Oh and bonus: If you don't ever research an upgrade to something like the basic Archer for as long as you possibly can, then you can also transfer the existing 4-10 population or whatever that exists in the city into cheap troops in about a turn or two. Reinvesting them as population, or saving them for later since they're cheap upkeep and can be instantly upgraded into something powerful later on. Either way, huge armies.

Indeed. That's what I do now. Create city, build district, raze, attach as an outpost. Same with Independent People City. It's better to attack them (bonus: military fame), raze the center, attach as outpost. What about the population? Na, you can work them to death for a district before razing it.

Merge/Absorb city is way too expensive.

Oh and colony model (and later versions of it) is cheap. So building new city with all infrastructures installed is very cheap compared to building it from scratch, all in one turn.

Yeah this is one of the areas of the game that I think needs to looked at. I have more thoughts, but essentially my TLDR thesis is being a "Builder" requires you to be a merchant more than a builder, because of this. And, it feels like Feudalism and the related upgrades should have some way of upgrading existing cities infrastructure, otherwise it becomes toxic really fast.

Huh, I knew you could ransack your own districts including Outposts and Administrative Centers, but I never tried it on the Main Plaza to just bork the city. Sounds like the main problems are:

1. The prohibitive cost of merging cities. Seriously, I don't understand why it's always so expensive. The principle deterrent to merging cities should be the stability cost (which is not currently much of a factor) and the loss of a city, which confers many benefits on its own. It should still scale with districts and such, but it's just too much right now.
2. The lack of cost scaling to attach an outpost that already contains many districts.

As long as the cost of just merging the city is cheaper than doing the roundabout exploity way, then it should be fine. 

As for the population/army bit, maybe assimilation shouldn't give control of their scores of garbo Ancient era units that can be instantly upgraded into rifles. Just send the armies into decline or something, you can give them another outpost to turn into a city if you want.  Also, upgrade costs on units probably need to be raised across the board. I guess the low upkeep of deferring upgrades is the opportunity cost of not having sent the unit back to city population, so that's alright.

It is not an exploit in the way sometimes you have to ransack cities, like capturing an independent city that you don't want, or an ai city for that matter. Ransacking an old city and replace it for attachment is more questionable, you may lose alot of population doing so, on other hand it can greatly reduce the cost of merging the territories together.

shasho wrote:

Huh, I knew you could ransack your own districts including Outposts and Administrative Centers, but I never tried it on the Main Plaza to just bork the city. Sounds like the main problems are:

1. The prohibitive cost of merging cities. Seriously, I don't understand why it's always so expensive. The principle deterrent to merging cities should be the stability cost (which is not currently much of a factor) and the loss of a city, which confers many benefits on its own. It should still scale with districts and such, but it's just too much right now.
2. The lack of cost scaling to attach an outpost that already contains many districts.

As long as the cost of just merging the city is cheaper than doing the roundabout exploity way, then it should be fine. 

As for the population/army bit, maybe assimilation shouldn't give control of their scores of garbo Ancient era units that can be instantly upgraded into rifles. Just send the armies into decline or something, you can give them another outpost to turn into a city if you want.  Also, upgrade costs on units probably need to be raised across the board. I guess the low upkeep of deferring upgrades is the opportunity cost of not having sent the unit back to city population, so that's alright.

The problem is, the cost becomes downright REASONABLE when you are a merchant race and it's paid in Money instead of Influence. Which sort of creates a situation where the best way to be a builder of a big city isn't to specialize in building, or Aestate, but instead in Money.

Torrent wrote:

Oh and bonus: If you don't ever research an upgrade to something like the basic Archer for as long as you possibly can, then you can also transfer the existing 4-10 population or whatever that exists in the city into cheap troops in about a turn or two. Reinvesting them as population, or saving them for later since they're cheap upkeep and can be instantly upgraded into something powerful later on. Either way, huge armies.

I was going to bring up that the population loss can be pretty extreme for well-established cities and not worth demolishing a city center for the "colony model" upgrade or cheaper outpost cost, but this troop loophole is interesting...

I practiced this stratagem in my recent game, to see how it worked and to manage my city cap limit. In my wars, I would capture an enemy city and I tried to ransack everything, or or just ransack the city center.

For ransack everything, I saw a lot of gold come in from ransacking everything, but it needs a lot of units to do so. This also left quite a few ruins to clear up whenever I wanted to use the territory.

For ransack just the main square, I had a nice clear territory that was much cheaper to claim during war surrendering, plus nothing for the enemy to retake. Less units required, but far less gold gained.

Both of these were effective in realigning territories where the enemy had built cities with limited territories attached, so what I also did was one of;

a. attach the ransacked territory to one of my existing cities that was not very big yet,

b. keep one conquered city and after war win then attach the extra territories where it originally had small number of territories attached,

c. or later game, completely ransack everything so I could use a Settler or Construction Team to save me the pain of all that building time :-)

Overall, I really enjoyed having these options and I would absolutely want to see these mechanisms kept please.

I think they need to leave in the ability to destroy a city center so that you aren't expansion blocked thanks to city cap. The fact is that absorbing cities is a terrible idea almost all the time and should just be made far, far cheaper. I have no idea why it's so expensive.

Faust wrote:

I think they need to leave in the ability to destroy a city center so that you aren't expansion blocked thanks to city cap. The fact is that absorbing cities is a terrible idea almost all the time and should just be made far, far cheaper. I have no idea why it's so expensive.

It is not always that expensive, most notably if you have several settlers and found cities with those and immediately aborb the cities, the cost can be really low, far cheaper than attaching outposts. Merge cost seems to mostly based on number of districts the target have and also the difference in infrastructure between the cities, you want the cities to have identical infrastructure to make it as cheap as possible. There may also be a few other things affecting the cost, like population or number of territories of the cities, but it don't seems to have much impact.

Or forget merging if you want to save influence -> build military units and "use up" all the city population ->ransack city center->build outpost->attach the territory->disband military units to get back the pops city had.

No need to invest 100 000s of influence/money to merge city. ALl the districts remain.

Gaspi2 wrote:

Or forget merging if you want to save influence -> build military units and "use up" all the city population ->ransack city center->build outpost->attach the territory->disband military units to get back the pops city had.

No need to invest 100 000s of influence/money to merge city. ALl the districts remain.

While you can do so, the units are not free to build as they cost industry/money to build, which instead could have been spent building more districts. Another way is instead of disbanding the units to get the pop back is to simply use the units in wars.

Faust wrote:

I think they need to leave in the ability to destroy a city center so that you aren't expansion blocked thanks to city cap. The fact is that absorbing cities is a terrible idea almost all the time and should just be made far, far cheaper. I have no idea why it's so expensive.

I think a better solution for that would be to allow depopulating one of your cities down to an outpost (and producing a bunch of "refugee" units from the pop... can't be upgraded, weaker than scout, etc.)  Maybe it could take some time, and only in a territory that was your sphere of influence and state religion... but then ban ransacking your own Main Plaza.

And then make Ransacking an Enemies Main Plaza/Administrative Center/Outpost cost you some War Support (because you are taking it from them even if you are not getting it).