Gifting junk cities. Is there a downside?

[a_cat]

I just completed a game (Peter/Noble/Inland Sea/SR Vic) in which several times I built a city deep in an ally's territory in a poor location surrounded by established cultural borders, and on the same turn gifted it to a hostile civilization either to end a war or in one case just to improve relations with the strong guy on the block. In all cases, this achieved the desired result for me at seemingly only the cost of a settler, and in return, the enemy civ inherited additional maintenance costs and a city that could never conceivably grow past 3 or 4.

This seems like ... (don't want to say bug)... a loophole? After all, no civ in it’s right algorithm would have built one of those worthless cities, yet they could barely contain themselves when I placed the offer on the bargaining table. Maybe "the computer" is more discriminating in the higher difficulties when it comes to deals like this?

 

[Swiss Bezerker]

Good point cat.I think the new maintenance is a bit flawed

BTW, welcome to the civ fanatics forums Happy posting!

 

[chewbaccad]

I've done this before, with far more evil implications!! I had a built a city at the very top of my empire (about as far away from any enemy as you could possibly get) on a big ice sheet just to get the fur and iron resources early in the game (a waste, I know, but I had no other source of iron). It never grew past 4, and I never really improved it much because it was a placeholder (maybe a temple/courthouse and one or two other buildings). Later in the game, after capturing another source of iron (useless for units, but needed for Ironworks) and with fur nearly rendered obsolete, I gifted the city to another civ for a couple technolgies. With the AI unable to do much with it (but happy to have an extra iron for some reason), I was hoping that the city would revert to me culturally since it was really only surrounded by my influence. Plus, the AI was at war with another faction who had units nearby (open borders), and they immediately made a beeline for it. They of course captured it, had a few revolts, and it was mine again several years down the road. Not that I wanted it, it was just a funny one-in-a-million set of circumstances that I wanted to see if it would work.

... I love it when a plan comes together

 

[CivCorpse]

I would love to have a city deep in someone's terrotory. Regardless of how small it remained. As long as I could keep it from flipping to it's neighbors. The reason for this is one word "airports". If you have that deep city far far away, you stay friendly with the surrounding nation/nations until it is their turn to be "liberated" at which point you drop 1 unit per turn from 10 of your cities with airports. do this for about 10 turns and you have 100 units already in the deepest and most likely least defended part of their empire. The only real drawback to having this outpost city is that you have to keep it your for a very very long time.

 

[Eastian]

Well, if it's a small city (say size 1 or 2) with a big garrison and luxury resources available, it'll probably won't flip. Yet, it's hard to be able to colonize a spot deep into the enemy's territory, early enough that the spot is unocuppied and your settler can actually get there (either not enough enemy's culture spread or open borders).

 

[Tall German Joe]

Yeah, I was thinking about this too. The AI seems to love building cities in the middle of icefields in the modern era to simply get 1 resource. So whats to stop you from loading up a transport with dozens of settlers, shipping it off to antarctica, and then totally wrecking the AI tech leader's economy by gifting it dozens of level 1 igloo cities that it has to spend hundereds of gold per turn to upkeep?

 

[Geostrophic]

After all, no civ in it’s right algorithm would have built one of those worthless cities

most of the games I've played the AI builds a ton of junk cities once the map get sufficiently cluttered. there's been several times where I've seen them put a town in the middle of a glacier, on one free space completely surrounded by an enemy civ and deep in the jungle, on an island with no shields other than the defaults the cities give you, etc. they really don't rest until every last square inch of land has been claimed.

 

[Zurai]

The cities aren't neccesarily junk, though, especially fishing villages which will almost always return more money than they cost.

 

[Amourek]

It's better to build a useless city deep in your own territory (say in the middle of a desert) and gift it. Then wait for it to flip back to you and gift it again.

 

[ccubed]

This sounds kind of exploitable when battling AIs. I had an old save that I'd abandoned because I didn't feel it was winnable, so I went back to it and made a little city right in between two of my biggest culture cities. They were far enough apart that even with the initial city foundation spread, there were no overlapping of workable tiles. I then gifted it to a nearby civ that I knew was going to attack me in a few turns. The gift halted them for awhile, long enough to build up better forces, and by the time they attacked the city had already flipped back. At the end of the war, since they were quite ahead of me technologically and with regards to troops, I gave the city back to them to sue for peace when I wouldn't normally have had any hope of gaining a cease fire.

It seems that if you actually planned this out, you could arrange cities in kind of a triangular spread with a no-man's land in the middle used exclusively for dumpable gift cities. I'm sure you could gain techs, money, or possibly even convince other civs to war on your enemies (not sure if all of these are actually available) with junk cities that will eventually return to your fold, or at worst require a single warrior to crush in times of war.

Of course, you don't want to do this later in the game when Airports become available, since you wouldn't like some Modern Armor or a Gunship suddenly showing up next to your capital.