Courthouse and Occupied Cities

[Taskmaster]

Courthouse cost 4 gold to maintain. Can I get rid of the courthouse after things settle down or do I have to keep it forever more in a city I captured? Thanks in advance.

[VILLAGE PILLAGE ⊕]

Please. Building Maintenance is a joke. You need to keep it anyway.

[Taskmaster]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ memes:

Please. Building Maintenance is a joke. You need to keep it anyway.

This is my first play through so I do not know all the ins and outs yet. Thanks for the info.

[Oddity]

Or puppet the city and don't annex it till you have the gold, or get a lot of luxury resources and have +20 happiness going around.

[Taskmaster]

Originally posted by LjSpike:

Or puppet the city and don't annex it till you have the gold, or get a lot of luxury resources and have +20 happiness going around.

I have plenty of gold and happiness. I guess the real question is does an annexed city ever become "native" or do they alway remain considered "occupied?"

[just.nuke.em]

Originally posted by Taskmaster:

does an annexed city ever become "native" or do they alway remain considered "occupied?"

No, always remain occupied.

[Taskmaster]

Originally posted by just.nuke.em:

Originally posted by Taskmaster:

does an annexed city ever become "native" or do they alway remain considered "occupied?"

No, always remain occupied.

Thank you

[Paladestar]

Even if you can handle the happiness hit, there's still no point in annexing a city right away. You can't do anything productive with it until the unrest state ends, so you're taking extra penalties for no good reason.

When you conquer a city it loses some of its population based on how influential your civilization's culture is over theirs. If you have very little to no influence over a civ, when you capture one of their cities it'll lose 50% of its population. If your culture is 100%+ influential over a civ, the conquered city will keep 100% of its population and there will be no unrest.

A city will enter a state of unrest if any population is lost by being conquered, the unrest state lasts one turn for each population that was lost, so if you attack a 20 pop city and capture it, without having cultural influence over their previous civilization, it'll take 10 turns before unrest ends.

If you don't have total influence over their culture, you really should just puppet a conquered city and wait for unrest to end before you annex it. You will still get the science cost increase from puppeting the city (2.5% to 5%, depending on map size), but you won't take the social policy cost increase (5% to 10%, depending on map size) until the city is actually annexed. Even if you won't go into negative happiness, you'll still not want to pointlessly make your next social policy cost a bit more, nor will you want to lose happiness and needlessly delay your next golden age and miss out on the extra culture per turn from that happiness if you took the aesthetics social policy that turns 50% of excess happiness into extra culture points per turn.

On the subject of the courthouse, yes, you'll need to keep it. Once the courthouse is built, functionally, the city just acts like any you built yourself and has no on-going penalties from you not being the original owner. If the city was razeable when it was captured you'll still be able to raze it at any time afterwards, if you later choose to do so. The annexed city always remembers who the original owner was. If another civilization then conquers the city from you, they'll get the option to liberate it and return it to the original owner. If the original owner was eliminated from the game by losing all of their cities, they'll become active again if someone liberates one of their cities.

[Taskmaster]

Originally posted by Paladestar:

Even if you can handle the happiness hit, there's still no point in annexing a city right away. You can't do anything productive with it until the unrest state ends, so you're taking extra penalties for no good reason.

Thanks for that in-depth detailed answer. Always good to get tips that will make my play more efficient.

[Soteria]

Also, this may be shocking, but I tend to raze a lot of cities. The AI is really bad at choosing city sites, so unless there's a luxury or strategic resource or a wonder or something, it might not be worth keeping.

You can get away with keeping a lot of cities on low difficulties, but basically each puppeted city generatese more unhappiness and increases the amount of science for new technologies. Also they generate less than a founded/annexed city will.