[Freeciv] Re: destroy a city instead of taking it over?

[Ross Wetmore <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a longstanding issue with the Civilization game as a whole. Over the 
decades, there have been a number of solutions worked out using existing 
rules, and in some case programmed enhancements.

Of course, one would always want the option to activate such a feature in 
the rules to allow player choice for solitary gaming. There are some further 
issues with multi-user and competition games that that mean controversial 
options are not always a great thing :-).

Personally, I always go for an option system provided the longstanding 
gameplay is one of the options and usually the default. This allows 
experimentation, and certainly does not cause the anguish that neophyte 
programmers often introduce by changing longstanding gameplay for their 
limited reasons of the moment, arrogantly overruling those that have worked 
and designed game options, play and strategies for considerably longer 
periods of time. Getting fresh ofttimes good changes without being forced to 
swallow initial experiments and misguided tries is the programming problem.


Some concerns to consider though are whether destroying a large city is in 
fact a realistic event, and what resources might be required to actually 
accomplish this. Certainly, doing this for villages and small towns is quite 
a reasonable strategy, so a rule that applied until one could build or 
required an aqueduct might be one sort of thing to be tried. Selling or 
redistributing food as an order or diplomatic option without going through a 
Caravan trade route path might be an interesting update to help with the 
food disposal problem.

Current strategies besides starvation which can be optimized to happen over 
a small number of turns by things like "growing" the city until the foodbox 
is empty, and then starving a city size per turn, include things like 
leaving the city to be recaptured. After a couple of exchanges it will be 
reduced to the small size that usually results in razing. Note promoting 
tax, science or luxury during the starvation process is one of the side 
benefits from currently usable strategies, as well as selling all current 
improvements and/or transferring ownerships of non-essential units or other 
assets.

Cheers,
RossW
=====

Eddie Anderson wrote:

>     Is there an option setting or rule that I can modify that will
> allow me to destroy a city when I conquer it (instead of having to
> manage it)?  When I conquer an enemy city, I don't always want to
> add it to my civ (for a variety of reasons).  But unless the enemy
> city was size 1 when I conquered it, I'm forced to manage that city
> after the conquest.
> 
>     In most cases I'd rather raze that city and move on the next
> one.  I've noticed that there is a "raze" option in the rules.  But
> it looks to me like that rule only applies to the buildings in a
> conquered city.  What I want to do (in some cities) is raze the
> whole city (all the population, all the buildings).  Ideally, when I
> conquer a city, a dialog box would open with two choices:
> 
>  1) Raze this city
>  2) Add this city to your civilization
> 
> With that choice, I could explicitly choose the fate of that city.
> 
>     Unfortunately, I haven't found any such an option or rule.  So
> instead, when I don't want to manage or defend a conquered city,
> I slowly starve it instead.  I starve the conquered city until it
> shrinks to size 1.  Then I set it so that it can't grow (which,
> unfortunately, isn't always possible) and leave the city undefended.
> When an enemy (eventually) reconquers that size 1 city, the city
> vanishes.
> 
>     The problem with the starvation method (besides it being cruel
> :-)) is that it wastes time.  If the conquered city has a lot of
> food in its food box, it can take many turns to shrink the city down
> to size 1.  During those turns I have to leave a garrison unit in
> the city to prevent the enemy from liberating the city before it
> gets down to size 1.
> 
>     I'm looking for a way to get the same result (complete
> destruction of the enemy city) on the turn when I conquer it.
> Is there a way to do that that I've overlooked?  Thanks in advance
> for any help you can offer about this.
> 
> Eddie
> 
> 
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