On the topic of switching castles to cities and vice versa.

I've been flipping my rear guard castles to cities over time, and I can't figure out all that stuff that happens. Do the troop producing buildings have to be rebuilt every time? As Scotland, if I have the top end building to make Noble Swordsman and all his buddies, and I switch to a city. Do i have to rebuild the city watch and whatnot. I'm guessing I do because on the city/castle window they don't match.

Any building that matches between city/castle will not be destroyed and anything that doesn't match is destroyed is pretty much how it goes?

Yep.

The only buildings that stay are the ones which are common between both cities and castles. Religious buildings and ports for example.

Might be nice to get the definitive answers to questions on this issue.

Seems to me you keep religious buildings, ports, roads, blacksmiths, brothels, siege buildings, gun powder buildings, and farms.

Not sure what happens going from a city with a level 3 church (abbey) or above to a castle. Presumably you'd downgrade to a level 2 church. (Can you even do this, or is the city too big to convert?) I personally never convert cities to castles.

Not sure about wall upgrades (ballista towers) but would guess you keep them.

I think most of the specialty buildings (plaza del toro, merchant banks, race tracks, etc.) are city-only but haven't played them all enough to be sure.

The question was raised a while back as to whether you automatically get the cash from the buildings that are razed. Not sure if we got the answer to that.

Once you have stone walls, you cannot convert to a castle, so the abbey isn't a problem.

The things remaining from a castle-city switch:

Church/masjid
Port
Siege builders
Barracks(not the first level, ie. the peasantbuilder)
farms
Cannonmakers
Swordsmith guild
Crusader guilds

Everything else gets destroyed.

Note that with the barracks, the first city level is equal to the second castle level. So, if you only the first level barracks at a castle, it will be destroyed when you convert.

Why CA took out the 'if you proceed with this transformation the following buildings will be destroyed' (as shown in preview screenshots) is beyond me :no: