Well, it is coherent since you can destroy all your improvements in one turn.

The only problem is sometimes you want to raze a city which prevents you to create another with better ressources access.

Building takes time

burning doesn't

I do think that the idea of razing a city taking time may be a good one.. it would allow time for the city owner to attempt to send troops to retake it.This would force the conquering army to hold the city..  So maybe make it take x numbers of turns based on city level and pop... seems like an interesting solution that should not be to prohibitive. another possible idea may be if the conquering army abandons the city before it is razed it has a chance to rejoin former owner or become a neutral city...

as usual just tossing out ideas to see if any stick or make sense heh heh. 

Hmm, I see it differently than some of you in this thread. If I conquered London and decided I was going to burn it to the ground and kill every single inhabitant I expect there would be some pretty stiff resistance from the populace. Now, if there is a method of GalCiv2 style defense where you can call every able-bodied civilian to the defense of the city when it's first attacked, then razing cities instantly is fine. Currently there's no such system. But to me it's simply stupid to have a city with thousands of people living in it get burned to the ground in a single turn by an individual peasant that surprise attacked it because the king absentmindedly moved his forces one tile away. All you guys saying burning a city is fairly easy, yea it's fairly easy if you have an army of 100+ guys and the city is relatively small. That's why there should be some fight when we proclaim that you want to kill everyone in city and raze it. Five peasants can't burn down Rome. Hell, even 500 peasants would have some trouble. That's why razing a city must have a cost, even if it's just slight enough to keep the weakest of armies from destroying the greatest of cities. 

There's an acceptable break between gameplay and reality, though. Being able to raze cities within a turn speeds up the game (no trench warfare, etc) and punishes players who don't have at least a small amount of defence on their cities. It's good for gameplay, even if it doesn't really make sense.

The multiple Turn Raze idea has issues based on "what happens" if the owners do return, but not for 3 Turns. What is lost? Surely, each Turn would Raze some portion, 1/3 of the City.

Currently a City is one (1) unit. It would require that mechanic to be changed to facilitate the Muti-Turn Razing. Doable? Doubtful at his point.

One idea could be that to Raze a City requires the enemy to Delete each building separately and only 2-3 Building can be selected per Turn during the "Razing Phase"(tm).

Best idea here.    Age of Wonders abstracted Razing by requiring a certain #/power of forces in the razing army. OP is correct that rather silly for 1 unit to burn down a Level 5 City in one turn.  10 units burning down 10 structures each turn... I'm good with that.

Currently, a Level 5 City can be had with minimal buildings as its growth is based on Pop.

With enough Tech, it doesn't take many actual buildings to reach L5 and then one relatively small force would be enough to Raze a City in 1 Turn, 2 Max.

We don't/shouldn't want to force players to have to grow/bloat their Cities up just so the enemy has to have huge armies to Raze them quickly enough not to lose any initiative they may have gained while doing so.

Why not have a number of resistance turns like civ does? (So like 8 turns or something for a really L5 city). The attacking force requires an army big enough combat rating to quell the cities, and if they don't it kicks them back out a square. If the civ that attacks the city attempts to raze houses beyond how many people are using it, or simply razing the city, THEN insurgants pop up and get into battle with the attacking forces. Generally peasants just roll over and let attacking armies take their city unless you are burning it down.

So make it a hit is = to 1 building, house 2, villa 3, estate 4, etc. The arguement was 1 peasant burning down a whole town. Well, level 5 has many more tiles than a level 1, so I believe the proposed solution is in the right direction.

All I know is if Chicago can almost burn to the ground in 1871, seems a lot easier to do it in times when civilization is just getting started. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire

Perhaps the other nearby sovereign/magic user can case a water based spell to reduce the damage of the razing? You cannot raze it for at least 1 or two turns more to give nearby units a chance to save it?

on a similar vein, in one of my games a single individual explorer (1 attack 5 defence) captured a L5 city on its own and was the ONLY unit within 5 tiles. I had expected it to die in the attack, not capture the ENTIRE city.

harpo