Favorite City States?

[Mustakrakish]

Toronto and Carthage are my buddies.

 

[camomilk]

Valletta: Allows the suzerain to consume faith to purchase urban centers and military buildings in your city. Reduces faith prices.

This is my favorite - I love founding a new city and immediately buying monument, granary, water mill with just faith.

 

[Promethian]

Favorite type of city state is commercial. Commercial district is the most built district for me and no matter what strategy I am going for I will have a commercial district in every city. The bonus coin thus really adds up and you can use it to get almost everything.

Favorite suzerain bonus is Carthage. Encampments giving trade routes is the highest potential economic boost you can get from a Suzerain. Note that this analysis assumes reliability of keeping the Suzerain bonus.
2nd favorite suzerain bonus is Valetta. It is behind Carthage for one major reason. Its only useful for faith strategies. If you are running a faith strategy it is stronger than Carthage. It also has the benefit that losing suzerain for a little while doesn't have the potential to have disastrous consequences for your economy.

Honorable mentions:
Zanzibar, good type and 2 extra unique luxuries is universally useful.
Stockholm, great person points for the win. Again universally useful no matter what your strategy it means more merchants and engineers at the least.
Hattusa, Being ensured to be able to upgrade your units is important.

 

[Manifold]

Carthage because of the extra trader per barracks!

 

[Onii-chan]

I'd say Stockholm and Toronto are probably the best all-round

Though if you're playing on an island map then Nan Madol is absolutely godly

 

[Balkans]

Bonuses are really crazy on some, i really like to play the game of being suzerain as much as i possibly can, it's like mini game inside civilization vi, .

 

[Zenstrive]

Toronto for regional buildings expanded influence.
Stockholm for bonus great people points

 

[DonPato]

Valletta: Allows the suzerain to consume faith to purchase urban centers and military buildings in your city. Reduces faith prices.

This is my favorite - I love founding a new city and immediately buying monument, granary, water mill with just faith.

ooooooooooooh, that's why I had the option to faith purchase those buildings in my current game... I was so confused when I saw that.

 

[CoconutTank]

Hmmm... So far I think I'm the only person to have mentioned Kabul, which I think is kind of weird since 2x experience is quite good.

I don't think anyone mentioned Preslav; their bonus is +5 str for light and heavy cavalry on hills, but that seems rather specific, and probably not very great.

No mention of Lisbon either, though I think that has more to do with AI not taking the sea very seriously and sea barbs being rather rare.

I was somewhat expecting folks to mention Seoul or Vilnius. It's not as crazy as Civ5 Poland, but free random Eureka or Inspiration per era seems like a pretty nice deal.

 

[Zenstrive]

eurekas or inspirations are cheap, not worth spending 3+ envoys

 

[Promethian]

Hmmm... So far I think I'm the only person to have mentioned Kabul, which I think is kind of weird since 2x experience is quite good.

I don't think anyone mentioned Preslav; their bonus is +5 str for light and heavy cavalry on hills, but that seems rather specific, and probably not very great.

No mention of Lisbon either, though I think that has more to do with AI not taking the sea very seriously and sea barbs being rather rare.

I was somewhat expecting folks to mention Seoul or Vilnius. It's not as crazy as Civ5 Poland, but free random Eureka or Inspiration per era seems like a pretty nice deal.

It is one Eureka. If you keep Suzerain is at most what 5 over the course of an entire game? And the likelihood that its lands on a tech that you were get the Eureka for anyways? Pretty darn high. The only suzerain bonus weaker than 1 Eureka per era is Jerusalem. You will have better places to put your envoys.

 

[RandV]

I'm impartial to Valetta because I've gotten them pretty much every game (system specs force me to play on small maps) and I always get religion. Pretty amazing when you get a good 200-300+ faith output going.

 

[Onii-chan]

I was somewhat expecting folks to mention Seoul or Vilnius. It's not as crazy as Civ5 Poland, but free random Eureka or Inspiration per era seems like a pretty nice deal.

Seoul or Vilnius only sound nice on paper, in practice they're really weak. Getting a free boost per era is for one quite hard to time since it requires you to be the suzerain the exact second you advance to the next era, so if there's competition over the city state (I.E: you and another civ keep trading suzerain status of it), then it literally only matters in those key moments. Being suzerain of the city state at any other point gives nothing

More importantly though, getting a free eureka or inspiration really isn't very impressive. That's like what, 3-4 turns worth of science/culture on standard speed? That's basically nothing. Not to mention that it's random and it's very likely that you would've been able to get the boost normally anyway in which case relatively speaking it didn't give you any advantage whatsoever. Compared to what you could be spending your enjoys for instead, using them to compete over Seoul or Vilnius is a huge waste of resources if you ask me

 

[elitetroops]

More importantly though, getting a free eureka or inspiration really isn't very impressive. That's like what, 3-4 turns worth of science/culture on standard speed? That's basically nothing.

