It doesn't make sense in the slightest that the cost to merge two singular without outposts cost 40k-50k like i inherited the city from this random mercenary faction and i wanted to combine it (thanks to the tech) and boom have one big city but nope it would cost over 40k to do that. Genuinely demand change on that its ridiculous 5k-10k for singular cities should be tbh specially in the early modern era

And it seems to go up every turn even if that city doesn't build or grow, which is really strange. I basically flipped into an Aesthete culture specifically to generate enough Influence to beat the turn-by-turn increase and merge the city.

There is an option to destroy the city and an outpost there, but it's super counterintuitive. City merge is supposed to streamline it.

This ability cost needs a serious overhaul. This is a Medieval tech that has the Influence cost of an empire in the Industrial/Contemporary era. If they have designed this as an Influence sink, then at least put city merging on a timer and let you use Influence to pay it down faster.

A big factor in the cost is infrastructure. Specifically infrastructure differences…and since infrastructure is expensive and changes…the cost goes up. (population also seems to be a part)

Melliores wrote:
This was probably done to stop you from building only districts in your fringe cities and they Absorb them, thus granting you a higher district count in the end.

Bingo!

Unfortunately, the exploit still exists, as others in the thread mentioned, you just need to take an extra step of razing the city center - imo, it should burn some of the districts randomly as well, while they should continue tweaking the merging cost.

It would be great if the techs unlocking infrastructure getting pre-built in new cities would also give a similar project for the existing cities, which would allow building up the missing infrastructure in one go for a massive industry discount. This alone would help with merging costs and would make hunting for missing infrastructure in both slightly less tedious.

They should make the merging cost of a city OR outpost equal to the sum of 1. adding all the territories 2. adding all the districts AND  3. a population factor (based on how much it would cost to build units for all the population..ie era factor)…so that raising and replacing is not worth it.