City-States' Gold

[MrWashington]

I have a question that I don't think has been asked.
When you gift gold to city-states, does that gold go directly into their treasury or does it disappear?

Greg gifted 750 gold to a city state in the live stream, which I imagine would give that city-state a significant boost to production/tile buying/etc.

 

[Fin]

I had thought the gold you gifted merely went towards increasing your reputation with the city-state. I'm probably wrong, though.

 

[draxil]

Perhaps it gets embezzled local officials

 

[Alsark]

If I had to guess, it probably disappears, or city-states aren't intelligent enough to utilize it. Keep in mind, the city-states have a very basic AI. This is almost necessary because, otherwise, it would take WAY too long in between turns for all of the city-states to process (by default, there are 2x as many city-states as normal civs in a game). The knowledge of how to spend gold is just one more step for the AI to take.

 

[Polobo]

Who knows; but they better make sure they keep enough of it around so when I first meet them on turn 400 they can give me my 15 gold

 

[chaotoroboto]

If I had to guess, it probably disappears, or city-states aren't intelligent enough to utilize it. Keep in mind, the city-states have a very basic AI. This is almost necessary because, otherwise, it would take WAY too long in between turns for all of the city-states to process (by default, there are 2x as many city-states as normal civs in a game). The knowledge of how to spend gold is just one more step for the AI to take.

Or more directly, I'd be surprised if City States really follow the rules at all. We know they upgrade their armies over time, but it's got to be simpler, and more relevant to the player, to follow a Barbarian style follow-the-leader script on unit upgrades, tile acquisition, unit production, pillage gold, etc. Why hobble them with rules if we can have equally (or more) predictable behavior that makes them more useful and interesting to the actual in-play civs?