Palace chasing doesn't work in 1.21?

[CerberusIV]

One of the tactics I had become quite fond of was a way of avoiding autorazing enemy towns in the early game. Basically it meant hitting the town that is the enemy capital during an early archer/sword rush. Normally size 1 cities with no culture are autorazed but if the palace has relocated then they get a point of culture after one turn and are no longer razed. This allows capture of several towns that would otherwise be destroyed.

Worked great with 1.14 but I patched to 1.21 last night and started a new game. I tried this tactic and all the size 1 towns were autorazed even after a few turns as the enemy capital.

I haven't done any testing of this but I assume it has been changed so that either a minimum number of culture points is needed to avoid autorazing or size 1 cities are razed regardless of culture.

Can anyone confirm this please.

[dexters]

It's a cheat an exploit and I'm glad they removed it.

[mimi]

Well, perhaps that explains why I never had a clue what people were talking about when they discussed palace chasing - saw that "option", tried it and it never worked so I figured I was being blonde.

[PeaSoup]

did you wait till the new capital's borders expand? I believe that's the sole requirement to avoid autorazing.

With the palace generating 1 culture/turn, you'd need to wait 10 turns before taking their new capital

[Ribannah]

In 1.14 you need to wait for 3 turns, I think. Enough to no longer consider palace-chasing an exploit.

Have you tried to wait a bit longer in 1.21? Maybe you were simply too fast.

[Cort Haus]

Why is Palace-chasing an expolit? Seems to me to be the rules of the game. Cities need culture to avoid auto-razing at size 1. Where's the cheat?

[nbarclay]

In the original, unpatched game, all size-1 cities could be captured. The autoraze feature was added to (for example) keep archers from following settlers around and grabbing the cities they build the instant they build them. Thus, with the current game, you can get two workers from an enemy settler (as was always part of the design) but can no longer get a free city out of the deal. Palace chasing takes things back a bit in the direction of where they were originally, but not so far as to bring back the original problem to any significant degree. So I view it as a legitimate tactic, one with both costs and benefits attached, rather than as an exploit.

Nathan

[CerberusIV]

I played a bit more last night and finished off the last two AI cities. If the border has not expanded the city is definitely razed at size 1.

The downside to all this is that it means I had to produce a number of settlers, costing population from my existing cities, and get them in place to occupy the captured territory. So it is harder.

The real annoyance is that most of the towns that were destroyed had populations of 3 or 4 to start with but by the time my hoplites and swordsmen had marched up to them and attacked the AI had poprushed spearmen and reduced them to size 1.

I suppose it is a way of getting the AI to abandon indefensible towns but there is a limit to how far a human would take that tactic. As it is now much harder to capture small towns I would like to see poprushing restricted to reducing towns to size 2 minimum.

If that were introduced it would be impossible to grab a new town that had not grown in size, it would still be razed, but would mean established towns could be taken and kept even if they had poprushed some defenders.

[Schee]

Well I don't think it is an exploit either ?
And what do you consider as an exploit, exactly ?

[lmtoops]

It's gone so what's the point? Expoit, cheat, tactic...Whatever!!!