You know with countless playings, I have not seen that any of that holds true… I have sent spies to see what a city’s income was before capture & if it was loosing money then it will be loosing money when you take it… except if you trash the population & then it makes money.

I often incite the cities to rebel so I can wipe them out & make money for a time at least. I think it is a matter of corruption as that figure is both positive or negative on the ledger… the actual method it works by is unknown to me but killing population is the only way I have found to handle some cities…. AND it doesn’t matter if it starts as your or if you capture it. There are a few cities that never loose money & a few that always loose money but most others to varying degrees are managed by reducing population…. Some times plague is your friend.

The best thing to do is to keep an Onager close by so you can assault the city when it revolts. This will usually happen when the riots start killing troops. Take the garrison out just leaving your governor alone…also it is not a good time to build anything new as it will be lost anyway. I have noticed that other cities become less likely to rebel when you kill population so if you have several cities try to do them all in the same time frame, even waiting a turn for that other city to rebel before recapturing a city can help…hey, your are loosing money anyway so one more turn won’t hurt that much.

Anyway I am not so pleased with the actual working of the economy in this game but yes killing population dose prove profitable...the only down side is in small towns where it takes forever before you can build troops...but there are ways around that too. Peasants work well for moving populations...