+1 to this idea. I don't often have the enemy capture cities, but it happened last night and they destroyed it the instant they had it, didn't give me a chance to recapture. I had an army that could take it back less than a turn away, but they insta-razed it and I couldn't rebuild.

I find city razing is part of the game, and a risk to deal with. That said, there are two long time issues here:

1- Insta-razing for AI and not for player is just not fair.

2- Insta-razing for monsters is infuriating, since there is no way to rebuild the city nor resettle the tile (salted land).

1 Should be fixed ASAP. Same rules is a must here. Everyday someone posts a complain about it, and many of us post to support it, still with the hopes of getting a response...

2 Any change here might be appreciated. Linking the number of turns needed to raze, to the level of the city would be a nice solution. Or a plain number (like 2 turns to raze: one turn to kill half the population and the second turn for the coup de grace). Maybe this way could fix #1 too.

Nibelung, you sound just like me.  I started a thread just like this and "infuriating" featured prominently.  Anyway, this is apparently a long-running issue and the vast majority of posters agree that the 5-turn delay needs to happen (personally, I'm against ALL razing but never mind).  Not sure if they plan on changing this in 1.1, but the devs seem to be trying the address the equally-infuriating "salting of the land" that takes place after a razing.  The problem is that tiles once occupied by a city are ALWAYS tagged as occupied by a city, even after the city is no more.

Workaround: building an outpost nearby "resets" the salted land so you can then go back in with a new settler.  I've never actually tried that, but somebody smart told me it would work.

Doesn't solve the razing problem in the first place, but at least makes the results marginally less...  infuriating.  Wish I could think of another word, but that's the one.

Building an outpost to 'reset' the salted land doesn't work, at least it hasn't for me. I had a city raised near a shard location. After the city was razed and the land values wiped/salted I built an outpost to at least reclaim the shard location and the land values remained nil - apparently still salted.