[suggestion] Razing Cities Should Not Be Free!!

Razing Cities:  Perhaps it should take a number of turns as a city is deconstructed, or burned down.  The ability to do so should still be around IMHO.

Undefended Cities: These should get a passive troop resistance with the upgrade to all the different walls. 

Much aggreement with the above post here.

Well, it is coherent since you can destroy all your improvements in one turn.

The only problem is sometimes you want to raze a city which prevents you to create another with better ressources access.

It seems to work fine to me. Once you're playing against players / decent AI, you can station troops in your cities to defend them, instead of just forgetting about them completely. It's a useful tool to hurt any silly players.

Building takes time

burning doesn't

Maybe it should take two turns to reflect the time to cook the marshmallows on the smoldering ruins?

I do think that the idea of razing a city taking time may be a good one.. it would allow time for the city owner to attempt to send troops to retake it.This would force the conquering army to hold the city..  So maybe make it take x numbers of turns based on city level and pop... seems like an interesting solution that should not be to prohibitive. another possible idea may be if the conquering army abandons the city before it is razed it has a chance to rejoin former owner or become a neutral city...

as usual just tossing out ideas to see if any stick or make sense heh heh. 

ya in the old days you could raze a entire city fairly easy.  I'm sure the designers will add lots of nasty little things for defending a city against enemies.  So I would worry about it.

Hmm, I see it differently than some of you in this thread. If I conquered London and decided I was going to burn it to the ground and kill every single inhabitant I expect there would be some pretty stiff resistance from the populace. Now, if there is a method of GalCiv2 style defense where you can call every able-bodied civilian to the defense of the city when it's first attacked, then razing cities instantly is fine. Currently there's no such system. But to me it's simply stupid to have a city with thousands of people living in it get burned to the ground in a single turn by an individual peasant that surprise attacked it because the king absentmindedly moved his forces one tile away. All you guys saying burning a city is fairly easy, yea it's fairly easy if you have an army of 100+ guys and the city is relatively small. That's why there should be some fight when we proclaim that you want to kill everyone in city and raze it. Five peasants can't burn down Rome. Hell, even 500 peasants would have some trouble. That's why razing a city must have a cost, even if it's just slight enough to keep the weakest of armies from destroying the greatest of cities. 

For Elemental, that means a level 5 city. I don't see why you would want to raze a level 5 city, it is valuable. 

There's an acceptable break between gameplay and reality, though. Being able to raze cities within a turn speeds up the game (no trench warfare, etc) and punishes players who don't have at least a small amount of defence on their cities. It's good for gameplay, even if it doesn't really make sense.

I see both your points. I could go for something like one person razes on building or something like that. You also need to realize that this is a primitive society. There is no fire brigade and no cops like we think of. Troops were the cops. Since your army was defeated, there is no force to organize the resistence. Rome was burned down as were several ancient cities. Sometimes without anyone knowing who did it. Heck, Chicago was burned to the ground supposedly by a cow!

Perhaps you cannot raise a city unless you have enough troops to quell the citizens? Perhaps their combat rating in some way equates to their control? As an example a combat rating of 8 means you can control 80 citizens, so if the total combat rating of the units in a city exceeds the population, you cannot raze the city, only a portion of it?

The multiple Turn Raze idea has issues based on "what happens" if the owners do return, but not for 3 Turns. What is lost? Surely, each Turn would Raze some portion, 1/3 of the City.

Currently a City is one (1) unit. It would require that mechanic to be changed to facilitate the Muti-Turn Razing. Doable? Doubtful at his point.

One idea could be that to Raze a City requires the enemy to Delete each building separately and only 2-3 Building can be selected per Turn during the "Razing Phase"(tm).

Or one per unit of occupation * # of buildings per turn [copywrite 2010]

Best idea here.    Age of Wonders abstracted Razing by requiring a certain #/power of forces in the razing army. OP is correct that rather silly for 1 unit to burn down a Level 5 City in one turn.  10 units burning down 10 structures each turn... I'm good with that.

Here's the thing guys: You can currently delete all buildings in a city in one turn. There's no point.

Currently, a Level 5 City can be had with minimal buildings as its growth is based on Pop.

With enough Tech, it doesn't take many actual buildings to reach L5 and then one relatively small force would be enough to Raze a City in 1 Turn, 2 Max.

We don't/shouldn't want to force players to have to grow/bloat their Cities up just so the enemy has to have huge armies to Raze them quickly enough not to lose any initiative they may have gained while doing so.

It's not smart to keep it I sneaked it out of my opponent's grasp while an army 100x the size of mine is sitting a couple tiles away. Better just burn it then. 

This is the main block I see against all the good ideas in this thread about delaying/hindering razing, and it's a good point. There is a solution. Have an "unrest" period of a few turns after conquest (the bigger the city the longer it is) where to destroy buildings you must have enough troops stationed in the city to carry out the deed.

This is similar to Civ 4's system of resistance for a few turns when the enemy's civilians won't harvest resources until you bring in enough troops to quell them. Except now they're preventing you from destroying their buildings. This way you can raze the city piecemeal, which is more realistic, I guess. 

Whatever it is, there must be some buffer for razing. 

Why not have a number of resistance turns like civ does? (So like 8 turns or something for a really L5 city). The attacking force requires an army big enough combat rating to quell the cities, and if they don't it kicks them back out a square. If the civ that attacks the city attempts to raze houses beyond how many people are using it, or simply razing the city, THEN insurgants pop up and get into battle with the attacking forces. Generally peasants just roll over and let attacking armies take their city unless you are burning it down.

Why not have a number of resistance turns like civ does? (So like 8 turns or something for a really L5 city). The attacking force requires an army big enough combat rating to quell the cities, and if they don't it kicks them back out a square. If the civ that attacks the city attempts to raze houses beyond how many people are using it, or simply razing the city, THEN insurgants pop up and get into battle with the attacking forces. Generally peasants just roll over and let attacking armies take their city unless you are burning it down.

I like this idea.

So make it a hit is = to 1 building, house 2, villa 3, estate 4, etc. The arguement was 1 peasant burning down a whole town. Well, level 5 has many more tiles than a level 1, so I believe the proposed solution is in the right direction.

All I know is if Chicago can almost burn to the ground in 1871, seems a lot easier to do it in times when civilization is just getting started. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire

Perhaps the other nearby sovereign/magic user can case a water based spell to reduce the damage of the razing? You cannot raze it for at least 1 or two turns more to give nearby units a chance to save it?

Historical instances are not relevant. The largest city know to modern man, London England, was burned to the ground, cause unknown. Hell the Germans during ww2 could not replicate with modern, at the time, incendiary weapons.

A City should have to be Sieged to be destroyed totally. When the population/Garrison dies or surrenders after a brutal resistance, you get the City.

on a similar vein, in one of my games a single individual explorer (1 attack 5 defence) captured a L5 city on its own and was the ONLY unit within 5 tiles. I had expected it to die in the attack, not capture the ENTIRE city.

harpo

exactly, and if you just razed the city imagine how frustrating and unrealistic that would be.