Eh, as in all things, it depends on the situation/game. Usually, I’m content to live and let live, unless someone’s decided to actively work or fight against me. Then, y’know, it’s a case of “screw it—they knew the risks and they made their choices.” Show no prisoners (er…make that “take no mercy.” Wait…).
Sometimes, I try to minimize causualties, or make them quick. If for no other reason than to save on ammo. Other times, well…some days, I’m just in bad enough a mood that I need to blow off some steam against a simulated opponent. To the point where I end up just pounding wet pieces of bone into the floorboards.
I do almost always avoid hurting police officers or animals (especially domestic ones), though. What can I say…my Dad’s a cop, and I have a soft spot for dogs. As Poe said, “There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.”
On the other hand, I’ve had my…creatively darker moments.
I was playing Civ II once, many moons back. I was Rome, and one of my computer opponents was France. One of my oldest enemies, they were…I finally fought a war of conquest against them in the mid A.D. centuries (IIRC), overruning all of the cities in the main French homeland of central to north-east Europe. But that didn’t destroy them…they had a city or cities, somewhere, beyond my reach. But I didn’t know where—and we’d occasionally skirmish as my forces moved across Eurasia, over the centuries.
Finally, I did find them—it was during a war with China, to which France had allied, in what had to have been the 19th century or later. The entire French nation had relocated—probably starting from around a small, isolated colony that had escaped my initial conquest, and had gradually prospered—to Siberia, almost to the Pacific. They gave me a devil of a time during my campaign in China, and wouldn’t give up even after I came to terms with the Chinese leader. The anger and bitterness towards me hadn’t waned, over the centuries, it seemed. I had no choice but to muster my forces—including an army still battered after the conquests in western China—and finish a final, brutal war against the old foe. Finally, I triumphed, with all of the Siberian French cities in my control. France, as an empire, was no more.
But my cold wrath would not be satisfied. Normally, conquered cities would be rebuilt, refortified, and absorbed into the Empire proper. Especially ones near a foe I had yet to completely conquer. But they had cost me too much, hindered me too long, caused too much trouble.
I sold off every city improvement I could from the former French territory, and had my troops begin systematically destroying the tile improvements from around them—including, as the plan progressed, the railroads, at least from the outlaying cities. Food intake to the cities, predictably, began to falter. Increasing starvation, and population loss. The conquered cities were set to work building new units…the “settler” units, each one of which costs the builder city a population point, presumably of volunteers or conscripts into the new labor/city founder unit.
As each settler was completed, the city would get a little smaller…and I’d have a new labor battalion. Perfect for use as combat engineers, or some of my public works projects like terraforming the Sahara desert into lush farmland, or building new roads in South America. Or maybe, eventually, being used to found new proper Roman colonies, or simply absorbed into other cities to boost production.
All the time while the old Neo French Homeland wasted away, slowly reclaimed by desert and forests, dwindling cities sitting like silent, empty-eyed ghosts as the world passed them by. Eventually leaving only a spiderweb of unused roads in a dusty, forgotten corner of the world.
Ethnic Cleansing, courtesy of Sid Meyer. To quote Caligula…“For the Senate, and the People…of ROME!” :eek:
