What do embassies do?

What's the advantage of having an embassy in your capital or another civs capital?

Positive diplo modifier, lets you see the location of their capital so you know if you need to worry about them or not (or if they better worry about you ) and I'm not sure but it seems like you can get slightly better deals selling stuff if you trade embassies or sell them one, probably just because of the slightly better relations. Also I think it's a prerequisite for open borders now, can't remember off the top of my head.

Edit: I think I might be confusing that with embassy and open borders being a prerequisite for research agreements. Bah, I don't know.

Only way to have an RA is to share embassies (and have a DOF). Only way to get Open Borders from a civ is to have an embassy in the other civ's capital. Having an embassy also shows you where the civ is located and gives you visibility into the civ's capital's core tiles. Modest positive modifer if you allow an embassy or share embassies.

Others may chime in with more advantages (and many will probably also ring in with their views of disadvantages).

Mostly it sets the stage for later diplomatic relations, but there are are side benefits just to being able to see their capital:

You'll know the population and defenses of the capital (good if you're planning an invasion)
You'll see improvements, plus surrounding (knowing if it's on a coast is handy for the above too)
You can place a spy in the capital (which will allow you to actually see without fog around the city)
You'll count as having "discovered" the civ if you have a City-State quest out there

Keep in mind that having an embassy of their in your capital allows all of that stuff, too. In the early game, especially at higher difficulties, the AI players may have vastly higher military strength than you, and seeing that you don't have walls and the location of your territory could prompt them to invade.

An embassy in your capitol will get you some small diplomatic bonuses as well as 25g early in the game.

An embassy in their capitol will allow you to sell them Open Borders for 50g every 30 turns as well as filling one of the requirements to sign a Research Agreement.

The above basically covers their advantages, the disadvantage is that it also reveals this to the AI.

Just like you get the screen shot for having an embassy over there, the AI now gets visibility of yours.

This can cause the following:

1. AI to develop land-envy when he sees how good your capital is. If this happens, the negative modifier from land envy will be far higher than the small plus. (AI can't envy what he can't see).

2. AI may see an open city site and try to settle a city to take in some of those resources he sees. (AI settlers are only sent to tiles the AI can see) (Also note that the human can exploit this to get a free worker or two.)

3. AI also can only spy against cities he's seen. (So denying embassy to all AIs until you know they've discovered your capital by some other means is very effective at reducing spy attempts.)

I always delay my embassy setting in others territory if it is possible because some city state will give your a mission to find the location of other civ.

realzhuyi0123 said:

I always delay my embassy setting in others territory if it is possible because some city state will give your a mission to find the location of other civ.

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Yes; and I found it so stupid I edited the quests xml to remove it in the mod I'm working on. (I also removed the bully quest)

You will never get the "find civ A" quest if any of your units has actually seen that civ's borders. It only works if your only contact with civ A is unit to unit.

Browd said:

You will never get the "find civ A" quest if any of your units has actually seen that civ's borders. It only works if your only contact with civ A is unit to unit.

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It also works with AI unit being next to your border.
Which is extremely common on higher difficulty levels on water maps. AI will tend to make a much higher priority of Sailing than the human who will be just getting the key techs and then be researching Philosophy.

One more point which hasn't been mentioned before - you can see if your opponents are building wonders. Especially important in the early game, where you don't have any other possibility to check that. You see none of your opponents started building GL yet - you can go for it, someone already started - on higher difficulty don't even bother, go for something else, etc. Same thing with ToA, Hanging Gardens and Haga Sophia. No AI is going to build these in any other city than the capitol.

I don't know if it works that way 100% but I have noticed that not sharing embassies
with civs delays the eventual DOW. Not postpones it but it will delay it a bit, even when we are next to each other.

Generally I only open embassies with civs that cant realistically attack me or ones that I want to DOW on me and then wipe them out.

Browd said:

You will never get the "find civ A" quest if any of your units has actually seen that civ's borders. It only works if your only contact with civ A is unit to unit.

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hah, cool. never encountered that quest before.