Hello!



When you conquer an Enemy city, that city becomes effectively yours and, if i'm not mistaken, triggers Expansion Disapproval on your empire.



While it is true that you can "Salt the City", this implies that you will have 4 turns of +Expansion Disapproval for nothing.



Now, even if it did not trigger the Approval malus, wouldn't it be better if a conquered city could be immediatly destroyed (without giving you the Settler as in Salt The City obviusly)?

+1 to idea



Also it would be nice to have the option to just create a puppet. ie. leave it to self-govern, you can get no benefits other then the possibility of annexing it later (ie. it not going poof). Population in the city could slowly go down so you can't just have giant cities ready to be integrated if you wait too long to fix your empire.

I agree.

I was in war with Broken lord (start a random game : 3 broken lords in front of me xD), with two of them. The stupid IA made only cavalry, so it was easy to beat them all. I captured four towns and start salting.

But the four town gimme such a terrible disapproval malus : all of my towns could'nt produce food anymore, and all building took something like 30 turns to end.



I would prefer an option like in civ or Total war : destroy, conquer, sacking.

Insta-razing is not fun if you're on the receiving end - getting the city you've spent hours with, building up perfectly, destroyed at the click of a button because you moved your military two tiles south instead of north is distinctly un-fun. You need to have a chance to reconquer the city and the happiness hit is an okay-ish measure to slow conquering sprees. The mechanic is fine.



[Wereallyneedtoremembertopostsuggestionsassuming1)thegamewillbebalanced(rightnowit'sobviouslynot,solet'snotdesignthegamearoundtheseimbalances)and2)theAIwillbemuchimproved(orsimplyimagineeverysuggestioninthecontextofmultiplayer).Hmm,IthinkIhaveanideaforanewsig...]

You need to have a chance to reconquer the city

indeed that's why we do it. but we are not so happy with disapproval at the moment, you have not enough ways to control atm and it is a bit brutal.

SpaceTroll wrote:
indeed that's why we do it. but we are not so happy with disapproval at the moment, you have not enough ways to control atm and it is a bit brutal.

Thank you for that comment. My main reason for checking the forums today was to see if I am missing something on the happiness front. So far it seems the only things I can do to improve it are to get +10 if I found the city next to certain anomalies, or +25 for the second tier lower quadrant empire plan, or luck into finding some wine. As the necros you can also start eating your own people to lift your spirits, but this does not seem like an ideal growth formula, heh.

SpaceTroll wrote:
indeed that's why we do it. but we are not so happy with disapproval at the moment, you have not enough ways to control atm and it is a bit brutal.

Have expansion disapproval decline over time? At -.5/turn, it will allow you to add a city every 20 turns.

Faction unique ways of dealing with the problem?



The necros could destroy a city by eating the current population, giving a empire wide happiness and food boost per population.

Seek wrote:
Insta-razing is not fun if you're on the receiving end - getting the city you've spent hours with, building up perfectly, destroyed at the click of a button because you moved your military two tiles south instead of north is distinctly un-fun. You need to have a chance to reconquer the city and the happiness hit is an okay-ish measure to slow conquering sprees. The mechanic is fine.



[Wereallyneedtoremembertopostsuggestionsassuming1)thegamewillbebalanced(rightnowit'sobviouslynot,solet'snotdesignthegamearoundtheseimbalances)and2)theAIwillbemuchimproved(orsimplyimagineeverysuggestioninthecontextofmultiplayer).Hmm,IthinkIhaveanideaforanewsig...]

An alternative would be leave the city's ruins on the map and allow new settlement by the original owner to rebuild the city more quickly than just starting all over. I like a feature similar to this in AoW and find it much more believable than the current "salting the earth" option.

This sounds like a practical decent idea - and something no other game of this type does - it seems obvious once some points it out

I remember in Civ4 From Fall from heaven (or a mod mod of it) that you would have several turns of uncontrollable/unproductive city in freshly conquests. Maybe have such a "occupation period" with several consequences :



-only food production

-no approval penalty empire wise (they are not part of the nation per se yet)

-a pillage build option (decrease pop by one, removes random building/district/creates dust)



That way you can torch the city along several turns or have some time before trying to integrate it. I agree we currently lack approval managment methods. In other games it was often offset by keeping garrisoned units for social order.

uriak wrote:
I remember in Civ4 From from heaven (or a mod mod of it) that you would have several turns of uncontrollable/unproductive city in freshly conquests. Maybe have such a "occupation period" with several consequences :



-only food production

-no approval penalty empire wise (they are not part of the nation per se yet)

-a pillage build option (decrease pop by one, removes random building/district/creates dust)



That way you can torch the city along several turns or have some time before trying to integrate it. I agree we currently lack approval managment methods. In other games it was often offset by keeping garrisoned units for social order.

I certainly agree that if you're going to keep a city, you should have to spend some time effectively assimilating it into your empire. Right now, you can too easily move from city to city on a spree of conquest without needing to keep any holding forces in the city.