Burn Patents On Capture

[Deantwo]

Currently if you capture any city of an advanced empire, you get access to ALL their patents.

I suggest that most (not all) patents get deleted from the city before the ownership transfer happens. Akin to the people shredding all the confidential patent research before trying to escape or surrender. A few random patents can be left behind as you always miss something when you are in a rush.



This would limit that major reward from capturing one city from an advanced empire. Force them to actually capture more than one city if they are attempting to gain patents.

I will point out that yes, patents aren't that valuable right now, since if you can use a patent you can also make it. But this could apply to other things too maybe, such as dumping fuel and weapons upon capture.

[Deantwo]

Maybe we should be able to select commodities that our cities should destroy when it is captured.
For example right now it is possible for an attacker to instantly start building something with the city's stockpiled resources right after capture.

Most of these non-patent issues is because we no longer have the loyalty system that the old-style cities had. An attacker can start instantly building a huge military base right after capturing a world.

[Deantwo]

Stealing patents is still pretty easy it seems.

Patents Easy to Steal
When an enemy captures a city, they get every patent in town. Buildings keep a library of every patent they might use, making the problem worse.

When the empire of a building changes, the building now discards all patents from its library that are not in use by its processes. If the building is destroyed/ruins when its empire changes, all of its patents are discarded.

Of course this only really matters for warp FTL drive module patents, since they are the only ones that take a long time to complete and have any real value.

Work around: turn off your warp FTL drive module production if you think you are gonna be attacked.