Disbanding cities

[Afterburner]

My preferred strategy is to not leave captured enemy cities around. Is there any way to simply disband these cities without razing them to the ground (and thereby taking the atrocity penalty)? I've tried the "Settler" disband method, but it don't work in SMAC. Any help would be appreciated.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Burner,

The settler disband method will work depending on the level of difficulty you play. Higher difficulties allow cities to disband.

[Ned]

Ogie, I read notes on this board about "disbanding" cities, so I looked at the menu when an unit is active and I could see no option that would permit one to disband a city. How do you do it? From the F4 function key menu? Where?

Ned

[Afterburner]

The settler disband method will work depending on the level of difficulty you play. Higher difficulties allow cities to disband.

Ah. Well there you are, then. I'm playing "Specialist" (or whatever the 2nd difficulty level is). Probably play a higher difficulty level next time, though. I'm not an advanced Civ/Civ2/SMAC player by any stretch, but criminy, even I like *some* challenge. =)

I'm playing the Pirates and I'm winning with ease using a particularly anal variant of the ICS. I have a pronounced aversion to overlapping city radii, so my cities are built to minimize the amount of unused terrain squares while simultaneously avoiding overlapping city radii. The result is a grid of cities that leaves 3 terrain squares unused between any block of 4 cities. When playing a land based faction, my expansion efforts are often thwarted by rocky terrain or by land turning into ocean in a bad spot. But I picked the "Create Random Map" option and didn't customize it at all (except for the size, which is 88 x 130), and wouldn't ya know that I got a waterworld with very few pieces of land. And my pod landed in the middle of a small archipelago, so I had lots of ocean shelf squares available to get me started. I've been expanding like mad ever since, and I've got about 40-45 cities currently.

(Yeah yeah, I realize that it's not Transcdending before 2250 in a Transcendant-difficulty game, but it's still fun.)


Afterburner: Out of curiosity, would you relocate those pods to new areas, or just add their population to an existing base?

If I can get the colony pods to my territory with a minimum of fuss, I'll pack 'em off to my territory and create a new city close to home. Otherwise, I just disband 'em.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Ned,

Oops sorry about that, thought I was still answering a question from Afterburner and addressing the reluctance to use the destroy base function that is considered an atrocity. ( I need to make sure I read the author correctly for the future). YT is right it is under one of the menus's and actually I think there is a set of key strokes as well. I rarely if ever use the destroy base as my preference is specialize/starve them and get some econ or research out of the deal if my intention is to get rid of the base.

P.S. If you have more than two Orbitals (farms) at a size 2 city you'll be bringing in 2 from the orbitals and 2 fromthe base supporting the 2 last citizens and no more starvation. You'll need to make a colony pod here to get to size one and then another soon afterwards (as you'll be running an excess nutrient of 1) in order to disband.

[This message has been edited by Ogie Oglethorpe (edited March 15, 2000).]

[EternalSpark]

In the #rules section of alpha.txt, the last one there is something to the fact of this...

1 - If this number is a non-zero, oblitering a base is an atrocity.

Make this number 0, and then raze anything you want. THis is the only permanant edit I use in Alpha.txt.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Set all your citizens to specialists. Sell off all improvments including recycle tanks. Allow the city to starve down to size 1. At this point the city(base) will be able to support one population point. Build a colony pod.

Caution: If you have Sky farms this might take some time.

Upon completion of the colony pod (you can rush build it if you are in a hurry) a pop up screen will ask whether you want to disband the colony and build a colony pod. Answer yes, presto.

On citizen level you can't disband the base this way instead a colony pod gets built but the base remains at size 1.

[YT]

Ned: Ogie was refering to creating colony pods equal to the base population. In higher dificulty levels, creating a colony pod in a level one base gives you the option to 'disband' the city, and finish creating the pod. The only menu command which eliminates a city is Action, Detroy Base (or something like that).

Afterburner: Out of curiosity, would you relocate those pods to new areas, or just add their population to an existing base?

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Yours Truly