in a bad place, that can be a bummer a thousand years hence...)

Which brings up my big complaint with the 1.29 patch --- most size 1 captures will Auto-Raze! Darn! This compels two aggravations ---
1. you need to bleed off your precious wartime production to make new settlers for whatever areas you win, and
2. foreign settlers need to be stopped before they plant, or you pass up the two free slaves (i mean, workers) and don't get a new city either.

 

[[GoD]Toxic]

Yeah that can be wery anoying but it can be minimized by building a few horsemen and sending them out as scouts and destroyers

 

[Adm. Hunter]

Which brings up my big complaint with the 1.29 patch --- most size 1 captures will Auto-Raze! Darn!

Unless the city has a Wonder.