Merging Cities?

[BigSexy]

I'm a little confused with the mechanics of merging cities. How is it done? What are the benefits / drawbacks. Is it the done through the 'collapse' button?
I've been able so far to work the mechanics of outposts being attached to cities and outposts becoming cities, but merging or collapsing cities is still an unknown. Can somebody please shed some light here?

[SirKnechtalot]

purpose: going below your city cap again
side effect: creating insane metropolises

[BigSexy]

Originally posted by SirKnechtalot:

purpose: going below your city cap again
side effect: creating insane metropolises

is 'creating insane metropolises' good or bad? Could you elaborate a bit. An in the game UI how does one merge cities?

thanks

[Digihuman]

Originally posted by BigSexy:

Originally posted by SirKnechtalot:

purpose: going below your city cap again
side effect: creating insane metropolises

is 'creating insane metropolises' good or bad? Could you elaborate a bit. An in the game UI how does one merge cities?

thanks

It's good as long as you can manage the stability penalty. You end up creating one city with the production, food, gold, and research output of 2 or more cities. The food and production output in particular means that the city can produce things much faster than single cities can.

It also synergises with certain culture abilities - for example, the British ability is a 5% boost per region attached to your capital. By merging your capital with other cities, you attach all the regions that those other cities were attached to, and in the process create huge boosts!

[Mikoshi]

Originally posted by BigSexy:

Originally posted by SirKnechtalot:

purpose: going below your city cap again
side effect: creating insane metropolises

is 'creating insane metropolises' good or bad? Could you elaborate a bit. An in the game UI how does one merge cities?

thanks

As far as I have been able to tell, the game seems to go well out of it's way to make "going tall" difficult. Two cities > one city, all things being equal, because of the big bonuses that you get from infrastructure buildings. A big city would probably overtake two small, once it hit a critical mass for making more districts, but the game explicitly increases district cost after each district built. To the point that even going full production build, you still end up with ~3-5 turns to build districts.

I suspect the only "advantage" to merging might lay in making feeder cities, whose only purpose is to feed into your mega city. You'll lose the infrastructure incomes from the feeder, but get the districts/pop. So you'd come close to doubling your pop growth/district additions, as opposed to a singular city that can only gain districts/pop at an extremely throttled rate.

[Bijat]

If you plan it properly you can build a good soldier production city but other then that i don´t rly see the point exept if you rly wish to own all the teritories in the world (kinda have to build mega cities for city limit sake).

For normal play 2-3 territories per city seems to be a good standard (including its own) becuse even late game (when you start building tight cities) district cost will go up to mutch to build bigger "cities" then that.

[sintri]

There's no confirmation when you do it, why is there no confirmation.

[BigSexy]

Originally posted by sintri:

There's no confirmation when you do it, why is there no confirmation.

Nobody has answered my question on how you do this in the UI. Is the 'Absorb' button how you merge one city into another?

[VoiD]

It really depends on your cultures and combos.

For instance: The Ming Chinese have the great Tea House, that structure gives you +1 influence per district.

So if you have one massive city with 100 districts and 6 regions you could build one of those in every one of those districts creating 600 influence+adjacency bonuses from them alone.

There are also boosts per pop which benefit from massive cities as well

[Argenblack]

Originally posted by BigSexy:

Originally posted by sintri:

There's no confirmation when you do it, why is there no confirmation.

Nobody has answered my question on how you do this in the UI. Is the 'Absorb' button how you merge one city into another?

Yes, according to the popup I saw the last time i had the opportunity to do this. For the unaware, the city screen will have a button labeled "absorb" when two cities can be merged.

[Olgol2]

Originally posted by BigSexy:

Nobody has answered my question on how you do this in the UI. Is the 'Absorb' button how you merge one city into another?

Yes. You need to select a city and then you will see the absorb button appear on the center of an adjacent city, similar to attaching an outpost to a city.

The advantages of merging cities are that:

1: You can get rid of small and ineffective cities (usually gained by conquest), and thus help your city cap while ensuring that they can get the resources they need

2: You can exploit powerful unique districts / culture benefits. For example, the Ming's teahouse can give +1 influence per district and can be built once per territory, so merging two 4 territory cities with 50 districts (200 influence per turn) gives 800 influence per turn.

[sintri]

Yes, absorb is the right button, you click on a city, and if they share borders they can be merged together for a varying cost. I think it only showed up after a certain tech though not 100% on that.