When I capture a city, I am stuck with it. This is not always what I intended for the territory - maybe I wanted to attach it to another city instead, especially in the early game when there are few administrators. Maybe in the later game I capture a city I know I won't be able to defend or apply enough influence on to keep it from defecting. Therefore, I would like to have options to raze a city on capture or reduce it to an outpost (so that I can attach it to another city).

Are such options in the pipeline?

You can raze a city by ransacking its center. Converting back to an outpost is unlikely to be added as there's already a medieval era technology that allows you to merge two adjacent cities.

If you ransack the city center, you essentially raze the city. If you want to get the city for yourself, force your enemy into surrender and demand the city from them/

Thank you for the quick answers!

Makes sense that it would work like this; how does it work though? Do you select the ransack action, then the city? I had been just right-clicking the city, which led to a battle which (when won) automatically led to occupying the city. Do I understand you right that you clicked the ransack action first instead of attacking the city outright? Or could you ransack the occupied city after capturing it? Does that work on your own cities too?

Satur9NL wrote:

Thank you for the quick answers!

Makes sense that it would work like this; how does it work though? Do you select the ransack action, then the city? I had been just right-clicking the city, which led to a battle which (when won) automatically led to occupying the city. Do I understand you right that you clicked the ransack action first instead of attacking the city outright? Or could you ransack the occupied city after capturing it? Does that work on your own cities too?

You need to first capture the city to ransack it. And I believe so.

Thank you! I hadn't thought of it working like that, I'll go try it out later. Moral of the story is probably that a lot of these issues will be clarified once the tutorial is fully implemented, so if a dev sees this: *here's a thing to put in the tutorial*.

Sounds reasonable, thanks for the information about the ransacking. I wondered about it myself.

Salterius wrote:

If you ransack the city center, you essentially raze the city. If you want to get the city for yourself, force your enemy into surrender and demand the city from them/

I just tried, ransaking a newly plopped city takes 25 turns, which is forever. It needs to be improved.

SunshineWings wrote:

Salterius wrote:

If you ransack the city center, you essentially raze the city. If you want to get the city for yourself, force your enemy into surrender and demand the city from them/

I just tried, ransaking a newly plopped city takes 25 turns, which is forever. It needs to be improved.

You should add another unit to the one already ransacking, it will take only a few turns (2 or 3).

If it's fortified, like it spawned after turn 100, then you cannot enter the city without taking it, at which point you cannot ransack it. There really needs to be a less clunky way to deal with this. I would love a button next to liberate marked "resettle" to disperse the population of the city you cannot administer. As it is I have to station a whack-a-mole army next to independents that don't like me once I hit the city cap.

OTOH, thanks for the free "militarist" stars... so it's also a bit of an exploit. Take, liberate, smash.

Oh how I wish I would've came here first during my war based- no intelligence run, this really helps a lot knowing now. Had saw options to ransack city when near and had no idea. Currently negative -58000.00 influence, got a lot of ransacking to do.