Gifting army to city-state

[radiospace]

So in my current game, I've got a runaway lead (score 1300 to 850 next highest civ), and am obviously going to win a spaceship victory.

As the endgame progresses, the Songhai attacked my oldest city-state ally, their neighbor Ragusa. When this happened previously I simply paid the Songhai off to sign a peace treaty with Ragusa and no big deal. (They are very friendly with me.) This time, though, they were in Perma-War with Ragusa, so that wasn't an option.

I decided to gift some units to Ragusa to defend themselves -- I gave them a couple of infantry and a tank (against invading cavalry and artillery). It only took a couple of turns for the Ragusa AI to blunder away these precious resources and lose them, so I gave them more... and more... and more... You don't realize how bad the AI is with tactical military operations until you're footing the bill...

Anyway, like the U.S. in Vietnam, having escalated this war to the point of no return, I've become stubborn in my pursuit of this strategy, so I am planning on building up a big army to gift Ragusa all at once, in hopes that they will actually conquer a few Songhai cities. By this time I have finished the tech tree so it will be 2 or 3 Death Robots, Jet Fighters, Stealth Bombers, mech infantry, modern armor, and maybe a couple of nuclear missiles mischief.

Here's my question: does the City-State have to pay upkeep on all these units? If they can't pay it, will they just have to disband them? Do they suffer combat penalties if they don't have resources to support the units (i.e. Aluminum for modern armor, oil for tanks, etc)? In short, is there any limit to how big of an army you can gift to a citystate without it causing some sort of epic economic fail?

 

[leckig]

great question. I was in a similar situation yesterday and quickly realized all the units I gifted were simply wasted. So I had to send my troops lead by myself to help.

 

[wcbarney]

Yeah, don't you just hate it when one of your CS allies puts out an URGENT request for units to defend itself against ... And then, when you give them a few of your pretty good troops, they aren't content to defend themselves -- they have to go off and use your toops to commit suicide against the nearest enemy city.

 

[sschmalz]

Wow! You're planning on gifting Death Robots and nukes to a CS?

Let me guess, next you're going to tell us that you're going to change your first name to Ragusa.

 

[Michl2602]

Radio Ragusa, what a beautiful name

sorry MOD

 

[chazzycat]

I don't know the answer to the maintenance question, but I like to do this pretty often when I am very far ahead, and can't remember ever seeing a unit get disbanded. If your tech is well ahead of the AI, you can empower a city state to wipe out entire continents. Yes their military AI is incompetent, but remember, so is the AI of its enemies. I'm betting a couple GDRs should turn the tide for you pretty quickly. This is a really fun way to win a domination victory without ever leaving your continent

 

[Michl2602]

Probably the problem only arises, when you give a unit to a militaristic-CS (what Ragusa is IIRC). My experiences with giving them units are also good (eg. Lhasa helped me a lot to win a recent war against Japan), but I never did that in an excessive way (just giving them 3 or 4 units).

 

[leckig]

here is a sneaky way: bribe a CIV to start a war with a CS and then give bunch of troops to that CS. I need to try that sometimes.

 

[sschmalz]

you can empower a city state to wipe out entire continents

This sounds like it could make a runaway game (such as the OP's) a bit more entertaining. Those science victory games can get a bit stale in the late stages.

 

[byzman13]

I've done quite a bit og military gifting to CS. I don't know if they pay maintenance on units or not. They do disband units. I can't recall them disbanding units when they are at war but they will definitely disband them when they are at peace. I'm not sure how many turns they will hold onto units but your best bet is to gift them 3-5 turns before you start a war.

When I have noticed CS disbanding gifted units I have gifted/bribed them more $$$ afterwards to see if they will hold onto the new units I'm gifting them. They don't seem to keep the units around any longer after they get the cash. So it may be something with their programming although maintenance may play into it also.

 

[leckig]

are CS limited by the resources they have when building military units? It seems like they can build units that require metal when they have no metal on their territory.

 

[LincolnOfRome]

I played a game today where I gifted an 4 mech infantry, 4 rocket artillery, a copter, and 6 cavalry to Monaco when Darius attacked it. I was a bit disappointed Monaco razed 5 of the 8 cities it conquered.

 

[radiospace]

Well, here's out it played out, for those interested (and I agree the name Ragusa has a certain ring to it).

I gave Ragusa loads of units. As I was at peace and with a runaway #1 economy, I essentially gave them my entire small but highly advanced army and then kept cranking out units. I gave them an army, navy and air force. They didn't seem to have any problem supporting the number of units though I felt that a couple of capital ships just plain disappeared from an enclosed bay the turn after they received them. (Philadelphia Experiment?)

