I often find myself at the city cap or 1 over and faced with a war. Are we supposed to just defend in that case an never try to take cities? I thought at some point you are supposed to be able to absorb cities into other cities, basically turning one of the cites into an attached territory of the other city, and that would help, but I was never able to get that to work. I remember it just saying there was no adjacent target available or something.

Anyway, anyone have suggestions for dealing with that?

Put efforts into the outpost and gaining enough war score to vassal. 

kruszcontrol wrote:

I often find myself at the city cap or 1 over and faced with a war. Are we supposed to just defend in that case an never try to take cities? I thought at some point you are supposed to be able to absorb cities into other cities, basically turning one of the cites into an attached territory of the other city, and that would help, but I was never able to get that to work. I remember it just saying there was no adjacent target available or something.

Anyway, anyone have suggestions for dealing with that?

Besides raising the city cap with appropriate techs, it becomes pretty easy to go 2-3+ cities over as your influence generation grows through the game. Maxing out liberty and making all your emblematic districts is key to this, though you can also grab Persians in classical or Ming Chinese in early modern if you really want more cities.

Besides that, razing extra/captured/weaker cities and re-settling an outpost then splitting the territories is always an option. Absorbing cities is done after you the Military Architecture in Medieval and as you saw they have to be two cities with territories that touch. The cost is very high influence-wise and is based on number of territories and difference in infrastructure between the cities, so make sure they have the same infrastructure built before merging to lower the cost and consider the Inherited Land civic under Land Rights to spend gold instead of influence before going on a merging spree if you don't have the influence.

I find the city cap is the roughest in the classical era since they removed the +1 city cap from Trade Expeditions and Leadership seems to never trigger. That said you can and should still go for wars on conquest to claim resources and wonders even if just to raze the cities and leave the land as outposts for future cities as your cap/influence goes up.

You have 2 really good Options depending on what your objectives are for the Future.

The first one is very simple just raze the cities, this is great option since you can just build a outpost over the city afterwards. You get to keep all the districts and the infrastructure doesn't matter since later techs allow you to establish cities with all infrastructure already. So yeah just make a Outpost and either attach to a City or keep it for upgrading to a City later.

The other really good option is just liberating it, the liberated people already start with 50 influence with you. Which is enough to buy resources and hire armies if you need to, so they can just build up the city for you while you work on getting a hir City Cap to take it later. This Option is really good for Militarist since it will spawn armies which you can kill for military stars.