Absorb City Suggestion

[leion247]

Absorbing a city with nearly no population or districts/infrastructure should be significantly cheaper. Absorbing a city with 10 pops and no districts/infrastructure late-game shouldn't be costing 50K+ influence/money to do so.

[1997]

Sadly the "Absorb City" function doesn't seem to offer any advantages compared to its absurd costs. What you do is ransack the main plaza, plop down an outpost and attach it for like 500 gold.

[leion247]

Yea, but then you get the pillage badge which can mess with your tense diplomatic relations. It's really dumb ransacking your own cities gives you that badge, as there is no other way to downgrade a city. If I wanna do it to multiple cities, then it effectively kills my relations with everyone, so it doesn't feel very practical.

[insidius_maximus]

Absorbing works the other way around... the cost is lower if the target city has the SAME infrastructure as the absorbing city. The workaround for this in your case (since its just 10 pops and you're late game) is to ransack the new city (effectively destroying it), build an outpost, and attach the outpost to your parent city.

[leion247]

I will say, I haven't experienced the modifier being cheaper when the infrastructure is the same. I've only every had it increase. Is the modifier for it just that insignificant?

[insidius_maximus]

This forum post goes into detail about how Absorb costs change: https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/173-strategy-guides/threads/45266-city-absorb-cost

My own experience has been relatively consistent with what that poster found. Infrastructure is the biggest cost-driver, while territory and districts also play a smaller role.

Something I've done in my recent playthroughs is building multiple cities in the New World using Settlers with Colony Plan (that builds cities with infrastructure from Tier 1-3), attaching 2-3 territories each, and merging them asap to get a cheap 6-12 territory megacity. You'll notice that because the cities are identical, merging is dirt cheap (like, 500 - 1500 influence per merge).

For older, established cities, the cost definitely comes down with infrastructure matching (I've seen cost drop from 45K influence to 29K, for example) but because of the districts already built, there will always be a substantial cost. The link I shared above has a really cool Google Sheets link with graphs that show how costs change with each additional district and Infra.

[leion247]

Thanks for the information, this should be helpful now that I can actually see the differences and values.

[leion247]

After playing with this info, I can confirm you're indeed right and it all lines up. There is significant cost decreases from the same/similar infrastructure. This helps a lot with conquering neighbors and just absorbing into nearby cities to avoid the pillager badge mid-late game.

[pejo_1985]

yes, synchronize buildings between two cities decreasing absorb city cost, but for me it is very difficult to remember what buildings are built on both cities to find out what building i have to build. for example if one city has 35 completed building and another has 47, it is difficult to find what buildings i need to build

[insidius_maximus]

Originally posted by pejo_1985:

yes, synchronize buildings between two cities decreasing absorb city cost, but for me it is very difficult to remember what buildings are built on both cities to find out what building i have to build. for example if one city has 35 completed building and another has 47, it is difficult to find what buildings i need to build

Yep, there's no easy way to compare the Infrastructure for two cities. I would love to see an expanded tooltip when hovering over the "Absorb City" button that breaks out the merge cost (similar to how Stability is broken down) and specifically lists out the top 5 missing infrastructure that are driving up the costs.