I am a long time player and reader of the DoC Forum. Thanks Leoreth for your excellent work and many, many hours of fun. It is really impressive how you created (and still improve) this historically accurate but also fun, playable mod.
Thank you for playing! It's always nice to hear from people who have played the mod for a long time but did not post in the forums. Sometimes I have this (wrong) impression that there are only the couple of people who are active here actually playing.
I guess I have a rather historic playing-style, which is probably not for everybody. (f.e. I don’t really enjoy owning all of Europe as Portugal/Netherlands/etc, since this feels odd, unrealistic and ahistoric to me). From reading this forum I got the feeling, that Leoreth prefers adaptions and solutions to the mod, that support “historic” developments (but without forcing / scripting them to much).
That's correct.
Here are some thoughts I had regarding the loss of city-developments due to conquest of the city:
Fighting over cities with barbs, in a civil war or with other enemies would be much more fun, if not nearly all city-developments would be destroyed during city conquest. In my games – losing an important city (with much developments) – usually leads to rage-quit and reload. Reason is the de-facto destruction of a lot of the value of the city by one simple conquest.
I would argue, that massive destruction during conquest also does not properly display reality. A lot of very important an very developed cities (Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Kiev, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Beijing, Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans, Barcelona, Singapore etc, etc, to name only some of them) had all been conquered by an enemy Army (and often reconquered shortly afterwards) in the last 250 years. I do not think that the destruction of *all* or nearly all infrastructure of such cities in the course of the conquest (and re-conquest) displays the reality accurately. Especially the re-conquest of a former owned city should not destruct much developments (assuming that you would see less looting and intentional destruction by the conquering army).
Also: this destruction destabilizes mostly the AI-Civs, since the AI often does not rebuild their cities properly.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. The current situation is bad and neither accurate historically nor useful for gameplay. However, it fulfills one important role in that it provides a ramp up time until newly conquered territory becomes useful. This is important because expansionism is already very powerful, and this rule provides an obstacle or at least a delay to have self-reinforcing benefits from expansion. Newly conquered cities should first create a drain on the economy due to their maintenance, and then become more viable as their infrastructure is returned. So however we are changing the rules this effect should be preserved.
Without wanting to brush aside your suggestions, this post made me come up with a new idea and reminded me of an old idea and how they are related.
1) My new idea is related to how building destruction actually works. For people who don't know, it is basically a random chance that is determined individually for each building. Some buildings have a 0% chance to be destroyed (like wonders) and others a 100% chance (defensive and cultural buildings), but for the rest it is random. Individually means that depending on the rolls, two identical cities may once lose very few buildings and another time lose almost all of them. As long as this random element exists it is hard to make additional rules that makes the destruction proportional to say the level of fighting that happened previously.
So my idea would be to remove the destruction of buildings on conquest entirely. Instead, each building requires a minimum percentage of culture for it to take effect. Buildings providing only the bare necessities for a city to function (like Granaries) would have a very low culture threshold, while more sophisticated buildings like Banks and Universities require a rather high culture percentage.
In my opinion, that would be desirable for many reasons:
- it would remove the randomness from the game
- if buildings with strong commerce modifiers require high culture percentages (as is appropriate in most cases) we still have this effect of recently conquered cities being a drain on the economy
- it encourages investing in culture and increases its value, which is overall desirable
- if you retake your own city, you still have majority culture, so it also addresses the frustrating situation described in the post above
This probably needs to be combined with building destruction to some degree, just much lower. For some buildings, it just makes sense, for example defensive or military buildings. Some general destruction is also required just to require some production investment into the new city, preferably for buildings where it makes most sense for them to be easily damaged and hard to replace, like Aqueducts.
2) My second idea is to differentiate the options on city conquest a bit more. In particular, I would like to introduce the "Sack City" option as an alternative to "Install a New Governor" that does not raze the city outright. The amount of gold pillaged from cities in the default option would be reduced and sacking cities would differ in that
- more gold is pillaged
- more buildings are destroyed and population is killed
- foreign culture is reduced instead of converted into your culture
- non-state religions are removed
- maybe settled great people can be abducted
I think this option is a much better representation of what e.g. the Mongols did than outright city razing, so in turn that option can be further restricted.
