Razing a city permanently destroys all terrain fertility

My understanding is that this feature was added in the last iteration of the game as an attempt to make city destruction mean more.

I also think this is working as designed, but I'm finding this frustrating if wandering monsters are the ones capturing and destroying the city. Would prefer a cool-down effect where after destruction all tiles are changed to 1 grain, 1 production. Then every 20 turns or so another grain or production is activated until eventually it is where it was.

I would answer  that you should put defensive units in your towns as intended and not have your sovereign stary too far away unitl your military can defend your territory. People are complaining about stacks of doom and it looks like the devs did something about it and now people are complaining about how they need to relearn how to play the game with the new different rules. this makes now sense to me, and i am not slamming anyone.

I'm not really a fan of permanent fertility loss if there's no way to spread it back. Even if it were a rather expensive undertaking, the option should at least be available. Also, is it intentional that capturing an opposing faction city means you either have to keep a city that looks completely out of place for your kingdom/empire or raze it and lose the option to even build there at all?

Apparently they want you to raze cities instead of always capturing them, so I can't imagine they will keep this the way it is. I thought that it was supposed to only last for a certain time... maybe 20-30 turns. Even then, it takes so long to grow a city, and adding that extra penalty will be highly discouraging. 

it is counterintuitive to destroy a square of 8x8 tiles when a city occupies one tile and uses only its resources

destroying permanently land fertility also seems too harsh, a cool down period, even of 50 turns, would be better

I hope the devs will balance this bit by putting the permanent fertility loss on "insane" difficulty

I am not a fan of permanent fertility loss, I wonder what point of raze city when raze for move a better spot of city but can't be done unless it's might be change in future.

Yeah, this is becoming a pretty big problem with the added monster attacks and unrest penalties for occupation. I think they should just get rid of it all together. Hopefully also removing those terrible 2 grain tiles from the list of colonizable tiles.

they either need to get rid of this or they need to make spells to get this back, early monster attacks are killing me, it would be one thing if i just had to rebuild city but now i cant because of how the game is. Maybe a spell of restoration like the old one for the sovereign, but this one just restores land to its potential

There are spells that revive the land, they're called Birth Of Summer (Kingdom) and Bloom of Twilight (Fallen).  They're level 5 Earth spells.

And also requires a random tech, or else I just can't receive it from level 5 earth magic...
The reason I say random is I don't always see the tech in my tech tree...

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Yes, other reason I don't like random, there is game most I don't get that birth of summer, most of time, but few case yes, as for earth, it's rare for me as well since I'm playing mightly warrior. well, mightly warrior is far better than mage of earth or any of spell that matter.

Ya I play as an earth/death mage and it takes forever to get lv 5 earth magic. Like 250+ turns. Seems a little difficult and obscure for something so useful.

I'm not sure what to make of it yet myself, might need to play a few more games to properly assess it. But it is having a dramatic change in my gameplay strategy as I adjust to it. I've become almost paranoid now as my young cities are quite vulnerable. Until I'm confident they can adequately defend themselves, I keep an army near by (generally my Sovergein early game). 

This changed allot, and I'm thinking it might be restraining the city spam we are use too previously. In my current game I defienetly can't spam cities, no way. The risk of loosing them is too great, and my economy is not developed enough to have multiple armies to guarantee their safety. Add to this that city razing pretty much ruins the area, I have to really be vigilant. That city is gone forever, so much is at stake, and this does add a new kind of tension that I'll admit I kinda like.

Curious to know how the AI is dealing with it? Guess I'll find out soon enough.

The fertility desctruction is irksome at best, pointless at worst. Especially given the fact that having more cities means you loose population growth... you will want to re-use ground in the best possible way. Combined with the 50-25% unrest problem, razing is almost a requirement, except it leaves the very earth you wanted to revice barren. Doenst feel right to me.

I like it the way it is now.

Micromanaging more than 3 cities is tedious for me so I usually go for the Scorched Earth approach.

When founding a new city it is very important to clear the area of monsters with your heroes.

If there are some really tough monsters in the area, then it is better not to settle there until you can take them out.

Can't say I do, said this some time ago too, its mostly because I cannot reset the city level up choices that the AI takes on theyre cities that I want to trash them and build something proper...
I would like if the game supported rebuilding of destroyed cities, it makes little sense to me that I cannot as a faction kill off all the magnar devotee's, trash all the weird infrastructure, and use up the same spots and the same rubble to build my new city, and reuse the old farms to produce my food.

I have tried a great many times getting the "Revive Land" spell, but everytime I get an Archmage Earth Specialist guy, I find I do not have the random tech required. Then I am left with one levelup choice that basicly granted me a useless "Earthquake" spell.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I would agree with making the revive land life and death spells permanent and available in every game.  This would give a reason to get high level magic, and the cost could be balanced so it's not too cheap or expensive.  But I don't think it should be too easy to just demolish a city and then rebuild.  If they didn't make the revive land spells available in every game, I would want fertility to come back after a certain game-adjusted number of turns.

They either need to take this out or have it as an option so we can turn off or leave on as desired.

So your screwed if you don't have earth spells.  How about this if you guys don't want to get rid of the mechanic or have it as a seperate option. Then allow us to build a unit with and added ability to restor the land to be used again. This could be seperate from the Pioneer.

Although I would perfer just adding a toggle in options to turn this on or off no matter what difficulty level you play at.

Or make it a spell that requires a champion with L5 in any element, or life or death, and not require Earth L5 specifically.

The wandering monster issue has affected me as well.

It's one thing to destroy a city (wandering monster) and a completely different thing to salt the earth (raze).

I didn't see this thread until after I had posted this.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/423600

making the earth totally barren for several spaces is too much for me especially now with the painful unrest percentages for taking over a city... something's gotta give.  either lower the unrest penalties or lower the effect on terrain that razing does.

or gave a milita in city stronger, maybe add defense, they don't had a defense at all even its 5 level city and did reseached leather and armor.

I really don't understand the point of this mechanic.  It really feels awkward and wrong to me.  As I recall, the major complaint about the "Raze" option was that it could reduce an enormous city that took the entire game to build up to nothing in no time at all.  This just compounds that problem by making "Raze" even more devastating.  It's also mostly pointless.

It seems to me in order to Raze an settlement a physical army needs to be present.  It should take at least one turn no matter what (so the army needs to have movement points which are reduced to zero while its razing the city) and multiple turns depending on the size of the army and the size of the city (each turn the population would drop).  The turn after the population is killed off the city is destroyed.

As far as monsters go, I think a conquering monster army should make the city its new home.  You have the same mechanic for population decrease, but meanwhile more and more powerful monsters are spawning from the city.  Eventually the population is destroyed and a new monster hive (with requisite loot) appears in its place.