Taking cities: occupy or destroy?

One thing ive found usefull later in the game when the cities have a lot of culture is move great artists into the city and drop the "culture bomb" this will accelerate your cultural growth. works well and helps avoid flipping back.
 
gakkun said:
You know I use to think that works but I've had 2 cases where the culture DID NOT budge at all!!!
Both were cities next to the enemy's capital and in one of these cases the capital was also a holy city. WHen I dropped the culture bomb the only tiles I gained were 2 ocean tiles but otherwise the enemy's culture continued to surround 3 sides of the city square.
Yeh these are extreme examples but I'm surprised by how strong the enemy culture and how different culture works in this game.


Exactly. Around 1800 or later if you are attacking a nation that has built up culture from turn 1 on another continent, 4000 is a pittance, and won't move your borders. Perhaps if you could save up 5 or 6 great artists you might get somewhere, but one almost never does anything for you in this scenario.
 
davymark8 said:
One thing ive found usefull later in the game when the cities have a lot of culture is move great artists into the city and drop the "culture bomb" this will accelerate your cultural growth. works well and helps avoid flipping back.

In civ 4, a captured city will never flip back to its original owner, right?
 
I prefer to raise and pillage everything, move in and select that "BURN! BABY BURN!" button. Take out an enemy city and pillage all the squares next to it, pillage roads leading towards your lines, and just plain drop scunion all over the enemy's territories.

I hate having to hold cities, they resist for too many turns, and having to leave one or two units behind to defend them is just too much of a pain, and an its easy way to stall out your attack. On tiny maps you can take over a whole enemy Civ (Noble diff) with 10-15 units if you raise cities rather than defend them - and that's huge, it means you spend less time building a force which translates to fighting on your terms, like say, right after you nab the only source of iron/horses on your continent.

Plus, its just plain fun, I mean, how often do you get a chance to raze Mecca or Paris?
 
If i raze an enemy city and the enemy settles on the same square again, would the generated culture from the razed city be in effect for that civ's new city?

Logic says the culture should have died with the raze but i'd like to get confirmation on it. I have faint memories of that not being the case in Civ III.
 
In single player almost always OCCUPY. And try to taske multiple cities in one war, if not ALL of them. And convert them to your state religion too.

In multiplayer amost always DESTROY the city. A real player is much more likely to take the city back. destroying his cities will give you an advantage and not tie down your forces in holding it, just rampage on. I would occupy a city thats on a far off island/continent and is only there for a resource. It usualy has no other cultural influence on and is probably less likely to be taken.
 
I would typically capture one city. Their best city. Raze the rest. If his capital is the best city, then I would capture it. Exceptions would be, of course, religion-founding sites and if I know they're there, wonders. I would raze all the other cities around them to eliminate the culture problem and infill the open lands with my own settlers.

Against a human opponent, I would typically raze everything. If you capture a city from someone with an ego, he would take it personally and his pride would force them to retake the city at whatever cost. (Of course that could be used against them, if you have the proper trap laid out.)
 
I just played a game in which I had like 20 cities -- at least 18 I know, because I saw I had 18 theaters at the end of the game screens. I kept every city except two that had no culture so were automatically destroyed.

It made my research slow here and there, that's for sure. I was doing a very aggressive conquest style approach, and all but four cities were actually made by two of my enemies, who I wiped. When I hit the medieval ages I was sweating because my expenses were so high that I had to keep research down for a good long time.

However, once those cities started going, they really contributed nicely. That took a while, that's for sure. I thought someone was going to get a space race victory on me because they were a high ranked civ and were completing multiple SS Thrusters long before I was anywhere near that stage of research. Once I got that research done, though, I was able to stick pretty much every city on spaceship parts, and got them all done almost simultaneously. Big cities on the bigger pieces, little cities on the little ones.

And this was despite being quite a noob and making many mistakes and having setbacks. Frankly, my understanding of the game is not really very good. Yet it worked. I won and wound up higher than every civilization in every stat but one, and that was who had most soldiers. Funny since I spent most of the game fighting!

I find keeping cities is very handy because it gives your units first of all a place to get an accelerated rest in some security. This forward point in your enemy's territory also lets you see some of the possible paths he might be trying to run past you on for a retalation. And when the battle continues to the next city, this city comes under a little less pressure as it drifts farther behind your lines. Eventually this enemy city that became your city and forward base becomes part of your supply of new soldiers, which is very important. If you are waging a long hard war, you will lose a lot of units and need to send in replacements quickly, or lose your advantage as the enemy builds up an ever greater defense-specialized force. So when you try to keep that momentum going but your troops have to come from 20 tiles away, and all your wounded have to heal in enemy space, you lose a lot.

I'm sure it varies game by game how thin you can afford to stretch yourself. But if you're fighting only one AI at a time, you can stretch yourself pretty thin if you're fighting and pillaging the enemy down to a much worse place than you are. And if you start catching up even a little on the growth of the cities you capture, even if they're crummy ones, you get a phenomenal late game boom. Doing all those spaceship components in one turn was pretty cool. I'm still amazed I beat that AI that was so far ahead of me in the space race, and every thing else research wise, for almost the whole game.



One reason
 
The only time you should raze a city is when there is a great chance your enemy will take it back permanently.
 
Domination Victory --- 70% land area 25% population

Raze it!!
 
As long as the city is a certain size, say 3 and up, I'll keep the city. It's more developed, and it'll develop faster, so why not keep it?

I've tried starting wars and have settlers follow my troops. This works OK, but it creates 2 problems. The cities take longer to develop in hostile territory, and on a rare occasion the other damn Civ's might sneak in and get it first.

Course that experience was more with Civ 2 & 3... so maybe I just wrote all that for nothing. :)
 
Capture is usefull in the late game only for a forward base for your bombers. Otherwise the culture of other cities makes the city starve down to pop 1 and until you conquer the surrounding cities it won't grow.
 
When I set out to attack my neighbors(and when playing Civ4:crazyeye: ) I allways have a plan as to which cities I am going to occupy. Once I've occupied those cities, if I have the resources, I will continue to push into enemy territory and raze everything in sight.

Not only does razing reduce the number of enemy cities(as does capturing them), it has the added benefit of further crippling the AI because it is compelled to re-settle that empty land, spending resources on settlers instead of military units or research.
 
Mujadaddy said:
Domination Victory --- 70% land area 25% population

Raze it!!
How does that make sense?! 70% area is hard to achieve, meaning you need every city you can get!
 
no, you only need 70% of the SETTLED land area ;)
 
Actually if you have a Creative Leader, then your city starts growing culture immediately. That's why I like Kubli Khan from the Mongols...
 
I take the cities, then use then use them as Slaves (with slavery as civic). Boosts my army :D. Help conquesting eve more cities. Also i only leave 1 military unit to defend.
 
hehe, as English I took a barbarian city whilst I was researching divine right to get islam, after ploughing everything I had into research. Then, just before my research was completed, Napolean declared war on me for no apparent reason (ok, I was making a culture attack on one of his cities, but I thought he would understand ;) ). The french took my city on the turn my research was completed and whilst I still founded the religion, I founded it in the city that the french just took from me.

Not going to make that mistake again...
 
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