CS Alliances No Longer Worth It?

[PhilBowles]

Pre G&K, a big part of my strategy was to build the largest early game gold pile I could in order to have mass amounts of gold on hand to spend on allying CS when I opened Patronage. The food, resources, culture or units and occasional GPs more than repaid my investments.

Post G&K I've changed my strategy. Now I spend my gold on buildings, units, and upgrades. The why of that is that the CS alliances are, to me, now nearly worthless.

1) Gold now influences CS far less than it did before. In vanilla, a gift of 1000 gold pretty much guaranteed an alliance. It can cost far more than that now.

2) Alliances have become ridiculously fragile. Coups, quests, and religion can now break an alliance into which you'e invested a ton of gold and effort. The quests to be the one to produce the most techs, culture, faith, whatever, in X number of turns can completely blindside you. You will lose either the culture or science quests if they don't fit in with your chosen victory condition.

CS alliances are still a valuable tool. They seem to be the only way to peacefully acquire missing late game strategic resources. Despite that, the fact that an alliance can be broken by something that I am powerless to prevent makes them optional for me.

To me, these changes sadly add more pressure to become a warmonger. The slow generation of Great Prophets or Missionaries combined with the ludicrous one spy-per-age mechanic means that I can't effectively prevent the loss of CS alliances to coups or religion; I'm simply outnumbered by the AI civs. I loaded the initial AutoSave from a game I lost as Carthage and I'm going all-out warmonger this time around to how it changes the outcome.

I'm just finding I tend to ignore CSes more than before in general, which is a pity. It's hard to maintain alliances, but probably too easy to form them and friendships due to the high influence provided by most quests; even the most basic (such as kill a barbarian or offer protection) offers enough to go straight from neutral to friendly. Even when next to an enemy, CS allies seem very passive, while previously they would actively intervene in military conflicts on your behalf.

As for coups, perhaps an allied CS should count as one of your cities for espionage purposes - so that you can station a spy there to perform counterintelligence?

 

[S.K. Ren]

Aesthetics + Papal Primacy(Religion Founder) + Promise of Protection = 45 baseline reputation with all CS. It is still very easy to get alliances, you just need to get the groundwork down so that you only need to pay for 15 reputation and not 60.

 

[binhthuy71]

Aesthetics + Papal Primacy(Religion Founder) + Promise of Protection = 45 baseline reputation with all CS. It is still very easy to get alliances, you just need to get the groundwork down so that you only need to pay for 15 reputation and not 60.

Although the combo you posted will indeed provide a higher baseline, getting Papal Primacy is a tossup because another civ may take it first. It looks to me as though some AI civs have an advantage in generating faith, possibly from turn 1.

 

[dexters]

coups need to be adjusted. See this post and this post from the first impressions thread.

The questing is fine. The reduced gold valuation is the cornerstone change for me. Actually there is another thread I'm reading right now where the OP is complaining they didn't go far enough nerfing gold

So definately IMHO the issue is more coup. 1 coup wiping out years of influence is a bit much even if there's some basis in reality, it wouldn't be too gamey to limit that a little to promote some stability to the CS alliances once spies start to become common place.

 

[Lyoncet]

Although the combo you posted will indeed provide a higher baseline, getting Papal Primacy is a tossup because another civ may take it first. It looks to me as though some AI civs have an advantage in generating faith, possibly from turn 1.

Could be, but I don't think so. If they started out generating faith, there would always be a Pantheon founded turn 10 or earlier (on normal speed), no exception. And then another on turn 15, etc. More likely is the tech and hammer boost the AI gets gives them really early shrines if they chose to do so. The exceptionally quick pantheons could have something to do with random elements that lead to high variance. For example:

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

My advice is-once its stable, download & use Gazebo's City-State Diplomacy mod. Combined with the already diminished importance of Gold in G&K, I reckon this mod-which further diminishes the role of gold in CS Diplomacy, should go down a treat !

Aussie.

 

[binhthuy71]

Could be, but I don't think so. If they started out generating faith, there would always be a Pantheon founded turn 10 or earlier (on normal speed), no exception. And then another on turn 15, etc. More likely is the tech and hammer boost the AI gets gives them really early shrines if they chose to do so. The exceptionally quick pantheons could have something to do with random elements that lead to high variance...

I forgot that the AI starts with Pottery at King and above. Thanks for reminding me.

 

[Peacemongerer]

What kills me about the coups is the way the AI spams them more than their effectiveness. I've seen scenarios like this:
1. Denmark is allies with a CS
2. Carthage starts a coup successfully
3. Denmark launches a coup successfully that SAME TURN
4. Carthage does the same the next turn to get the cs back
5. I rig an election 2 turns later to get within strike range and then spend 1k to get an ally.
6. Somebody launched a coup on me (can't even remember who)

The worst of all three parts... the city state has changed hands 4 times for multiple reasons. I've also had times where FOUR civs launched coups against an ally of mine in the same turn. It was right before a UN vote, so I see why they were desperate, but STILL.

I'd like to see a system like this:
1. All civs have between 0 and 120 influence.
2. Once somebody reaches 60, they become an ally and their influence no longer is subject to dropping below 60.
3. Once a cs has an ally, all other civs reach "locked-out status" and cannot buy favor with gold. Their influence is also capped at 90.
4. If a civ who is locked-out completes a quest and gets a higher influence level than the current ally, they become the new ally.
5. If the ally is over 90 influence, then their new floor for dropping becomes 90 and no amount of questing or gold will allow a locked-out civ to supplant them. This makes alliances early in the game virtually impregnable and worthwhile because they last a long time. Only the rise of espionage will ruin this.
6. Rigging elections in a CS with an ally will work diffrently. First of all, the ally may not interfere with the elections. His influence is fixed. Second, if another party succeeds, his influence goes-up to 60 as friends and all other non-allied civs drop to 0. He then also may launch a coup, but only has the next 10 turns to do so.
7. The odds of the coup succeeding depend on how high past 90 the ally is; 120 makes the odds virtually impossible; 90 makes it 50-50 or so.
8. A successful coup will result in the current ally's party dropping to 60 while the new ally will start at 120. A failed coup will put that civ in -30 territory and also make both election rigging and coups impossible for some time in addition to the dead spy.
9. The ally may plant an agent of his own in the CS to watch for coup attempts just like blocking tech theft. Also, while he cannot rig elections, he may perform damage control and make it so that coup is not even an option.

Makes holding onto allies less about gold and more about playing the espionage game correctly. The decay due to time having a floor means that you don't have to constantly shell-out money to play the city state game, but that doing so is still useful to deter outside incursions.