City improvements in captured cities

[G.A]

In all of my games this didn`t happen just once - I once got a city with an aqueduct, and nothing else. The rest were always empty.

[Padmewan]

In my last game the Germans took one of my advanced cities in a sneak attack, and when I took it back immediately, all my millenia-old improvements were gone.

It was almost as bad as razing my city

[Moraelin]

Yep, I don't remember taking a city with anything but aqueducts, either. The only reason why they have barracks is that I have the Sun Tzu's Art of War wonder. Look at how they don't need maintenance. But if I conquer on another continent, or simply culturally expand across water, they'll have nothing either.

Also, I can't help noticing that most of those cities were producing regular units, with 3 hit points, not veterans. So they didn't have barracks before I took over.

So it's not that I inherited the barracks, it's simply that the city gained one automatically when I took over it.

And I'm not talking about taking over Redneck Village with a population on 1 and no culture radius. Taking over Moskow, after it's been the center of an empire that spanned a quarter of the world, gave me jack squat too. In fact, worse than jack squat, it gave me a bunch of resistance so I couldn't even hurry production for a while, except by bringing and disbanding tanks there. (Well, hey, I could afford it)

Cultural take overs, which I do far more often than military conquest, doesn't seem to bring along any city improvements either. So they didn't get destroyed by combat.

I'm starting to think that indeed, razing cities is the sane way to victory.

And, yes, I know that the AI will rather build hordes of obsolete units than doing any city improvements. (E.g., as I've said before, it tends to produce regular units -- and obsolete ones at that -- all the way to the end.) That could be the explanation. But still, a few of those cities actually had a culture radius. Not many of them, but a few actually did.