City States

[Jewbat]

I haven't really given it much thought, but I've recently been trying to make better use of CS in my games. However, the price in gold to keep them happy is ridiculous, and usually they ask me to do things that are not within my sphere of influence.

What ways are relatively easy to make/keep CS happy and allied with you? I know it's pretty easy as Alexander, but I tend to play Arabia, and unless it's later in the game when I'm making tons of money from trades to other Civs, I can't keep them anything more than "Friends."

 

[Treso]

Ya, they are very cheap. Just sell your luxuries to the AI for 300gold and buy a CS that gives you another luxury. You profit at least 50gold in the trade.

 

[elthrasher]

Selling your luxuries to buy city-states is always a good plan. Obviously Patronage helps as well.

The main thing is just to have a good income. How? Trading posts. Each trading post you build and work gives you +2 gold per turn. So if you need to generate 250 gold in 30 turns to keep your city-state ally, you need to have 6 gold per turn (and 10 extra gold). That's just three trading posts. The more cities and trading posts you have, the more city-states you can buy. It's not uncommon to have hundreds of gold per turn coming in during the late game. Makes keeping city-states happy really easy. You don't even need Patronage at that point.

 

[Jewbat]

Good points, I just thought of something (mind you I haven't played for about 3 days due to the fact I tend to play only MP with a group of friends) but can you sell resources that Allies give you? If you can, that'd be a great way to pay for them. Ally with them, then sell their resources off to pay for their friendship.

 

[elthrasher]

Good points, I just thought of something (mind you I haven't played for about 3 days due to the fact I tend to play only MP with a group of friends) but can you sell resources that Allies give you? If you can, that'd be a great way to pay for them. Ally with them, then sell their resources off to pay for their friendship.

Nope. You can't sell city-state gifts. Nor can you broker resources purchased from other civs.

 

[Jewbat]

Nope. You can't sell city-state gifts. Nor can you broker resources purchased from other civs.

Drat! That would be such a cool way to pay off CS ally prices.

 

[TheDice]

Good points, I just thought of something (mind you I haven't played for about 3 days due to the fact I tend to play only MP with a group of friends) but can you sell resources that Allies give you? If you can, that'd be a great way to pay for them. Ally with them, then sell their resources off to pay for their friendship.

You can't sell them directly, per se, but you can ally with a CS that has a resource you already posses, and sell your own copy. If your capital has cotton, and a CS you ally does as well, I just sell my cotton to the AI, use the cash to bribe the CS, and you have your resource back + whatever benefit the CS grants.

 

[Alpedar]

It seems that they value your last instance of it more. So sell it first and then reacquire it from ally.

 

[biohazard72]

I love city-states on lower difficulties because you don't/can't do as many RAs and you have extra luxury sale gold for them.

I'll go whole games without city-states on Deity at times when I need max cash for RAs or other things. There I have no time for Patronage policies which have dubious benefit without many city-states.

 

[Michl2602]

Selling your luxuries to buy city-states is always a good plan. Obviously Patronage helps as well.

The main thing is just to have a good income. How? Trading posts. Each trading post you build and work gives you +2 gold per turn. So if you need to generate 250 gold in 30 turns to keep your city-state ally, you need to have 6 gold per turn (and 10 extra gold). That's just three trading posts. The more cities and trading posts you have, the more city-states you can buy. It's not uncommon to have hundreds of gold per turn coming in during the late game. Makes keeping city-states happy really easy. You don't even need Patronage at that point.

Sry, but it is 8 gold/turn and hence 4 trading posts. Or did I miss some point here?

 

[LamaGT]

Sry, but it is 8 gold/turn and hence 4 trading posts. Or did I miss some point here?

i once had 350 GPT with napoleon few cities and no TPs at all, though i was using Balance combined but since it was quite broken the gold income wouldn't change so much with vanilla

 

[elthrasher]

Sry, but it is 8 gold/turn and hence 4 trading posts. Or did I miss some point here?

Some jerk put the 8 near the 6 on my keyboard. It's just two keys over. How am I supposed to type properly when they are that close together?