When do you annex a city? What criteria must be met?

[snarzberry]

One reason is to annex a frontier city during a war to add rush-bought troops to your army.

 

[Mark the Bold]

Except they don't keep the enemy's palace when you conquer them and the bonuses from your palace are the whole reason your capital is so much better from the start than any of your other cities. So they aren't even "theoretically" equivalent to your capital.

- Marty Lund

So there is no start location bias for the capital cities of all Civs on the map? They just position settlers completely randomly? News to me. I've never annexed an enemy capital city that isn't easily turned into my number two production / wonder city in very little time.

Keep puppeting capital cities for all I care. Hope to see you soon on a MP game, "-Marty Lund"

 

[Teutorian]

I mainly just puppet everything until (if ever) I reach the point where I am satisfied with my social policies (so we're talking very late game) and am going into TOTAL WAR mode against a last remaining one or two Civilizations in what is going to be a domination victory. At that point, start annexing and start mass producing military.

 

[peddroelm]

I keep them puppet until
- they reach 7+ population
- a few good +production tiles are improved [mines,lumber mills,]
- a few good +food tiles are improved to make sure few people will be wasted providing enough food .
- there is enough empire +happiness [+15 ?]

Annex -> buy a workshop if in the money, start producing the courthouse -> micro lock the people for maximum production. This is easier to do during a golden age because of the production bonus.

 

[mujrim]

I annex puppets once I have enough gold so that I can flat out buy the courthouse and any culture producing buildings immediately.

 

[joncnunn]

Myself, I go by:

Can this city possibly get semi decent production out of it if I were to take control of the tiles and city builds.

When that is the case, I'll annex it some time after it comes out of resistance. Usually when I have the cash to buy the courthouse, but if it looks like it would build a courthouse fast enough just from rearranging worked tiles I won't wait for cash and will simply build it naturally.

Or is puppeting usually the way to go always?