Razing captured bases

[fivre]

Stupid question, but I've never been able to figure it out:

How do you instantly dispose of captured bases? I'm pretty sure I've seen the AI do it... Once. Not being able to do it makes for a really annoying conquest victory.

[Krill]

Why play AC when CIV is out?

[vyeh]

Re: Razing captured bases

Originally posted by fivre
How do you instantly dispose of captured bases? I'm pretty sure I've seen the AI do it... Once. Not being able to do it makes for a really annoying conquest victory.

Type B when a combat unit is active in the base or use the "action" menu and choose "obliterate base".

Illuminatus, the immediately preceding post seems to be a troll (since this is an AC forum, denigrating AC here would be trolling). Isn't there a rule against trolling?

[Darrell01]

Krill - 1999 Game of the Year. (I think or was it 1995? I might be getting it confused with Settlers of Cataan.)
Good storyline
Great Gameplay
SMAniaC
Civ is the first game of the series and was made long before Alpha Centauri.

fivre - A city is turned into your city once 50 turns go by. It might be 20 or some other number, but it is a long time. I don't think you are talking about that though. I'm pretty sure you are talking about the B button. When a military unit is in a base, hit B and the unit will oBliterate the city. This has 2 negative consequences. The first is that it is an atrocity. Once committed against another faction's captured city, that faction will never blood truce or submit or anything with you except for vendetta. So if you obliterate their base you captured, it pretty much means that "its on". A more peaceful and the method that I prefer is to abandon the base. This is accomplished by building nothing but colony pods, even when the city is size 1. It may be hard to build a colony pod when the city is population booming by having a children's creche + planned + democracy + eudaimonia or cloning vats + Hydroponic Sky farms. What I do in this situation is to first stop the food harvest and have the city harvest less or equal food that it consumes. If that can't happen, I'll stop the population boom by eliminating the creche or changing the Social Engineering choice. If that can't happen I'll bring in supply convoys to ship some of the food to another city. It usually doesn't come down to that though. I might bring in some supply convoys anyway to build one colony pod a turn. Possible uses for these pods is to boost another city of mine or found new ones with the excess military and formers I might have. A word about colony pods here. You can hit B with a colony pod on a city to increase its size if it is your city or a pact-mate's city no matter what the size, even if it puts it over the hab limits.

Also, I'm not sure why you need to do this to get a conquest victory. Of course, I'm one who shies away from planet busters. I like the mag and bag or the chop and drop meathods to just take out a faction in one or two turns.

[fivre]

Originally posted by Darrell01

Also, I'm not sure why you need to do this to get a conquest victory.

You don't, but I hate having to monitor so many dinky cities after capturing, an annoyance aggravated by the AI's tendency to sprawl.

[Illuminatus]

Re: Re: Razing captured bases

Originally posted by vyeh
Illuminatus, the immediately preceding post seems to be a troll (since this is an AC forum, denigrating AC here would be trolling). Isn't there a rule against trolling?

I'll leave this post as a reminder. Krill is already being dealt with.

[vyeh]

Originally posted by Darrell01
A more peaceful and the method that I prefer is to abandon the base. This is accomplished by building nothing but colony pods, even when the city is size 1.

While Darrell01 is usually much more thorough than I, please note that if you're playing on the two easiest difficulty levels, a base of size 1 is not abandoned by building a colony pod.

[Hydro]

Don't forget that you can also gift the base to a submissive AI. This takes it off your hands and you can get some trade benefits.

You can also do sneaky things, like gift it to an AI you're hostile to or one that has tech you want. Then you probe the heck out of the nice, conveniently defenseless base. It’s like probing fish in a barrel.

Or you can gift it to a hostile faction, get a diplo bonus for this, and then take back the very same turn. If you have Spoils of War on you may get some tech, and if the base is small it will just go away. This is kind of mean, sneaky, and manipulative, but hey – all’s fair in love and war! You may even be able to do this several times before the AI stops talking to you. Hehe.

Hydro

[CEO Aaron]

Yeah, I can't stomach the exploitative nature of the base grant + probe rape. It's like shivving a kindergartener to get his lunch money. Total overkill.

As for the 'obliterate base' option, if you really don't want to pay attention to the base, turn on the governor. They're idiotic, but even a moronically run base will produce more resources for your war effort than a smoking, corpse-filled crater, and you don't need to worry about the diplomatic consequences either.

On the other hand, if you're the Aliens, or fighting Aliens, you can commit atrocities without any negative repercussions, so by all means, advance to the atrocities phase.

[Hydro]

Friend CEO, there are some factions that make a specialty of taking candy from babies and teaching small children the value of money by taking away from them. Morgan comes to mind, of course. Santiago takes from the weak – children or otherwise – and ChairmanYang would take the candy and then bash the child’s head against a xenofungus stalk if it served his purpose. Or perhaps he might like how the red blood and pink of the brain matter contrasts with the pinkish blue of the xenofungus – a unique aesthetic, I’d say.

Personally, I gift the bases to a friendly or subservient faction. I dislike extermination and as the CEO says other tactics are fun once and then quickly lose their amusement value.

Hydro

[Marid Audran]

I agree with CEO and this gifting base/probe-rape maneuver is another AI exploit I don't do in my games. The AI's naivety is simply too great to rationalize it. I do trade bases but only when it's "reasonable" for geographic or evacuation reasons, and don't try to scam the AI in the trade in regards to the individual value of the bases in question, or if the AI will be receiving a base next to a faction they're currently at war with and it'll essentially be as defenseless as a dodo.

As far as razing bases, basically whether or not the U.N. Atrocity Charter has been repealed the injured faction in question will loathe you for all time and never engage you in diplomacy again, so be certain you're comfortable with vendetta with said faction for the rest of your days (until they're eradicated, of course). Same thing with nerve gas troops, I believe. The only way you can "safely" raze, and by this I mean without major diplomatic repercusion, is by the base's population being assimilated into one's own, a process that takes fifty years if I recall correctly.

[Mead]

Just gift the base away.

Usually you should be in a position, if you're in the habit of conquering other bases, that you already have sufficient tech lead over your potential beneficiaries that you shouldn't be tempted to tech probe them afterwards.


Mead

[Chaosahanu]

Ah, but if you don't obliterate bases, you miss out on messages like this:



Also noteworthy:
Obliterating The Lord's Truth
Obliterating The Hand of God
Pretty much any Believer base.