I Raze a City with No Wonders. I raze a City not Settled in the best place for its area. I Puppet a City as a Forward Base for during a Conquest. I Puppet Cities in general when I am going for a Cultural Victory to maintain a high Culture/Turn for Social Policies. I Annex Cities that have World Wonders. However before Annexing any City, I keep it a Puppet until I can afford to Buy a Courthouse to avoid the Happiness Hit. As a general rule, I think it is best just to Annex only Capitals and Cities with Wonders; with few exceptions.
If you can live through the unhapiness hit of annexation, it's better to manually build the courthouse. Courthouses are one of the worst gold per hammer ratio in the game.
You have a solid pint, but I have been playing a lot of 'Try to Win Faster' games lately so every Turn spent building a Courthouse feels like it is slowing me down![]()
why should puppets build workshops?
a puppet needs only several essential buildings (market, bank, colosseum, zoo, and maybe a library and monument).
workshop
1. delays those
2. doesnt pay for its cost: 10% of 5 buildings is only 50% cost of one building
3. has a maint of 2 gold
to help a puppet's production trade-post hills.
If puppets build workshops then they can build the other buildings much quicker. Rather than spending 10+ turns trying to build a stock exchange...
You can actually buy tiles in a city under resistance so if there's an important resource in your puppet that you want to connect immediately, you have the option to annex and buy the tile without waiting for resistance to finish.If keeping the city at all (some AI cities are best off razing to the ground since they found cities too close together) others are junk for other reasons but are far enough away to safely sell to some other AI, then unless you have gone Order and already have the tenet that gives a free courthouse for instantly annex always puppet at least until it comes out of resistance.
You can't buy land tiles nor cash rush in a city that's still in resistance anyway so there's no point in subjecting yourself to the occupation happiness and increased cultural cost penalties yet.
After it comes out of resistance, then you can consider annexing at a point in which it won't interfere with national wonder construction.