City States limit my expansion.

[oawiefga]

My problem with city states is that it always seems that my start location is surrounded by them. So that when I am scoping out my second city location the nearest best 5 or 6 locations are already taken by city states. This really puts a damper on my expansion.

Further it seems that City States always crowd me more than they do the AI Civ's. I know it sounds crazy paranoid. This may be partly due to me playing mostly pangaea and restarting until I get a non coastal start.

I am trying to think of some work around. Either tweaking some of the settings in global_defines.xml like minor_civ_food_requirement. Or changing the ratio of city states to civs from 2 to 1.5 are a similar number.

I am looking for suggestions from the community members.

 

[ChrisTheMean]

In most of my games, I add two AI players and take out 4 CSs. This seems to balance the CS lovers (Siam, Greece) and make diplo wins harder. Sometimes CSs will still be in a place you want to settle, but it can make them act as a buffer between you and other civs (less coveting).

 

[AntiLegend]

you could always just conquer them. especially when it comes to military ones, i don't feel too bad about doing it. has the nice side effect of giving your troops some exp and bringing you a little closer to the next general.

what i also like to do is building the louvre and culture bomb the city states to get some of their tiles. but of course that's very situational and hardly a "standard" method of dealing with greedy city states.

 

[GfxJG]

You could also just disable them completely. Also kills Greece and Siam.

 

[Yzman]

In advanced setup you can change the number of city states. No reason to mod the game.

 

[joncnunn]

Re-start if you feel too hemed in by city states; which you'd find out really early on.

But I also note that you don't really need to build many cities at all in Civ 5. In my current game (Earth large map, playing the Arabs but started in Thailand), I used the 3 CS near me as my peaceful expansion border. I just built 4 cities besides the capital to fill in rest of Southeast Asia; basically in order Laos, Southern China, Singapore, and Borneo.) The CS's in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Burma on the mainland & Java in the Pacific made nice buffers.

My problem with city states is that it always seems that my start location is surrounded by them. So that when I am scoping out my second city location the nearest best 5 or 6 locations are already taken by city states. This really puts a damper on my expansion.

Further it seems that City States always crowd me more than they do the AI Civ's. I know it sounds crazy paranoid. This may be partly due to me playing mostly pangaea and restarting until I get a non coastal start.

I am trying to think of some work around. Either tweaking some of the settings in global_defines.xml like minor_civ_food_requirement. Or changing the ratio of city states to civs from 2 to 1.5 are a similar number.

I am looking for suggestions from the community members.