You can build roads in City-States and they pick up the bill.

Did anyone know about this? Is this widespread knowledge?

This is something I've known about for awhile, but I've really been exploiting it recently.

I just played a 2v2v2 OCC game with a friend where he was in the center of a pangaea map, surrounded by the other two teams, while I was isolated on one side of the map on some peninsula.


He was starting to get attacked by two team members on either side, so I had to travel all across the map to help him. There were some city-states along the way so I embarked my units and landed them in city-state territory where my workers were building roads (at no cost to me, and no loss of influence). They also picked up Mt. Kilimanjaro along the way.


This seems like something is very exploitative and very useful. The thing that I'm wondering is could this possibly come at any loss for me, or could it cause some unintended consequence?

For example, maybe I get less gold from trade routes with the city-state if its income is suffering?

Useful for moving troops when you're already at war with your opponents, but don't depend on it to connect your cities. Losing the CS will hit you with massive gpt loss when they disconnect your empire.

yep I try to prioritise this so if you get a CS request to build a road to you then it's easier to get that done quickly.
Firstly because there is less road tiles that need to be built to connect
Secondly because CS territories quickly fill up with units and that makes it impossible or very hard to get a worker in to build the road
Thirdly it can help friendly CSs go to war with a neighbor as they can move their units over rough terrain more easily.

I has assumed this to be pretty widespread knowledge. The topic comes up with some frequency.

Yes, it is very useful. Especially if your workers would otherwise be idle. The only loss to you is the opportunity cost if your workers could be doing something more useful.

The only unintended consequences I can think of is that if a rival (who has allied the CS) DOWs you. Now the CS can wage war a little more effectively in their own territory. But you are probably not fighting the CS in their territory anyway.

If this costs the CS in any way, I have never noticed the effects.

If I restore a civ to life, I usually build rails all through their territory. This has left them with appreciably less gold to trade with me. So I might start being less generous with my workers’ time!

As Sclb pointed out, roads through CS do not count as establishing city connections (unless you have friend or ally status), but unless you are at war, your units move freely on them.

I often build roads and rails on neighbors territory as well, but not usually the way they would really appreciate. (For example a shortcut through their territory, but one that does not connect their city.) As with the CS, the benefit of the convenient cost-free route for me outweighs any tactical advantage I may be providing them later. AIs and CS never remove roads.

My current game is a wide liberty match with Greece as my main rival. You can lose a lot of happiness and gold when that *$%&^( coups your city state. Hate that mechanic. Big problem when he has several cities turning out 200 gpt.

Yeah I'm aware of this but I only build roads inside their territory as I really need to not frivolously though. Because those roads will mean the city state have less GPT to work with for maintaining their combat units.

Athenaeum said:

maybe I get less gold from trade routes with the city-state if its income is suffering?

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Nope. Trade route yields don't care about the state of either party's treasury. Aside from stuff you can do, they're just based on the GPT of the cities themselves, whether the destination has a river, whether the cities have Markets, if the destination has East Indies Co, a x2 bonus if it's a sea route, and the number of resources the cities have. So filling a CS with Roads won't reduce their TR yield, as city-level GPT is not affected, but it might extend a caravan's reach to get to a good destination. Which is a marginal gain, that of course may benefit rivals.

If you have cities far apart and want to connect them, it helps a lot if you can build most of the road through city state territory.

Additionally, you can puts roads (and railroads) on other civilisations' cities and they don't do a thing about it.

Timewalker102 said:

Additionally, you can puts roads (and railroads) on other civilisations' cities and they don't do a thing about it.

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Tangentially related: if an AI is using roads in no man's land to connect cities, you can raze them at peace with no diplomatic repercussions. They pay to upkeep a broken road, and get no connection money for it.