Captured cities, burn and build new?

[Blaupanzer]

Agree with Cold Pheonix. Keep 2 current cities. Build 2 more cities. Take the west X down 1 to SW and East X down 1 to SE. (West X can be tinkered with depending on whether fresh water from the river or a new ocean port is more critical.) The Khmer are especially prone to favor hills over directly on rivers because of their special building, which gives and extra food directly to the city.

[Seedle]

Hmmm, good advice, especially as pertains to the western x. Thank you.

[Chemical Ollie]

What level are we discussing? I am mostly playing on noble or prince. I have yet to raze a city I conquered, and I find losing cities to revolt very rare. I am to greedy to raze it. But perhaps it works differently on higher levels?

In the early game, a free extra city (from warrior or archer rush) could put you right into the top of the score list and never look back. And in the late game, rebuilding from scratch takes much longer than adding some buildings.

Another issue is the enemy capital, which quite often has some great generals. Razing those would be madness.

[joncnunn]

Actually the option to let a city you captured in combat culturally revolt back to the original owner is disabled by default. So unless you went into advanced settings and turned it on the worst that can happen to those cities is frequently going into revolt.