People who play Civilization know what I mean.
The old, old versions had cheat codes where, if an opposing civilization got on your nerves too much, you could just vanish them, not unlike a Douwd. But from 3 on, you have to either fight it out or quit the game.
I much preferred being a god. 
Civ4 (not sure about Civ3) has the World Builder, which allows you to do pretty much the same thing.
Used to play a Civ-like war game called Lords of the Realm, where the goal is to conquer all of 12th-century England. One of my favorite tricks, after capturing a county I didn’t want to keep, was to ship away all the food and force the serfs away from working the fields, thus destroying the county’s ability to produce any kind of agriculture. Naturally, the county would eventually revolt and break away, but that was the whole point – in fact, the land would be so devastated that if I tried marching my own armies through that county, they would quickly get diseased and starve to death.
Good times, good times.
That sounds like my method for reducing dissent in conquered cities, in Civ 3: A newly-conquered city is tasked for 100% tax collectors until they’re small enough to be in We Love the King Day (that is to say, enough of the foreign nationals unhappy about me fighting their country have starved, and the luxuries/cathedrals/marketplaces are enough to appease the rest). Not only does this reduce the chance of revolt, in multiple ways (less foreign nationals and WLtKD), but conquered cities are often far from my capital and hopelessly corrupt/wasteful, so putting the entire population in specialists is usually a significant increase to the city’s value. And it isn’t even technically an atrocity.