City State vs City State

Hello everybody. Something unexpected happened in my latest game and I wanted to share:

Lhasa and Tyre are two militaristic city states that are very close to each other, (their borders are touching), but they aren't issuing any demands that the other be destroyed - they'd both rather focus their hate on Edinburgh and Belgrade who are on the opposite end of the continent. So, they're friends, right?

Enter Genghis Kahn at the head of a Mongol horde. He takes Lhasa for his own while he retreats from a Greek onslaught. Tyre - allied to Alexander - goes on the offensive and, while Genghis is distracted, rids Lhasa of his presence. Shortly thereafter, Genghis is defeated.

Now, when a city state takes a city, they normally raze it and go on their merry way. But, obviously, a city state cannot be razed - so Tyre occupies and puppets Lhasa instead. There now exists a super-city state, a "city+1 state" if you will.

I would have thought Tyre would liberate Lhasa, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

City States are not given the ai to react in such a way... Besides, if you doubled you power, would you be so eager to recind it?

Also, city-states have been known to keep up to three cities... I wonder, however... if I put a bunch of capitals on an island w/cs, and then befriended said cs and systematically went to war w/each capital, letting cs take them...

Would they keep capturing cities?

This is not uncommon... I've seen it a few times.

I've had a CS with 2 puppets (with no help from me), but I've seen a CS on this forum with 4 puppets, 3 of them actual AI capitals... in that particular case, the CS had a lot of help, of course!

Note: A CS will always raze a city unless it's another CS, or an AI capital.

City states in the internal game logic are referred to as "minor civilizations". I don't know whether they originally planned to make them work a bit differently, but that's the way I think of them.

brianshapiro said:

City states in the internal game logic are referred to as "minor civilizations". I don't know whether they originally planned to make them work a bit differently, but that's the way I think of them.

Click to expand...

Also known as "civilizations with no interest of winning the game"

The_Quasar said:

This is not uncommon... I've seen it a few times.

I've had a CS with 2 puppets (with no help from me), but I've seen a CS on this forum with 4 puppets, 3 of them actual AI capitals... in that particular case, the CS had a lot of help, of course!

Note: A CS will always raze a city unless it's another CS, or an AI capital.

Click to expand...

I've seen CS's taking down other CS's, though not yet taking an AI capital. But scenarios like these could be a bit of fun, maybe even a bit exciting ....One could systematically liberate CS's, and maybe even AI capitals if it's a destroyed AI civ. Would make going after Patronage a kind of interesting and even more rewarding "social policy" route.... You would probably try to do this without actually declaring war on anyone...just keeping someone else's DOW alive... I've also set things up a few times where a city state could take some enemy AI's city, knowing they would then raze it...

One of my favorite games was a surprise domination win when a city-state captured the last AI capital....