Cities & Knights rules query

[Stephen]

Something that cam up tonight, curious what people think.

Playing with the cities & Knights expansion, Player X has 2 cities and 5 settlements.

The barbarians invade, and they have least activated knights, and the knights aren't strong enough to fight off the invaders.

Normally, you take a city and replace it with a settlement, but each player only has 5 settlement pieces, so X has no settlement to replace their lost city with.

So what happens?

My guess is that, under rules as written, you just lose a city and replace it with nothing, because you have nothing to replace it with.

We let the player lose the city and then move one of their other settlements to the site of the lost city (which was in a good location).

But this still meant that the player lost 2 victory points in total (2 cities + 5 settlements -> 1 city + 5 settlements).
The player felt they should get a bonus victory point.

What do you guys think?

[Derek]

I was wondering this myself. My take would be that the city would become a settlement even if there are no pieces- "Pillaged cities are reduced to mere settlements" Though the rules to refer to "losing a city" in a couple places, they offer no other definitions as to what losing a city means.

I would suggest turning it upside-down (not sideways, to keep it separate from sabotaged cities) or using some other token and treating it like a sixth settlement. Of course, if a city is built in a different location, replace it with the proper settlement piece.

The only other option I could think of is that perhaps, like a person with no cities or a person with only a metropolis, they are not eligible to pillaged. This one doesn't sit right with me, though, because they're neither so pathetic as to not be able to be pillaged nor have they earned the right not to be.

Your way doesn't sit right with me either. Losing two points (and more importantly, in my mind, two spots worth of production) when everybody else only was up to losing one seems greatly unfair.