Raze own cities?

[Badger]

So ive gone and captured more cities than my authority can currently handle. Is there a way to simply raze one of your own cities you may not want instead of giving it away?

[Neutron]

Yes, the little button at the bottom of the settlement screen on the right of the bottom row of stats. Note that you can only raze small settlements though.

[Monolith]

Originally posted by Neutron:

Yes, the little button at the bottom of the settlement screen on the right of the bottom row of stats. Note that you can only raze small settlements though.

Would REALLY love it if I could raze large settlements... not being able to is kind of ruining my experience right now. :\

[{O|G} Erik the Red]

Well you can destroy them after you capture them.... You should be paying attention to your authority levels, and determine whether you want ro run the risk of adding more cities to your empire.

Or if you wanted to keep the cities you've captured but want to destroy a less productive but large existing city? Your own citizens wouldn't be too happy about that if you could... It would have to have a relatively severe faction wide unrest penalty, perhaps make it an edict.

It could be interesting to have more edicts with potentially more negative effects than positive... Nothing stopping players from becoming bad emperors or tyrants... Razing your own cities (for whatever reason) does seem counter-productive to the endgame goals, with population being your main tax base, and the main conditions of victory in 2 of the victory modes.

[Haddon]

Originally posted by X-Erik the Red:

Well you can destroy them after you capture them.... You should be paying attention to your authority levels, and determine whether you want ro run the risk of adding more cities to your empire.

Or if you wanted to keep the cities you've captured but want to destroy a less productive but large existing city? Your own citizens wouldn't be too happy about that if you could... It would have to have a relatively severe faction wide unrest penalty, perhaps make it an edict.

It could be interesting to have more edicts with potentially more negative effects than positive... Nothing stopping players from becoming bad emperors or tyrants... Razing your own cities (for whatever reason) does seem counter-productive to the endgame goals, with population being your main tax base, and the main conditions of victory in 2 of the victory modes.

Several times in Chinese history powerful people have up and moved almost entire populations from cities. This was done mostly to capitols, but I don't see why it couldn't be done for any city.

Maybe make it so razing a small settlement has no disadvantage, razing anything between 16-50 population causes a faction-wide -25 happiness, reducing by 5 per turn. Anything over 51 cannot be razed, but we should be able to destroy our own farms to systematically starve our people to bring population down, if we choose to be evil despots.

I think having more options like this in the game would be good, but with detriments attached (like the cost to respecialize in RPGs, or the reduced resources returned for cancelling a building in RTS). Having to make difficult choices of "how much detriment can I handle for the benefit?" makes interesting strategic gameplay for those of us obsessed with efficiency.

[Jactar]

If you end up having extra towns you could always offer them to minor AI rulers as payment if they agree to be your vassals. Extra towns are great bargaining chips for that.

[Jactar]

Originally posted by Shattered:

+1, thats a really good idea.

But why become ruler in the first place if you cant kill off in mass your own people? Im not trying to quell unrest due to authority rating, but punish those who question my authority.

You are doing this all of time by using pesants as forced labor and cheap troops in armies in feudal system. You can push people up to point where they rebel. Politics just dont work in the way that there is some "punish" button that resets all rebellions and make people forget all you have done.

Also in feudal system if you raze town you raze somebody property as ruler you have agreed to protect people and noble who own the town as exchange that they pay taxes and provide troops. If you ask them to burn their own property they would just defect to other ruler who protects them better instead of starting to burn their own lands and houses.

You just cant order lesser nobles to burn their own lands and houses feudal system wont work like that even when in this game is pretty abstracted.

[Neutron]

Originally posted by Haddon:

Originally posted by X-Erik the Red:

Well you can destroy them after you capture them.... You should be paying attention to your authority levels, and determine whether you want ro run the risk of adding more cities to your empire.

Or if you wanted to keep the cities you've captured but want to destroy a less productive but large existing city? Your own citizens wouldn't be too happy about that if you could... It would have to have a relatively severe faction wide unrest penalty, perhaps make it an edict.

It could be interesting to have more edicts with potentially more negative effects than positive... Nothing stopping players from becoming bad emperors or tyrants... Razing your own cities (for whatever reason) does seem counter-productive to the endgame goals, with population being your main tax base, and the main conditions of victory in 2 of the victory modes.

Several times in Chinese history powerful people have up and moved almost entire populations from cities. This was done mostly to capitols, but I don't see why it couldn't be done for any city.

Maybe make it so razing a small settlement has no disadvantage, razing anything between 16-50 population causes a faction-wide -25 happiness, reducing by 5 per turn. Anything over 51 cannot be razed, but we should be able to destroy our own farms to systematically starve our people to bring population down, if we choose to be evil despots.

I think having more options like this in the game would be good, but with detriments attached (like the cost to respecialize in RPGs, or the reduced resources returned for cancelling a building in RTS). Having to make difficult choices of "how much detriment can I handle for the benefit?" makes interesting strategic gameplay for those of us obsessed with efficiency.

