Austrian marriage question

When Maria marries a CS, the CS icon beside the name disappears, so it does not look like a captured CS. Does this mean that if the CS is captured it can't be liberated? Does the same hold true for Venice?

City-States annexed through peaceful means (married to Austria/bought by Venice) are, indeed, no longer counted as being City-States.
After all, this was not a hostile take-over, it was peaceful negotiations that brought the City-State and the Empire/Republic together...
...
Or something like that, I'm not too sure of the reason why...

Is this hardcoded or can you undo the fact that you are not able to liberate married/bought CS's with mods?

Cool, thanks

JSMCAG said:

City-States annexed through peaceful means (married to Austria/bought by Venice) are, indeed, no longer counted as being City-States.
After all, this was not a hostile take-over, it was peaceful negotiations that brought the City-State and the Empire/Republic together...
...
Or something like that, I'm not too sure of the reason why...

Click to expand...

I've always hated that.. Venice buys your ally so you immediately DoW and retake it, but then you're stuck with a warmonger penalty for conquering a Venetian city!

Sturmgewher88mm said:

I've always hated that.. Venice buys your ally so you immediately DoW and retake it, but then you're stuck with a warmonger penalty for conquering a Venetian city!

Click to expand...

The problem is that people see their CS allies as conquered puppets or colonies rather than as minor sovereign nations. It "decided" it stood to gain more by joining the Venetian empire (that's the mechanism the Venetian MoV deals and for that matter the Austrian weddings emulates) than by remaining a CS at the mercy of the other major Civs like you, who impress or bribe its elites and gets all its treasures and resources for it. Venice will ensure its protection, and shower the city with gold to buy it infrastructure and units, and upgrades. Venice invest a lot more in a puppet CS than another Civ does to bribe.

That's irritating to lose a CS ally to Venice/Austria, but not much of a casus belli on its own unless you're an imperialist who sees "colonies" where other nations might see "sovereign allies", or unless the CS is in a key strategic position for you, giving venice a base in the middle of your cities for instance (placing you in a bit of a Cuban missiles crisis position), or if it was a vital source of a strategic resource you can't find replace peacefully otherwise (though often Venice might trade it to you for gpt...). Otherwise, a more proportionate diplomatic answer to a Venetian peaceful takeover of a CS is to use a spy or bribery to steal one of Venice's other CS allies, or eventually to denounce it, or try to get it embargoed, which for Venice can be crippling.

If you're more imperialist and it has to come to war, it's much better not to take the former CS but to force Venice to give it to you intact. But if you capture it, kill half the civilians and loot it in the process then liberate it, why should the former city-state be happy about it, when what you did was violate its sovereign right to be part of the Venetian (or Austrian) Empire? Either way, they didn't want to be a CS anymore, so to impose your political will on them after you're imposed your will militarily you're forced to puppet or annex it. It's not like you came at its rescue to free it from the Mongols or Germany and restored its sovereignty.

Gameplay-wise it wouldn't make sense that Venetian puppets can be liberated and returned to their CS status. If it was so, there would be no downside to conquering Venetian puppets, and not only you'd get solid allies but liberating a single CS puppet would negate 100% of the penalty for capturing Venice itself.. so you get a capital and a few CS allies without diplomatic penalties. Way too tempting. It would become standard strategy when that Civ is in a game to liberate the puppets and capture Venice itself.