3-4 turns of teching equals 20-27 turns of Geneva suzerain bonus. That's not nothing.

I don't like the randomness of Seoul and Vilnius, but they are far from the worst city states. Especially Seoul, since it also boosts your campuses. It's not that I would spend lots of envoys to fight for them, but if I meet either one early for a free envoy and get the second envoy from an easy quest, then I will for sure send a third there pretty soon. Possibly before entering the classical era. Depends of course on what other city states are around. Becoming suzerain of Vilnius in the ancient era would actually be quite good, since most classical civics require investments I wouldn't like to do at that time.

 

[Onii-chan]

3-4 turns of teching equals 20-27 turns of Geneva suzerain bonus. That's not nothing.

Difference is Geneva's 15% science increase is to the part of every tech which you have to actually research manually every time, whereas Seoul's is just the Eureka which you could be getting anyway. And also Geneva's is consistently good every single turn you have it whereas Seoul's is only useful for a split second where you just have to hope that no one else comes in and steals it just when you're about to hit the next era. That, combined with the randomness of what you actually get boosted makes it rather inconsistent. Though I don't think you should be comparing it directly to Geneva in the first place since there are even better city states out there you could be sending your envoys to over either of these

Though yes of course getting 6 envoys just for the regular bonuses is always a good idea, but that's not really the point here

 

[kaspergm]

Toronto is downright broken for pretty obvious reasons.

Yerevan means the easiest religious victory ever. Just spam Apostles with proselytizer ability and wipe out all other religions.

Kumas will be your best friend if meeting them early and playing Kongo.

 

[elitetroops]

And also Geneva's is consistently good every single turn you have it

It's only good every single turn you are at peace. This would depend on your playstyle, but for me this pretty much means no Geneva bonus in the BC years. In the meantime Seoul could have earned me 4 random eurekas. Sure they are random, they might have been useful, or not. But from a quick glance at the tech tree I'd say in most eras 1/2 to 2/3 of the eurekas require me to do something I usually only do for the sake of the eureka, if I do it at all (not counting the techs whose eureka I usually have completed before entering the era). So most likely there will have been some benefit from the suzerain bonus. A lot of other city states would have been completely useless during this time.

Again, I'm not saying they are the best or even particularly great. Just saying they are much better than people give them credit for and far from the worst.

 

[Frostburn]

Carthage is my favoirte, Usually building encampment districts anyway, more trade routes is great. So is early unit production from being a military CS.

Honorable Mentions: Toronto, Amsterdam, Zanzibar, and Buenos Aires.

 

[Bigv32]

If you give a German Player access to Toronto, it's gg (heck any human player with Toronto).

The reason it is powerful is obvious but let's go through some number. With the standard +6 range on indy districts, you can get 4-6 cities if you get lucky with placement possiblities and are trying to ics. With +9 range (total) and the same strategy, you could get 10+ cities easily, and that is just looking at one district and not the rest of the overlap. The amount of extra hammers is rediculous. +1 would be a good reward that still would cause the player to think elsewhere, +2 would be great and would lead to a player still pursuing Toronto most of the time, +3 is broken (it simply is) for the extra amount of room that gives you.

Carthage would be next is its flexibility and borderline OPness of internal trade routes.

Any financial cs because commercial districts are probably the second most used districts after indy.

If you are playing like I do at times to just get to the end game and roleplay somewhat, hong kong is awesome because you can just spam city projects for massive amounts of gp.

 

[FaerunPlayer]

Industrial city state bonus seems to apply to industrial zones under construction but this does not seem to be true for other districts.
i.e. I start an industrial zone but have not completed it and instead start some other district. In the screen capture below I have +5 production towards buildings from an uncompleted industrial zone. I think this is form being suzerain of Brussels and Toronto and having papal primacy while Brussels is of my religion (1.5*2+2=5). meanwhile in the second screen capture the commercial hub does not get any cs bonus although I am suzerain of Zanzibar and it's of my religion.... and I have checked to see if it's just a tool tip error for industrial zone and it seems I do get the bonus.
I be interested to hear if anyone else can confirm this behavior.
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