Sacking cities

[Bluevoss]

Why cant we?

Often, I don't want a city added to my rolls. I just want some quick cash. From reading about the Hittites, sacking cities (and pilaging) were often used by ancient kingdoms to generate some quick cash. Yeah, the city is pretty much banged up when you are through, but thats not an issue if you are giving it back, is it?

I know you can sell the improvements, but thats not really it. There should be an intrinsic value that you can get for putting a city to the sack, maybe a thousand per population point? When you leave, all the improvements are destroyed, but you dont own it.

Imagine if a foregn power managed to sack New York. How much would THAT bring?

It sucks that if I want to cripple a rival and I take a city, either I gotta give it away, keep the silly thing (which should be a good source of headaches), or destroy it over years of population reduction. I should be able to just generate some quick cash and move on.

Any modmakers interested?

[Immortal Wombat]

nm, that would do it all the time

You want some sort of messagebox in there too...

[hexagonian]

Set the disband city number to something very high - off the top of my head, it may be in const.txt, but I am not 100% sure...

That'll do the trick easily.

Of course, if you want something of value from the population, that would be a SLIC matter.

[Pedrunn]

Isnt the same conquer a city disband the improvments and give the city back to the its onwer?

Yet a great addition would be getting money by pillaging (about 20 gold). That is realistic and you will have the effect of farms and mines being sacked. I dont think thats hard to do it, is it?

Other thing is to mix the cleric sell indulgence with bombard destroying buildings. In other words every assault unit could get gold (or PW?) with a special attack that also destroy a random (or nonrandom if possible) building. Try to imaging the barbarians with that ability. of course it would have a chance of getting killed too.

[Bluevoss]

The only problem with selling everything off is that you can only sell one item per turn. That means that you are stuck in the city for 10-20 turns. I want to put a city to the sack, which means I should be able to blow through it, steal everything not nailed down, and then leave. The city should lose most of its improvements and be about half the population size as when the sack started.

[Pedrunn]

Originally posted by Bluevoss
The only problem with selling everything off is that you can only sell one item per turn. That means that you are stuck in the city for 10-20 turns. I want to put a city to the sack, which means I should be able to blow through it, steal everything not nailed down, and then leave. The city should lose most of its improvements and be about half the population size as when the sack started.

Since the improvements get destroyed by conquering anyway, maybe a code to get money when conquering a city is the solution? What about 60 gold per city size? Or a the amount of gold per improvement destroyed? maybe both? Or maybe an advance? just like civ2.
Yet i liked the idea of pillaging giving money or PW. I thought better and i think one fifth of the tile improvement cost is perfect.

[Bluevoss]

There needs to be a choice, right when the player takes the city, before he's even aware of what is within, whether he wishes to sieze the city and keep it, or if it should be pillaged.

For one thing, conquest destress should be something that takes YEARS to overcome. Right now, its just a brief passing problem - My troops remain until the bad feelings fade, and then the city is no different from one of my own. So I'd leave the full negative impact for at least 20 turns. This would slow down wars of conquest.

In WW2, Paris was siezed by the germans with a minimum of destruction. They held it four (?) years, during which time partisians still took the heads off dispatch riders with piano wire. Clearly, the Germans wanted to keep the city. Later, the allies retook it and gave it back, again, with a minium of destruction.

As Alexander moved through Persia, he took cities (Memphis, Milius, Sidon), planted new cities (Alexandria) and destroyed some cities (Tyre).

In my game last night, the Turks went back on the cease fire (bastards!) and a huge war broke out. We exchanged some cities, which really pissed me off (well, I was pleased to see them actually fighting back). Finally, I hamered their capital into submission and stormed it. Massive casualties. I decided to sack the city.

Pretty anticlimactical - I had to slowly stave it and build settlers to make it go away. Also, I had to sell its improvements, one by one. How tedious. I kept forgetting to do it, so I lost about 2000gp I could have made. And the two wonders - couldn't sell them, so they were lost.

But I wanted to be like Alexander when he finally got within Tyre's walls after his seven month siege. I wanted to reward the defenders with a show of my displeasure - I wanted to light the damn town on fire, and let blood run in the streets.

And what did I actually do? Something very much like a garage sale.

[Gen.Dragolen]

I like your idea of being given a choice as what to do with a city when it's captured. Do you know of anyway to make a message box and choice switch? I'm just starting to get familiar with the scripting language and I suspect that it may be a little tricky to get that option.

As an alternative, I think having the chances of revolt with a captured city as pretty great with the effect of garrison strength and empire happiness and the number of casusalties inflicted. That and the civilization's diplomatic stance: a diplomatic peacemaker's people will try to make the best of the situation, an Evil-Genius' people will be happier under new leaders, and everyone else will wait and see. (Random function) I think the presence of courts and such should also affect happiness as justice meeted out from a drumhead is usually very fast, very bloody and very detrimental to the occupied people's happiness.

Gonna be a killer of a time to get a script together that will do all that...


Good Hunting.

[Immortal Wombat]

I have tried to construct a code that will give you a choice of taking the city, or pillaging it (this doesn't capture it, but destroys all buildings, and captures 500 gold per pop point, then halves the city population).

There is one problem though: It freezes the game

I can't find events close enough together to stop the victory move for the message, then allow it again for the capture.

I'll keep trying, but I think the capture move is one of those things which it is very difficult to tinker with. Sorry.

[Bluevoss]

Well, thanks for the attempt. Appriciate that. Its really too bad that they didn't flesh out the game a little more, since there are so many neat things they could put into it.

I'm going to hopefully find time to finish my current game. Time time whos got the time.