Are City State Improvements good for Town Spam/In General?

[Leefizzy]

Didn't think too much on it, but the City State Improvements, esp the Monastery in the Exploration age can be bought in towns.
Gold, Science, and Culture (If not Augustus) can't be bought in towns otherwise.

Most of them, excluding the Gold and the Stone Heads, don't have their base associated yield as an adjacency bonus, so you're keeping the 2/5 science from the step pyramid, monastery or megalith going forward, letting you have a leg up on the competition the next age.
Granted, this is all RNG dependent, since you can't count on rolling the right city state every game/age, plus protecting them from the AI or other players once they see the massive gains you're getting from them, in addition to paying gold for each improvement.
Don't forget the Warehouse bonus, since it's just slapping additional gains on top of the main reason why the town is there, mining, farming etc.

 

[evonannoredars]

I think they can absolutely be incredibly powerful, so long as you have enough gold income to build plenty of them

 

[Melkus]

You really have to view this on a case-by-case basis, especially because prices can vary a lot. A stepwell for 800 gold? Not sure.
But Xerxes' silk road bonus (+1 culture + gold per age and improvement / unique building) goes slightly insane when spamming improvements, for instance.

 

[Leefizzy]

You really have to view this on a case-by-case basis, especially because prices can vary a lot. A stepwell for 800 gold? Not sure.
But Xerxes' silk road bonus (+1 culture + gold per age and improvement / unique building) goes slightly insane when spamming improvements, for instance.

Aren't City State improvements 264 gold, what causes it to hit 800 a pop?

 

[Melkus]

Modern age improvements are more expensive. (CivWiki says 300 prod, as comparison: a Pairidaeza costs 30 prod)
The stepwell was generally not the strongest option in my Mughal game (it needs adjacency to food and I had built other improvements on most of my farms already.)

[Edit: it's not a city state improvement, so off-topic from me. My bad.]