In a way I agree with you on this.  There is definitely an issue when it is advantageous to subjugate a race which is supposed to hate your own.  On the other hand I really can't see a simple solution to this.  Making it so you can't build any buildings of your own would be to severe and just promote a scorched earth policy towards the other faction.  I've seen someone suggest making a 1 to 1 between the buildings so you can't have both 1 tech producing buildings in a city but this 1 to 1 system breaks down at higher level buildings. 

There's also some problems (?) with empire cities requiring less population to get to level 5 when you are empire and so the city center provides less population.  When a kingdom player takes the city the center still only allows the amount of population it normally does but the pop required for leveling becomes the kingdom requirement meaning you need more housing.

I can't personally think of an easy way to resolve this without introducing a new mechanic (e.g. migration like AoW had).  Except with the way cities are built in this game without a 1 to 1 building set for empire and kingdom it's not possible to 'convert' a city as far as I can see.  Just removing all the buildings which don't have a 1 to 1 between the groups would create other problems like chunks of the city going missing.

Sorry to not offer solutions but I do agree with you that this is a problem, at least in so far as it 'feels wrong' when I'm playing, but in spite of having thought about this quite a bit I personally can't see a solution.

I think this is one of those things that doesn't have a quick fix so to speak, but really needs to be dealt with. Consider an conquest only MP game where there are 4 kingdoms guys and one Empire guy. Every kingdom player in this scenario has a huge incentive to immediately go to war with the Empire player simply because if they fail to do so, their opponents will gain access to a huge bonus over them.

Honestly, they probably should just implement building mutual exclusion and then just say, well if you have this building then you can't have this building. Yet, I think this should be in addition to what wintersong suggested, which is simply destroy buildings that under certain circumstances. Again though, that should be added to the game since it would allow mod makers to do a lot of crazy things if you could enforce buildings being destroyed at a particular moment.

The problem is not the resource buildings in general. The real problem comes with the ability to get insane bonuses. Consider a city with a gold mine that has all all the gold bonus buildings for the kingdoms, and it is taken by the empire. This city can now build the empire gold bonus buildings too. So now, not only did you faction lose the resource and your bonus buildings, but now the enemy gets all the income from your bonus buildings, the mine, and his bonus buildings.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the blurb for 1.1. But I thought that now you could build any number of the same type of buildings within 1.1. this is what i was talking about, rather than just building lots of buildings. Therefore you can already build more then one of each type gold improvement, so it won't be a bonus anyway if you already have the opposite style of building. This was done to make large cities better than several small cities, thereby reducing the benefits of city spam. Mainly because housing is more efficient per person in large cities than small ones, meaning more people from less food. I thought that each building now has a maintenance cost and a population cost that needs to be met to build and keep it. Obviously this wouldn't be a problem with gold bulding though because they would pay their own mainenance costs just by being built.

Come to think of it, this does seem rather overpowered anyway so maybe i am wrong. Hmm... maybe i should look up the topic i am thinking of.

If my thoughts were right then the obvious solution would be increasing costs (populatio/materials/gold/food etc) for each extra building to balance it out. If they were wrong just ignore me and carry on.

I actually think this is a fairly elegant solution, and I think you have hit the nail on how to solve the problem.

From what I have read, there will be some buildings, ie the resource creation buildings like the workshop or study, that can be built multiple times. However, the crazier higher lvl buildings will still be 1 per city or 1 per faction.

I would like it if this solution was implemented.  And it would be fantastic and very sensible to be able to use for custom faction types too - "Only works for Elves" (when/if they are made a separate faction), "Only works for Undead" etc.  It would be an elegant way of solving a lot of problems with capturing towns of different alignments.

What do others, players/devs, think?  Could this solution be implemented in 1.1?

Best regards,
Steven.

I REALLY REALLY WANT to be able to use the multicultural assets of a taken city.  That is huge fun for me.  IMHO, this is a balancing issue not a problem.

Some of the most fun that MoM provided was you could get access to new racial advantages and tools and units without limitations.  It becomes a strategic advantage to go for those cities.

In pre 1.1 play I haven't had many games where a city was unstoppable, because I used strategy tactics.  But I agree with OP that, if it becomes too powerful, then buildings that are taken could have one or more of the following limitations imposed:

1) less efficient production for the first X turns, with efficiency slowly returning based on new research lines

2) make you research the new lines, or research Kingdom language to be able to read the manuals

3) the local citizens force you to pay outrageous sums to operate the buildings, requiring you to pay a price to 'activate' a building's bonuses

4) decrease the morale of all units built from the city until you have researched a tech

I can see quite a wide variety of options to allow them in play but to be balanced.

One note: I do think you should have to break down a wall in the city's defenses (aka AOW2:SM) to be able to fight, and you should have to pay to repair it!

I like that solution - or perhaps a combination: convert any buildings that have a direct equivalent, and disable anything that doesn't (or anything that has a one-per-player limit that you've already built somewhere else). Since there's no building limit, you might as well let the extra nonfunctional buildings just sit there, that way if the original owner recaptures his city next turn he doesn't find half his buildings have instantly disappeared.

Unfortunately I think this entire problem is overshadowed by other problems with the economy, which is changing drastically in 1.1 anyway, we may as well wait until after 1.1 to revisit it.

All that being said, I'm not entirely against bonuses for multicultural cities - it's just that getting to keep the old Empire buildings, and then build your Kingdom equivalents alongside them for double the usual bonus is awfully broken. If we want a multicultural bonus, it needs to be something different - start by disabling or converting these excess buildings, and then add in some other way to benefit from our exotic conquests. Ideally it should be offset by some kind of disadvantage, so that captured Empire cities aren't strictly better or worse than your Kingdom's home cities (or vice versa if playing Empire) - just different.

How about you can't train troops in the taken city? That way, you can take advantage of any resource bonuses (more than you could in any of your own cities), but can't train troops. 

Perhaps there is a city-wide penalty to many things. The conquerer may build a special building (that must be researched). This building requires a decent upkeep of gildar per turn and also requires a decent number of specialists (say 5). For each specialist, the penalty is reduced until the penalty is completely gone.

In effect, you'd be trading people and money for 'other stuff'.