Shangri-La: Any sufficiently populated capital is unconquerable

[KrikkitTwo]

I'm not sure I agree. To me the production and combat penalties, while harsh, seem necessary. Otherwise, there's no real penalty for mass conquering whatsoever.

No growth? Not a problem, just work hammer and commerce tiles, growth's already so slow in Civ5 that it hardly matters in the short-mid term.

No Settlers? Doesn't matter, you're away conquering new cities anyway.

No annexing cities? That's really not much of a penalty for a marching army, especially if you ditch maintenance for puppets as you suggest.

Well I'm suggesting that puppets do exactly Nothing for your empire as well as 0 maintenance.
Razing cities doesn't stop a marching army either. (ie a Puppet is like Razing the city but you keep the territory and can annex it later)

I might add an additional -1 Growth to all cities

 

[Qin Shi Huang]

Hmmm im thinking that in the game maybe it should depend on the time period for the effect conquering a city has up until the modern age people were always pleased when their leaders captured another city and turned it to their empire so happiness in your cities that you have made and not conquered should go up and the city which was captured should be very unhappy and so have citizens that dont work and when you reach the modern era capturing a place decreases happiness at home and the captured city (unless they declared war on you then when you capture one of their cities home happiness should increase as it shows the war is turning your way) what do you think?

 

[dalowrider]

Reminds me of Baghdad just a few years ago. I'd say it's quite realistic.

Anyway, getting happiness is not a problem. I regularly produce more than 400 when I build large empires. I your empire can't deal with even one city, your strategy is broken.

we should have just puppeted it