Whats the best way to deal with loyalty in cities?

[Nuggs]

im trying to go for a domination victory and it feels really hard to do with loyalty being a thing? whats the best way to deal with loyalty when expanding and taking over cities?

[fmalfeas]

Assign a governor. Repair the city. Make sure you have enough amenities. Keep the population as high as you can. And by 'enough' that ideally means +3 or better, because you want a loyalty bonus from it.

If there's the right districts, run Bread and Circuses. Set policy cards that boost loyalty.

And ultimately, make absolutely certain that you're not leaving a huge gap between your territory and the territory you're conquering, or you will have to take multiple cities at once to have enough loyalty pressure to stave off rebellions.

[Stormwinds]

Loyalty is primarily determined by population. If you're going domination and can't hold cities, it may be in your best interest to let the cities flip independent and come back later after you take more cities. Other than that, monuments give +1, cities following your religion give +3 or -3 if they aren't, and governors give +8 immediately without needing to be established first.

[grognardgary]

Note starting with any of the great commanders group conquered cities get +4 loyalty and +1 amenity per turn If you want to paint the map that's about as good a start as you can get.

[colostmy4]

Certain leaders give loyalty bonuses to your cities as well.

[plaguepenguin]

The specific direct methods for increasing loyalty have been mentioned, except,I think, religious differences and the ages effect. You get a slight benefit if your newly conquered city is your religion and not some other.

Among all of those factors there are two that are especially important, governors and population pressure.

Governors add 8 points in your favor. That's big.

Population pressure is the basis for calculating loyalty. Every city within 9 tiles of a city exerts loyalty pressure on that city. The pressure is greater the greater the population of these other cities, and is also greater the closer they are to the target city. The target city's pop counts the most, because it is the closest you can get to the target city. The loyalty pressure is modified by what sort of age you are in compared to the other civ. Pop points in a golden age exert twice the pressure, dark half the pressure.

The practical difficulty for conquest is that you often find yourself taking a low pop frontier city from your enemy, then capturing it reduces its pop further. This low pop city then Has to withstand the loyalty pressure from your enemy's larger core cities. This is a problem.

The way around this problem is blitzkrieg. You have to take enough core cites from your enemy soon enough after the frontier city or cities that you capture first that they don't have time to revolt before you take the core cities to create a viable nest of loyalty pressure in your favor. Taking one of their high pop cities is a twofer, you reduce their pressure and increase your own.

If you are planning conquest into a dense nest of enemy cities, you might get by with arranging all the loyalty boosts mentioned above. If that won't do it, you just have to wait and plan for a blitzkrieg.

[Maya-Neko]

The easiest way is to just tear down the defenses of multiple cities, but not taking them instantly, but just waiting, until you've like either 2 big cities next to each other or 3 medium sized cities near each other and taking them all at the same time. That way you can also attack very slow and in the mean time even train your ranged units to keep the city defenses down

Also attacking in fast succession is an option as well, but that needs to to outtech the opponent with you siege units compared to their walls. With that strat you still might need a gouvernor to hold your first city to extend the possible loyalty flip up to like 4-5 turns, but usually that's more a lategame strat, where you often attack on multiple fronts in my experience.

Overall with the first strategy being an option, loyalty isn't really a problem in most situations, so you can keep more useful cards in your policy slots, especially those who give a better yield long term (like +25% experience gain for attackers or obviously many economic cards), as well as cards, which allow you to attack faster (like +1 movement or x attack strength within friendly territory), thus solving the loyalty problem faster.

Though i would always recommend to have at least one gouvernor available, preferably Liang or Magnus, if you don't need their buffs right now.

[Cryten]

Your war governor has a upgrade that gives an aoe loyalty bonus that can stack with other governors for some strong loyalty. Positive amenities helps, surrounding population of the same nations helps build up loyalty, getting a monument gives you something like 2 loyalty a turn, having your home religion gives bonus loyalty and having an opposing religion gives a penalty.

The best method is to take cities in triangles so 2 cities are always benefiting the other in every direction. Cutting swamps and rain forests for population can help you rapidly stabilise a city. Lastly you could just let the city either flip or burn it to the ground.

[SLG]

Also the diplomat governor has a promotion that removes loyalty from cities that are near by.