Can you point me at some examples ?

[Haddon]

Examples of the forced move? The main one that comes to mind is Dong Zhuo leaving Luoyang and enforcing a movement of as much of the populace as he could to...Chang'an I think? It did not go over well, but as Zhuo was already a tyrant, he didn't mind enacting a "do as I say or die" edict.

I seem to recall the Northern Jin doing similar with one of the early cities as Ghengis attacked the north, trying to keep Genghis from having a foothold into northern China. Which, of course, didn't do much good as he took half a dozen cities in the north anyway. I will try to find what I read about and get back to you.

And then there were the edicts during the Qing attempting to get more settlers out to the western parts of China, but I don't think they razed any cities to do so, it was just a "move out here in large numbers!" kinda thing.

Edit: I might have been thinking of the movement of the court to Kaifeng after the Mongol assault on Beijing, but I will keep looking.

Perhaps I should ammend that statement to "Several times in Chinese history poerful people have moved large populations away from cities".

[Jactar]

Well Feudal system dont work that way. Nobles did not need to order people around as quite often there were a lot of landless people around who moved where ever they could get land and protection from nobles as excange they paid taxes with mostly with goods, foods and servitude.Richer pesants could also pay taxes with money but that was not common.

If any noble needed more pesants he just started distribute land and in no time he had more pesants quite often even too much that it started causing problems.

Reasons why people relocated at feudal times was that nobles could not gurantee protection becouse of wars or there was no more land available. Or there was more land elsewhere with better protection as farming generally needs stability.

I think this game simulate this aspect pretty well if you want more people you build more farms it kind of simulate distributing land to peasant who then work the fields and pay taxes.

[Jactar]

What Josef Stalin did or Trump has nothing to do with ancient China you are totally off railing whole topic.

You just dont understand feudal system. For example my family got freeman status at some point in history providing and arming two horse men to Swedish king when it was only required to arm and maintaing one infanrymen per farm. But becouse we provided two men and two horses and arming two horsemen we got title. Just like everybody else who provided more troops than what was required per farm.

What would have happened if swedish king would have ordered all farms and nobles to relocate who provided him taxes and troops? Well he would have lost those troops and all taxes also there would have been propably revolt. Nobody would have provided any extra troops and propably not even minimun that was required.

Also there is a lot of things lowborn people could do to harm raising feudal levies if they dont like the nobles or ruler they can provide only poor quality weapons, poor food, send only poor quality men and never provide anything extra. Still they dont brake any laws. They could raise levies slowly and delay sending troops and waste time of rulers. And this is just case where ruler is not liked not in the case where ruler is openly hostile toward people under his protection.

Even when this is not about ancient china still those rulers lived in the feudal system they needed to rely people under them training, maintaining weapons, troops and feeding and suppliing them. Rulers needed to rely that most of smaller nobles support them or otherwise they had not troops at all and in worst case rebellions.

[sausages]

Originally posted by Jactar:

You just dont understand feudal system...

Then you do not understand China. China had been experiencing a pull-push relationship in between feudal system and absolute monarchy but the scale pretty much side with absolute monarchy. The absolute monarchy starts with the Central Bureaucracy sytem implemented by Qin to further enhance the Mandate of Heaven and the Hevenly Son's absolute power. Of course, we know the history that since Qin pushes this too hard and due to several natural disasters... we have Han Dynasty next; but still, all the rest of the dynasties still push forward to Central Bureaucracy to strength the authority of the Hevenly Son.

The last Dynasty in China, which is Qing Dynasty, on the other hand, implemented a psudo-feudal system by learning the failure from Yuan Dynasty because Mandate of Heaven was so deeply implemented in the minds of the Beifangren and Nanfangren that these two major culture groups of Chinese can hardly accept a "foreigner" as the Heavenly Son. By having the feudal system to calm those regions in specific needs, you are prolonging your dynasty's life.



Now, back to the OP, you aren't wrong about such Mandate of Heaven wouldn't have any trouble moving its peasant but you better embrace a wave of peasant revolt next.

It is because of how the game works. First of all, while maintaining Authority is an issue, relocating 15+ Settlers to different cities would be a pain (don't start another post about adding numbers directly to your cities, because that's an insult to current game mechanic). Then, if you are trying to add those 15+ Settlers in ONE cities, you will suffer from the food problem unless you have kept making fields. But since you have been well-prepared with fields by working your peasants non-stop, you are absolutely looking forward to peasant revolt when:
1. you raze your own huge cities
2. you overworked your peasants in other cities to preparing for the raze
3. you added the now raged peasants to the already enraged cities due to over-work
4. have fun

I just do not see how this has any meaningful implmentation to the game other than making the Dev working on something that has no gain to the players at all...

[sausages]

Originally posted by Shattered:

If the game is ladder you should be able to kill and raze your own cities

If this ladder is going to kill you no matter what, why would the Dev wants to implement it?