Rheims: Democratic French provincial city.
The French are running a 1T/5S/4L tax structure (because Lyon is in disorder from having 5 naval vessels out chasing an Aztec explorer on the south pole, but that is another story.)

Size: 8 with 5 happy and 3 content (WLTPD!!!)

Improvements: Temple & Marketplace. (perhaps an Aquaduct would be helpfull??)

Shield production: 8 with 3 fortified (nonvet) riflemen & a fighter in town, and an explorer & engineer out and about. That makes for a net of 2 shields.

City radius: 9 double irrigated squares - (6 plains and a desert included,) half have roads, and a fish special is being worked. Alas, the gold mountain is unworked. (I might recommend a supermarket if you are going to double irrigate plains)

Building: Cure for Cancer. 76 more turns to completion.

Alex v4.6

What's more, if it refuses, one attack (whether it succeeds or fails), will almost always provoke a suicide-counter-attack.

Used this strategy to capture top two Roman cities (Rome and Veii), as well as the entire British empire, in a Nomads game.

Hows that for stupid?

But they don't always, and attacking such small cities usually ends with destruction not conquest. I wonder what makes one A1 defending warrior suicidal/mad/brave but prompts the next to sit tight?

2. I've just finished a game in which one of the cities figuring in the top five list had 8 citizens, 4 happy and 4 content. The diplomacy screen said the civ was a republic but it stayed firmly at 8 citizens for turn after turn. I started to speculate that the A1 does not celebrate. The notion that the city HAD NO AQUADUCT all that time simply did not occur to me.

And I've contrived sometimes actually to lose to the A1. How, oh how, have I done it!

BTW-Have any of you guys noticed how the ai will often attack with it's weakest units, then the strongest? That way, it loses an easy battle, by sending in the tanks, THEN the howitzers.

RAH

As for bone-head AI, I just can reiterate the attack stratagies everone else has been bringing up. I had a city on a peninsula of a large continent completely owned by the Zulu's. I put a fortress on a chokepoint, and put a couple vet musketeers in it, with a catapult and a horsie of some sort, and every turn it came under attack with every catapult, chariot, elephant and other unit they had. There was a narrow channel between their continent and mine and plenty of coastal cities for both of us, but the attack never varied. my attack units took out the catapults and such, while everything else beat itself senseless against the fortress

I had just captured a coastal Infidel city; It was lightly defended after capture, but I wasn't worried because the nearest Infidel city was the magic three squares away, and the AI dosen't deliberately kamakazie...

So imagine my surprise when a sorcerer comes right at me, makes a turn, and finishes its sixth move in an apparently empty square just outside my city radius. Then a second. Then a third... Six sorcerers paraded past my city this way!

I "knew" from past exploration that the square was empty, but something was clearly up. I checked my city, noticed I still had the ship my force came in on, and a skald (dip). I put the skald in the ship and sent it to the "empty" square, and found a size four city. I decided to bribe--and the price was right.

In addition to the six sorcerers, I found an additional five, several units of cavalry, a couple elephants, two settlers, and another skald. Since I was in republic, I knew most of them would be lost the next turn, so I sent most of the sorcerers on Kamakzie runs against everything within five ssquares. The Infidels lost another fifteen units that way...

When I captured the city, it was earning 2 science. There was no library. There were no trade specials, almost no roads, and it was not on the coast. 100 turns later it is still an average science city. It did help them by keeping it away from me, but puh-lease.