Hints for destroying one of YOUR cities

[vik]

Suppose I don't want to keep enemy cities that I've taken.

What is a quick way to dismantle a friendly city?

I found that making all the citizens into elvis/einstein will eventually starve the city down to one population, and then I build a settler unit to totally dismantle it.

This can take some time, any quicker ways?

[Xin Yu]

If you don't have pyramids, a faster way is to send a food caravan or two to it to make the food box full. At the same time make all citizens taxmen. The next turn the food box will be empty (half empty if you have pyramids) and the population will grow by one. It will start to drop from then. Perhaps you also want to build food caravan from this city to other cities to cancel the added food from the route.

[SmartFart]

Jeez Xin......you really know this game don't you

[Ming]

Yeah... Xin Yu knows his stuff

When I saw that someone had responded to this thread, I figured it was Xin. He's still the best in my book!

Hey Xin, any more cheats for my cheat thread?

[My Wife Hates CIV]

yes that will help but only if the food box is nearly full and more than half anyway. It still might be faster, if the city requires a lot of food and if it's getting most of it from only a few sqaures, just to starve it instead of adding another to the population. and you might not have the caravans. it really depends on how much food the city currently has.
[This message has been edited by My Wife Hates CIV (edited January 06, 2000).]

[Xin Yu]

Also, once I had a city will almost full food box (no wall) but after all defense units were killed and size down from 9 to 1, the food box became empty. I'm not sure if all no wall cities will suffer from this. Maybe helpful in disbanding cities quickly.

[wonderdog4]

I do this all of the time with costal cities that I want to destroy prior to the discovery of steam engine.

This is how I do it. I hit a coastal city with a bunch of units and stack them all inside (including the ships) and turn every citizen into a tax collector. Each turn I disband one of the units to partially fill the shield box and then rush build a settler and disband it. I also sell one improvement each turn, saving the walls for last.

In 8 turns you can make a walled city of 8 disappear. Once the city is reduced to the same size as the number of units I have in it, I stop rush building, sell the walls and just let it slowly starve.

Money is rarely a problem when doing this, because the sale of the improvements ususally pays for the cost of rush building. In any case, I play most of the game as a democracy, so cash is rarely a problem.

The caravan idea is good, but it is not designed for speed.

[SandMonkey]

wonderdog -

isn't that an awful waste of units? If you know you're gonna destroy the city ahead of time, why not take a bunch of diplo's and destroy the city walls, then as you attack the city the population will go down. Then again, i guess that's just as much as a waste of units, isn't it?

------------------
SandMonkey

"Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a qtip"
-Homer Simpson

"Ecky eck ecky!"
"It's just a flesh wound!"
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

[wonderdog4]

War is a waste of units -- but a sometimes necessary waste. I see it as an investment. Given the AIs propensity to build ships just to harass your coastline, I will do just about anything to exterminate coastal cities before they can be used to launch ironclads or anything else.