Conquest Victory

[Falconer999]

I usually go shoot for one of the other victory conditions, but while wiping out two small civs (about 5 cities each) to make my continent 'pure' last night, I came up with something that I really couldn't figure out how was best to solve. Like I said, I don't normally go for Conquest victory.

Usually when I conquer a city, I install a new governor and keep it for myself. With some of the wonders I like to get, as soon as the city leaves its revolt stage, culture instantly starts spreading.

With the controls against ICS now, it seems like this is a bad idea - especially on Huge maps with lots of civs/cities. I think I had about 8 cities of my own and by the time I'd cleared out the other 2 civs I was up to 16 and that was with razing the smaller cities and I was already feeling the ill effects... and these were just 2 tiny civs. (incidentally, each time as soon as I razed a city, another Civ plopped down a settler there within 2-3 turns).

If I were going for Conquest, you're talking about maybe 50 more cities to worry about. Would you just go about razing all the cities and leaving the globe empty or is there someway to combat that the ill effects with improvements?

[Fried-Psitalon]

State Property does an excellent job of neutralizing the distance effect, obviously. As for the rest of it - try not to use more expensive civics than you need; if you're already steamrolling the world, back off Vasallage and Theocracy for Free Speech and Free Religion (no upkeep, low upkeep) and so on.

Most captured cities are moderately sized at the least, so they can help pay for themselves relatively quickly, once you're using State Property to neutralize the increasingly nasty distance factor.