So why did I had two cities? That happened when suddenly I found out that one my of precious mined hill tile was occupied by another city. I went out to find out and there was a newly built allied French city. I moved my military unit on that tile but that didn't help. Is this because of alliance? So I bribed that city and rush-built a settler to remove it and then I disbanded that settler. And my question, what should I have done to obey strictly OCC-rules? I really coulnd't afford losing permanently a city square?

The instance I loaded was that I really badly wanted an alliance with Aztek who had a lot of money and he demanded me to go to war with my neighbor French and I did that.. in a hope that I can negotiate a cease fire afterwards. Well, French really got mad with me and sent a bunch of dragoons to pest me

I really didn't want to wage war against them (I was building a wonder and didn't had too many defenging units) so I learned that NEVER EVER go to war with your neighbor!

I had an interesting end game My long time ally English who was biggest and from whom I got thousands of gold as gifts got weary of our alliance when I got space flight and wanted it. I refused (of course!) and soon the evil queen of England was sending a huge army of armors, artilleries and bombers towards my precious Washington. I was lucky that there were many no-road tiles between English empire and me I had to stop building structurals and built barracs, then my own armors and bombers. Then I build a nice trap: I sent my engineer to build a fortress to a mountain choke point five squares from my city and fortified a couple of armors there. Then I watched how the pile of English iron rubbish grew under my mountain

Bribing the city was I fear a no-no - your only real choice was to reduce it to rubble - either by repeated attacks (without city walls) or by poisoning down to 1 and then flattening it - in fact the poisoning trick would reduce the number of workers and then you would be able to reclaim the mine - of course your carefully conserved alliance is unlikely to survive these tactics.

A better bet would have been to have had a few none units placed as scouts to keep closer tabs on the immediate surroundings - a settler will not found with a military unit in an adjacent square (even an allied one) - I believe this to be fact not urban myth - but can anyone else comment??? - and that allows you to avoid the embarrassment in the first instance

Hope this helps,

------------------
____________
Scouse Git[1]