Is there an alternative to always razing cites?

[planetfall]

Thanks all for the ideas, I have been experimenting and this seems like the best strategy:

1. capture city quickly without bombardment
{lose a few more units but gain improvements}

2. set production to Temple or Library

3. Key I was forgetting, turn on city governor to manage moods

4. put 1 weak unit in city {warrior, spearman, horse, etc}

5. put 3-5 armor units within 1 turn stricking distance to retake the city

6. turn every citizen to entertainer

7. try to find cannon/artillery/gallery/etc you can disband into the resisting city
so you can hurry production


Using this method on 10 cities with resisters and some distance from FP and capital, only 1 turned. Cost 1 unit. Gain marketplace and Tsu.

Definitely more fun than just razing the cities. Get to see the city influence levels grow again. 1.17 definitely fixed the excessive flipping problem, now it is just another part of the game.

Does anyone see any problems with this strategy?

[Whoha]

If the city has no culture there is no alternative(short of screwing around with the save file).

If the city has culture, but is in a crappy location, you can disband the city.

If the city has culture, will most likely flip, unless of course you stack your entire attacking force in it, you can park 2 attack units outside, leave none inside, and if it flips back take the city back. Replace losses as you get them.

If the city has culture, will most likely flip, and has self destructed, you can take it and sit there with a city that will never use its terrain, you can disband it and pass the unhappiness on to one of your good cities, or you can give it away to another ai.

razing is the easiest and most effective way(and parking 2 units outside the city to take it back if it flips isnt the most intuitive thing to do), if you take a city chances are you will have to rebuild everything anyways, infrastructure the ai pillaged instead of using its units to blunt your attack included.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Whoha
razing is the easiest and most effective way

I have no trouble conquering and holding very large enemy cities.

[chiefpaco]

Originally posted by planetfall
Thanks all for the ideas, I have been experimenting and this seems like the best strategy:

1. capture city quickly without bombardment
{lose a few more units but gain improvements}

2. set production to Temple or Library

3. Key I was forgetting, turn on city governor to manage moods

4. put 1 weak unit in city {warrior, spearman, horse, etc}

5. put 3-5 armor units within 1 turn stricking distance to retake the city

6. turn every citizen to entertainer

7. try to find cannon/artillery/gallery/etc you can disband into the resisting city
so you can hurry production

Some comments for some of your points:

1. I prefer to bombard to lower my casualty count & especially if I don't end up capturing the city, it's pretty useful. It doesn't really help your flip factor since cultural buildings don't transfer, unless you hit the marketplace & you'll miss out on extra happiness. However, the AI will do more drafting if you park outside the city for a few turns. So.... either way...

3,6. I think once you set your governor on, you can't turn all your citizens to entertainers - he'll change them back. This is pretty dangerous cause he can't deal with resistors becoming unhappy citizens & disordering the city, which doubles the flipping chance.

4. I often save conscript defenders for the city. To push the city's pop/unit ratio, I put in some outdated units too. I don't mind so much about losing conscripts & ancient swordsmen. This scares the AI a little, I think, cause I'm not sure if it sometimes considers the number of units in the city rather than the quality. If they do attack, they have to use extra attackers to get it, even if they probably win.

It's kind of cool calling on my swordsmen in the modern era to be my fun police. Ooh, who can be so upset when those guys with cool-looking swords are around!

Keeping cities isn't always useful under most govt types since it could be so far away to be very productive. So a settler for a new city would be just as good, in most cases. However, when I'm running communism, they're more valuable since they could be my next best city in time. So, it's a bit govt dependent too.

I don't see flipping as much with 1.17 & keep most of my cities. But it could also be because I try to at least keep even on culture & then I have few problems. Being superior in culture & military over a civ should be an easy victory.

[ACooper]

It seems from the responses here that some people are having problem and some are not. (I myself rarely lose a city) I wonder if this has to do with gameplay styles and willingness to play the game as Civ3 and not try to play as Civ2. I've noticed that most of the people who complain about losing cities are also the ones who complain about other elements of the game that are different from Civ2.

Civ 3 is a very different game than Civ2. To wage a sucessful war you need to garrison troops in the occupied city. You need to be sure that your culture is strong. It also help to build temples, etc. quickly to hold that city.

Civ3 needs to be played like Civ3 and not Civ2 or SMAC. It's a different game.

[Whoha]

"I have no trouble conquering and holding very large enemy cities."

Im sorry i dont have any cookies for you. Please go back and reread my post, instead of taking parts of it out of context. Mouse click for mouse click, razing IS the easiest and most effective. However I posted the second most optimal strat that lets you hold such a large city, proving that I have no difficulty whatsoever, playing whatever strat I want, even one that shoots me in the foot(like giving the civ im about to wipe out every resource for 20 turns so i can fight a few modern units).

I also noticed how you stated very large enemy cities. So can I take this to mean that you can not deal with self-destructed cities? hah, victory

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Whoha
I also noticed how you stated very large enemy cities. So can I take this to mean that you can not deal with self-destructed cities? hah, victory

Of course razing is easy. So is murder, plunder, or destruction. Razing is easy. Ruling is hard.

[Whoha]

no... clicking your mouse in a different way is most certainly not difficult.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Whoha
no... clicking your mouse in a different way is most certainly not difficult.

[Zachriel]

There are certainly many ways to play Civ. That is for sure. And they are all "valid." In actual fact, razing might turn out to be the generalized "best" play. That would be sad. But that just means that "good" plays with a handicap, as it does in real life anyway. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. So the good guy just has to be a little smarter and work a little harder.

