Is there any point in sieging a city?

[Jarkorsis]

There does not seem to be any reason. You are better off attacking it and hopefully capturing it.

There seems to be little reason to attack out of a city if you are besieged until you have numbers. Starvation and population reduction in cities is very slow. Defense has a huge advantage.

[Quillan]

By "sieging a city", do you mean piling troops in as many squares of the city radius as you can cover, so none of those tiles can be worked? If so, then I don't see a lot of reason to do so now. In Civ 3, defense bonus was tied to the city size, but no longer.

If you mean waiting to assault until your siege weapons have reduced the defense bonus to nothing, then yes there is a huge point to doing so.

[Jarkorsis]

I meant putting samll stacks in the srrounding countryside to prevent use of tiles.

[Diadem]

There's not much point in it. If you want to keep the city, you don't want it reduced in size. And if you want to kill the city, you can just take it and raze it.

A siege would only be useful if you don't have the numbers to take it, but you do have to numbers to siege it. I can't see that happening, unless you completely forgot to build catapults

[Shogun Gunner]

That can be a useful tactic if you are looking to hurt your neighbor -- and don't have the power to take the city. Destroy improvements - especially resources and special goods that are traded/utilized. Reducing towns earns you money, while it destroys his tax base . This ismore of an attrition/degradation strategy versus military conquest.

[Crossfire]

Yeah, but that is pillaging, not sieging. There are certainly good reasons to pillage if you aren't going to take over the surrounding cities, but I can't think of a good reason to siege a city. Either take it or go fight somewhere else.

[Badtz Maru]

Maybe now that the AI is more likely to give cities as part of a peace deal besieging a city might make it more likely to give it to you - I'm sure smaller cities are worth less to the AI when it decides whether or not to give it to you.

[ghen]

sieging in that way seems kind of dumb. It requires more units than what would be realistically needed, so for real sieging tactics the game would have to be changed.. Maybe something like: If there are units on 4 of 8 tiles surrounding a city then you must attack those units to get out of the city, and the viable squares to work are reduced to the square around the city... which in this case means the 4 with no units on them.

That would lead to nice sieging strats as a longer term civilization killer than pillaging only.

[joncnunn]

The above segizing tactic is not the right way to do it.

It's much better to have your stack that's insufficent to attack the city and yet too strong for the defenders to successfuly attack to instead go around pillaging, particlarly towns, resources, and the key tiles that will break a long farm chain.