City States & Warmongering

[RasaNova]

I have a question about the topic in the title. I was early in to expansion on a second continent, that Japan already had a foothold on. My small handful of cities were built near an equal number of city states. Japan was capturing city states moving towards my settlements, leading up to one that would have been seriously devastating to my own growth. So, to keep them from capturing this one crucial city, with a heavy heart I declared war on it and captured it before Japan could.

So naturally this slapped me with an insane warmongering penalty, and wrecked me politcally for the rest of the game, leading to multiple wars etc over the next 100 years because of this one city state. That's all fine and dandy but Is there anything that I could have done to lessen the warmongering penalty? There's no cassius belli as with other civs. (And Japan didn't seem to have trouble maintaining friendships after taking several city states.)

[pitonsnaboca]

(Hope I'm saying it all correctly)

If you had manage to be suzerain of that CS an researched the civic "Diplomatic Service", you could have declared a Protectorate War against Japan (think the warmongering penalty is half).

Not sure if the Colonial War is applicable against CS, after you research the Nationalism civic.

[Lemurian1972]

There really isn't an option to lessen the warmonger penalty for capturing a CS. When they adjusted the penalty system to be partially based on the number of cities on the map, it seems as if they left CSs out of the calculation.

It's disappointing in the sense that this kind of thing negates key design elements for certain Civs. If Germany wasn't awesome in other ways, they'd be completely hobbled because of the fact that their bonus vs CS units is a waste.

Like piton said, if you were suzerain, you could defend them via a Protectorate War (Colonial war isn't an option though) you could also declare a Liberation War. Even without a Liberation War you could still let Japan capture the CS, then declare another type of war, take the CS back and liberate it, and get out of the situation in slightly better shape than outright capping the CS first.

[RasaNova]

Thanks for the insights.
I wasn't suz, and was no way to make that happen on short notice, capturing the city it was an emergency ploy to keep Japan from really screwing me over. If I could release the city after, I would!

It's true it would probably have been better to declare war on Japan, capture the city and then release it since I ended up at war with them anyway within 20 turns due to warmongering! Would have had a free CS (and possibly 1 or 2 captured cities) and much lower penalty...

[Lemurian1972]

Since you seem worried about warmonger penalties, I'll tip you off to the biggest way to avoid them: don't capture cities. Kill his armies, knock down city walls, pillage the land around cities you don't want, then when the time comes to make peace, clear out all the stuff they offer and put the cities you want on the table. If you did enough damage you should be able to get them all, plus a chunk of his resources, all for no warmonger penalty and no continuous complaining that you occupy one of their cities. The only penalty you incur that way is the one for declaring whatever type of war you started.