Puppet cities

Puppeting a city has been one of the most popular means of controlling conquered cities in the history of Kai. Such cities are not controlled directly by the conquering empire, but rather by an "expert democratic government" charged with carrying out extensive reforms such as raising the standard of living and exterminating widespread corruption, and which is benevolently protected by the mighty empire. This state of affairs brings the following distinctions:

• The conquering empire immediately acquires the city's territory and gains control of all its resources. That also means they can use their city's resources to replenish and upgrade their military units within this territory, and the isolated city doesn't need to have a road or Harbor connection to the Capital for spending strategic resources on upgrading.
• The conquering empire may station garrison military units in it, as in a normal city of their empire.
• The conquering empire benefits from the city's yield production (cultural developments, gold, scientific developments, and the influence of applicable religious faiths) once the period of resistance is over. It should be noteed, however, that scientific and cultural developments produced by a puppet city suffer a diminished output.
• The city will continue to grow its population and borders as a normal city. However, the conquering empire tends to have no control of these processes.
• The conquering empire has no control of the production process in puppet cities. Once the period of resistance is over, it will always produce something, which is either new buildings, or wealth. It will never produce military units, though, nor will it attempt to produce any world wonders.
• The conquering empire cannot assign the population in puppet cities to tasks they feel would best benefit the empire. The "democratic governments" always tend to think it's most prudent to prioritize gold and wealth production. Very... democratic.

The populous of puppet cities do not count towards the empire acquiring new, additional social policies, nor do they tend to contribute towards the requirements for building National Wonders. They do not affect the conquering empire's treasury negatively, as their focus tends to be set on generating gold and wealth.

Since a newly captured city enters a period of resistance and can't really do anything useful for the conquering empire, advisors usually suggest the leader of the conquering empire to make it a puppet for a about a century (or at least until resistance ends) instead of immediately annexing it. Another point of keeping a city as a puppet is if the conquering empire is very large already, and has issues maintaining the happiness of its people - mainly if they are led by warmongers seeking domination over other nations.