It wasn't until I gave them about 4 Giant Death Robots on one turn that they had any success, and then success came fast -- they conquered (and razed) 3 Songhai border cities in just a few turns. After that, though, they ceased to be effective with the military. They kept their surviving GDR's near their home city and would send sporadic lone units to assault a nearby city. (Weirdly, they had a penchant for using SAM units for this task).

They might have accomplished more but long about this time the Songhai also attacked Stockholm, another maritime ally of mine, distracting me from my generous support of the Ragusa cause for the rest of the game (as events unfolded). I gave Stockholm a handful of advanced units and within turns the Songhai sued them for peace. Well done.

However, later I took note of the fact that the Songhai had parked a huge army along Stockholm's border - by now they were up to rocket artillery, et. al. I didn't like the look of this at all, so I contacted the Songhai's neighbor Persia and asked what it would take for them to start a war with Songhai. "70 gold" was the answer. Really?, I thought, 70 gold? To quote Sarah Palin: you betcha.

I didn't expect much for my 70 gold. Just a minor skirmish to distract the Songhai for a few turns would have been worth twice that. I was amazed when a few turns later Persia nuked the Songhai's entire western frontier, 3 cities north to south getting The Bomb and turning the entire swath of the country into glowing orange dust. Stockholm asked, "That stuff doesn't drift in the wind, does it?", to which we assured them, "Never."

Getting a taste for this sort of proxy-mongering (tm) at the exact moment that the world's tyrants started going crazy trying to conquer city-states, I ended up funding resistances against the Russians (two) and Babylon (one), all of which failed when the aggressors hit so fast and hard that the city-state was conquered before the bulk of my gifted units ever arrived. (You don't get a refund, I found out the hard way).

Japan wasn't so lucky. They invaded their neighboring city-state (Lhasa) down by the antarctic circle in a barren, snow covered landscape like something out of John Carpenter's "The Thing". I unleashed a massive, bloody war by supplying huge numbers of Giant Death Robots, which lurched around the Japanese snow-covered countryside getting blasted by jet fighters, anti-aircraft guns and helicopters until they collapsed in heaps of glowing steel. When that was all said and done the Japanese lost two cities. Whereas Ragusa razed all of the cities it conquered, Lhasa kept the Japanese cities, presumably putting the captured Japanese to work improving my robot designs. (Maybe they'd come after me next?). I won the game with a cultural victory a few turns later.

I was never sure if the Japanese GDR's were operating at full health, given the lack of uranium to support them in that city-state. They were falling like flies, that's for sure, and I was keeping Lhasa supplied with Mech Infantry units (which don't require any resources to support) as insurance. In fact it was the Mech Infantries that first broke through and took a Japanese city. Whether that was because they were more effective than the GDR's or just because the GDR's were soaking up all of Japan's firepower I won't ever know.

 

[leckig]

wow, just WOW!

 

[Raethwyn]

proxy-mongering (tm)

Haha, I like it.

 

[Firvulag]

here is a sneaky way: bribe a CIV to start a war with a CS and then give bunch of troops to that CS. I need to try that sometimes.

That's my kind of evil

 

[Buccaneer]

I think I got to learn to extend games well into the modern era and see what war is like. Usually my games end before anyone has much modern units.

 

[MadDjinn]

CS allies can be quite effective in proxy-wars if they are actually close to the AIs borders. There seems to be a distance factor where the CSs just won't go past to hit their 'permanent enemy'.

The good news is that if you find one that will keep the cities (haven't figured out which CS attributes help this, or if it's resource location based) then they will incorporate that new city into the distance factor.

This can be a great way to get things done in a continents/islands game. Let the CS take the heat with your units for some time and eventually take out some cities. Then follow up with your own invasion forces to capture strategic cities.

- CSs have to be really close for them to try to go after capitals, so it'll depend on the game to see if you can use them for a domination victory.

As per types of units to give them: Infantry should be the primary force since those units get both offense and defense bonuses. Anything that gets negative defense, or no defense, will just get run over due to being used badly.

AA units can be good if the enemy has fighters. The auto-defense AA will help run down the enemy fighters since all AI use fighters purely for attacking units/cities. Never for CAP and they never heal them. (bad coding there since it should be easy to code in a heal when the unit hits 5 health or less)

 

[Revoran]

City States will not use nukes, don't bother gifting nukes. As for the rest, I actually don't know sorry.

 

[Double A]

What about cruiser missiles?