Once I saw an army raze an American city. It left a huge hole in the world where there had once been a great city. I couldn't change the past, but I destroyed that army and made allies with the Americans which lasted the entire game.

[Elucidus]

Originally posted by Zachriel


Razing is easy. Ruling is hard.


No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. So the good guy just has to be a little smarter and work a little harder.

Aren't both of those the truth. In more than just the game.

[nbarclay]

In my current game (1.16f patch), 25 years (five turns) ago, I took out all eleven of China's cities on the main continent in a single turn. (The battle was modern armor vs. infantry, with my cavalry mopping up obsolete units.) I've had two culture flips since then and had to retake the cities (unfortunately, China has an island right off the mainland), but consider what I have in return (not counting libraries and a couple temples I've built myself).

Note that I'm putting coal plants in parentheses since my Hoover Dam makes them essentially irrelevant. Also, since I built the Pyramids and captured the Art of War, I have granaries and barracks in all my cities whether I would have captured them or not.

Shanghai, made my new capital by a great leader:
-- Size 19 (after producing a settler to transfer surplus population)
-- Marketplace, Aqueduct, Factory, Bank, Courthouse, Hospital, Police Station, Smith's Trading Company, (Coal Plant)

Beijing
-- Size 17 (will stabilize at 16 once it grows enough to feed itself).
-- Marketplace, Courthouse, Factory, Bank, Hospital, Police Station, Great Library, Art of War

Tatung
-- Size 16
-- Aqueduct, Bank, Hospital, Police Station

Chengdu
-- Size 15
-- Marketplace, Aqueduct, Bank, Factory, Hospital

Xinjian
-- Size 13
-- Marketplace, Courthouse, Bank, Hospital

Canton (one of the cities that flipped)
-- Size 18
-- Marketplace, Courthouse, Bank, Hospital, Coastal Fortress, Magellan's Voyage, Copernicus's Observatory

Tientsin
-- Size 13
-- Courthouse, Aqueduct, Bank, Factory, Hospital, Harbor, (Coal Plant)

Hangchow
-- Size 11
-- Bank, Hospital, Harbor, Police Station

Anyang (the other one that flipped)
-- Size 10
-- Aqueduct, Harbor

Nanking
-- Size 9
-- Aqueduct, Courthouse, Marketplace, Harbor

Tsingtao
-- Size 6 (will shrink to 5 before expanding to feed itself)
-- Aqueduct, Harbor

There can be definite advantages to keeping cities instead of razing them, especially if you can come up with the power for a blitzkreig that doesn't give the AI time to draft a lot of people and make its cities unhappy. It would take centuries to bring replacement cities up to the same level some of my Chinese conquests are at, unless I would be willing to spend a lot of gold I don't want to take away from research (and which I'd have significantly less of without income from the captured cities' marketplaces and banks).

Nathan

P.S. After gobbling up mainland China, I ate England for dessert. Their cities weren't as valuable, but none flipped on me, and none ever will now that I've used a newly built troop transport to capture their island city of Oxford.

[Whoha]

pangea, or have you edited the building giving wonders to give to all cities?

[cassembler]

the ACooper-meister

Civ3 needs to be played like Civ3 and not Civ2 or SMAC. It's a different game.

Right on!

[planetfall]

Hey, great responses. Thanks.


ACooper It seems from the responses here that some people are having problem and some are not. (I myself rarely lose a city)

Rather I think people are still overreacting from the flips in original version up to 1.16.

My "problem" was not with flipping but with the campaign stalling by not bringing along police units and wasting panzers for police action.

chiefpaco 1. I prefer to bombard to lower my casualty count & especially if I don't end up capturing the city, it's
pretty useful.

I used to always bombard, and would not invade until city was down to 1-3 citizen size. Problems with that were: 1) slow, 2) AI has time to reinforce, 3) tedious, and mainly 4) lose all the city improvement goodies.

What do you mean don't take the city? I don't know the appropriate military term for units, but not taking the city is not usually a problem. For example, last campaign, French had about 6 cities clustered to the south, smallest was size 10. There were 3 more cities about 13 tiles to north in mountain terrain. I used to try to block horsemen and calvary by moving a solid wall of armor. This time I tried something different which was very effective. Precampaign my boarder line was [sea][city][3 tiles][city][3tiles][city][2 tiles][lake].

I allocated 60 panzers to the south. {The other 60 were in the north for the English}.

I had 6 stacks of 10 panzers each. {brigade?}
3 stacks went south, and 3 went north. When AI moved units out of cities, they were primary target and cities were secondary targets. With this much armor the AI tried to stack 12-15 defenders, no problem. One city in south and one in north did not fall on first attempt, simply pulled a few panzers from one unit to take care of the job. I lost a couple panzers attacking units fortified in the mountains, but with infrastructure capable pumping out 10 new armor each turn, no problem.

3,6. I think once you set your governor on, you can't turn all your citizens to entertainers - he'll change them back. This is pretty dangerous

Never had that happen. Maybe I didn't explain well enough. My steps are: 1) all citizens to entertainers, 2) turn on mood governor, 3) complete turn, 4) next turn: repeat steps 1..3 until no resisters are left. You are right if on the second turn you do not reassign workers, governor will give citizens productive tasks.

Forget to mention: another useful strategy is to change production to settler, combo of starving, reducing citizen base, and camping police does work to reduce flip probability.


4. It's kind of cool calling on my swordsmen in the modern era to be my fun police.

My philosophy is police are the highest value unit available in one turn. What is really fun to see is to have a couple cities production up where they can pump out knights in one turn.
Seeing police dressed up as knights in the modern era is hilarious.