How to stop resisting cities from defecting--starve'em!

[Seraphim]

Has anyone else experienced this? I had just begun a naval invasion of the Roman continent, and after successfully taking one of his cities I poured all units into that town. Using that as a beachhead I start to attack his other towns. I'm doing well, maneuvering my forces to sack another while I send my injured troops to the first city. Then, less than four turns after I took it, the first city reverts back to the Romans--taking all of my troops with it. This after I had quelled all resistance and at the time my culture was much higher than the Romans.


After reloading and experimenting, I hit upon this strategy, which seems to work well at stopping reversion and at least minimizing the damage when it happens. If you can't wipe out a civilization in one or two turns (which also prevents reversion), try doing this:


1. Conquer enemy city. Flood it with as many forces as you can spare while keeping the heat on the enemy. Immediately changed production to a worker or settler, and turn everyone into entertainers. End turn.

2. When the next turn rolls around, the city will come out of civil disorder, and in all likelihood will have starved away a population point. Vacate the city off all your troops, regardless of how many resistors you quelled, except for one or two of your most critically injured.

3. Whenever a city starves it automatically re-assigns the tiles. You'll have to manually turn everyone into entertainers again.

4. Whenever you finally build a worker have them work the tiles or simply have them rejoin the city.

5. If a city DOES rebel, at least your forces are right next to it for an easy retaking. Rebelled cities only get one defensive unit.

The key to this strategy is that workers built in a resisting city still belong to your civilization. When you have them rejoin a city they count as your nationality, not the one you just conquered. The more of their nationality you kill through famine, the higher the proportion of your citizens (through rejoined workers) the city gets, and the less likely it is to rebel.

Using the above, I conquered the Roman capital and successfully starved them down from a size 12 to only 2 population points, and created 3 workers in the process. I then had those 3 join, and suddenly the majority was French. No rebellion whatsoever.

Though it might seem bad to deliberately destroy the production of a sizeable city you just took, you should know that (A) You're only killing resistors, who wouldn't have worked for you anyway, (B) At most a conquered city can only work 9 tiles, and (C) If you hadn't pillaged all the terrain improvements, the city will rapidly regrow.

[Akron]

Yeah, after playing around a bit, I started starving conquered cities too. Anyway, conquered cities are horribly unproductive. I hadn't thought of the worker thing though. I'll try that later.

[CivExtrodinaire]

I tried this same strategy and it worked wonders! Also, the only cities I took were cities that had a lot of resources surrounding them or cities that would be of vital use later on down the road, the rest I raized.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

I got a simpler one.

Use forced labor. It starts with foreign nationals (i.e rebels) first. Rush build a culture improvement. They rebels all die, and you get lots of culture.

[monkspider]

A slow and methodical but effective strategy I have is reducing the population of the city with an ungodly ammount of cannister fire/catapult warfare/Saturation boming. When the city's size takes a good blow, it is ripe for conquest.

[KhanMan]

The best strategy, IMHO, is combining forced labor with Workers: "Get in the gulags and out into the fields, you stupid resistors!"

Force your citizens to rush build Workers, and the population plummets...it feels so strange wanting to do that in a civ game, but what the hey, it's fun to imagine all those slaves being beaten to death


-KhanMan
King of the Greeks

[Stryfe]

I combine the bombardment / starvation tactics together, the latter more from necessity than anything else. However, once I discovered flight I began using bombers to reduce my opponents cities to rubble before taking them. But even earlier in the game, as soon as artillery was available, I was blasting cities to smithereens in sieges before taking them (defensive bonuses also decrease!). Destroying the barracks is also a nice side effect of this strategy.

Since I rarely wage war, I haven't had too much experience doing this--I only wage war to gain access to resources; I recently discovered that all but two uranium deposits were in my territory; err, weren't in my territory. I also picked up a monopoly on ivory at the same time But anyway, unless you overpower your opponent both culturally and technologically, this is the only really effective way of conducting war that I've found in Civ3.

[Eli]

Do the first people who starve are the foreigners?

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
I got a simpler one.

Use forced labor. It starts with foreign nationals (i.e rebels) first. Rush build a culture improvement. They rebels all die, and you get lots of culture.

That's it. That's the key. You badly need the culture to expand your influence too.