Refugees

[Randolph]

Originally posted by Prussia


Yeah, and not too many Iraqis are heading off to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or any of those countries, either.

A lot of nasty things have happened in Iraq, but I don’t think any of them really equate to “raising a city.”

[padillah]

I'm not sure I like the "population going to other civs" aspect. This could seriously overbalance a city.

Example: I want to go to war with Izzy anyway. I gift Monty several units that should be strong enough to take her and bribe him to war. Now build a city as close as possible to her borders. Everytime he rases a city I get more pop in mine for free.

Or, the other side. I'm chugging along, minding my own business when suddenly one of my cities flips to Izzy cause she's had so much population influx. Now I'm out a city because Monty is good at war.

[Thedrin]

I'm not sure it could overbalance a city. Ignoring whether or not the city has enough health and happiness bonuses to handle the influx of refugees, will it have enough food available to it?

You could use the above tactic to rush-grow a new city but such a city would be even more vunerable to a culture flip.

[Xorbon]

Didn't Genghis Khan obliterate several cities and their populations? Or are these accounts exaggerated?

[Randolph]

Refugees certainly shouldn't be a mechanism for immediate economic growth. The idea that you would raise nearby cities in order to send masses of starving refugees to your country because it would good for your economy sounds pretty crazy. Maybe they could come in as “angry citizens” (like the ones when you exceed the happiness max) for a number of turns so that eat up food and use health resources, but don’t add anything to the economy. Over time they would turn into normal productive citizens.

[Badtz Maru]

Originally posted by padillah
I'm not sure I like the "population going to other civs" aspect. This could seriously overbalance a city.

Example: I want to go to war with Izzy anyway. I gift Monty several units that should be strong enough to take her and bribe him to war. Now build a city as close as possible to her borders. Everytime he rases a city I get more pop in mine for free.

Or, the other side. I'm chugging along, minding my own business when suddenly one of my cities flips to Izzy cause she's had so much population influx. Now I'm out a city because Monty is good at war.

In the scenario I described, you wouldn't be getting those refugees unless Izzy didn't have any other cities capable of absorbing the refugee population and there were no other civs friendly to Izzy (assuming you don't have open borders with her, if all Izzy's other cities were full and you were the closest civilization with open borders, then yes, you'd catch the overflow).

[ben04]

Or replace razed cities with towns and villages.

[zeace]

I like the idea of refugees entering my city, but as has been mentioned, the idea of my city flipping to the country of the immigrants has to be controlled. I think that basically if a civ is badly losing a war (cities getting taken over/razed every few turns) no one would suggest that a city should change it's allegiance to the loser civ.

In fact you could go one step further and say that if a city is split between it's current nationality and another, losing a war would make the city more likely to defect. The portion of the city representing the new civ would have an easier time converting the rest of the city:

"Elizabeth makes her cities into beatiful cultural icons. Napoleon gives his to Isabella so she can burn them to the ground... So who wants to be British?"

[CarnalCanaan]

Originally posted by yin26


Frankly, I have turned off razing cities because I find it too gamey.

There is a massive penalty for burning down someone's holy city, which will enrage even the most mild of leaders. This is understandable. However, the penalty for razing cities does not seem connected to their size or cultural output.

To obliterate a metropolis of millions of persons that serves as a cultural icon to millions more should be a HUGELY expensive diplomatic decision that would probably stop late-game razers (*cough* Monty...).

Perhaps it could be called the 9/11 Mechanism: razing (or even just attacking) a culturally significant city (top five in global rankings or beyond Influential in status) results in -1 to -5 diplomatic hit from the victim, -1 to -3 from his allies and -0 to -1 from all others.

Is there any record of such in the playtesting?

[Nugog]

Originally posted by CarnalCanaan
Perhaps it could be called the 9/11 Mechanism

C'mon.....................

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun
I'd like to be able to prevent razing of cities above certain size. You can't just torch a metropolis...

I don't think that's really true...if you've got a big enough army to take and hold a city, even a metropolis, you've probably got the ability to slaughter the population and level the city if you choose to.

Look at what's left of cities that have been in the middle of a war zone; large craters where buildings used to be, smoking ruins, destroyed streets, buried land mines, ect. That's all "collateral damage", generally speaking. But if you had that kind of millitary power, and chose to use it to intentioanlly destroy a city where there was no effective resistance to your forces, and didn't care about civillian casualties, sure, it could be done. The reason it hasn't been done much (with a few exceptions, such as Dresden) is more a matter of choice then because it was impossible.

[Prussia]

There are some mods people have made where you can't simply destroy a city in one sweep - it takes a few turns depending on how big the city is, so the city's army will come to the rescue.

That's pretty realistic right there.

But think of it this way.

Think of every unit as carrying 10,000 times the number of guys left standing - 3 guys is 30,000, 2 guys is 20,000, etc.

Now depending on how big the city is, those thousands of soldiers could either burn the city before you could blink (for example, the mongolian horde), or it would take them years (the germanic tribes attacking Rome).

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Prussia
Now depending on how big the city is, those thousands of soldiers could either burn the city before you could blink (for example, the mongolian horde), or it would take them years (the germanic tribes attacking Rome).

No one was really trying to destroy Rome, though. They just wanted to grab all the loot they could and then leave.

[Generaldoktor]

Originally posted by Xorbon
Didn't Genghis Khan obliterate several cities and their populations? Or are these accounts exaggerated?

I'm surprised this got obscured. My reading of Harold Lamb's admittedly somewhat fictionalized biography, admittedly some many years ago suggested Ghengiz razed (not "raised", folks) several of several hundred thousand inhabitants, belonging to obscure Middle Asian "empires" though there may have been a few Russian/Polish ones too, before they were stopped in Europe in mid-13th century. (Encarta mentions Merv and Nishapur.) Ghenghiz' son Hulagu, who founded a short-lived Persian dynasty, evidently effectively razed Baghdad, though obviously it was rebuilt. Encarta mentions several "destroyed" cities were rebuilt again by Hulagu in his lifetime, sort of the equivalent of running your own settlers in on the same site, after razing. Tamerlane, a "Mogul," not Mongol, evidently razed a few in North India/Central Asia of some size also.

The Nazi Germans, from what I understand, fully intended to raze Leningrad, a metro area of some 3 million people, had they successfully taken it, which they nearly did. Nearly half the population was killed in the siege of over two and a half years (9/41-1/44,) anyway. This kind of belies the notion somebody had that large modern metro areas could not be razed. My money is on that the Germans would have/could have done it, had they succeeded in the prior military campaign.

I'm surprised someone else failed to notice that population does go down in cities, when big battles are fought over them, either successfully resulting in capture, or not. This was true also in Civ 3. It apparently goes down one population point per turn of battle actually involving the city.

[Prussia]

Originally posted by Yosho


No one was really trying to destroy Rome, though. They just wanted to grab all the loot they could and then leave.

Come on, those barbarians wanted the entire world to go up in flames. They were trying to destroy EVERYTHING.