Giving City States Units

[Gath]

Ok, so two circumstances:

Gave City State 1 (who is on my continent), a Hoplight. He deployed it immidiatly.

Gave city state 2 (who is not on my continent, but who I had a carvel sitting next to watching) a knight, but I never saw him use it or deploy it. Where exactly do these troops go to when we give them to the AI?

Anybody know? Is there some kind of transit time? Also, given how much production time it takes to make a unit, they're not very grateful.

 

[Stalker0]

When you gift a unit to a city state and you do it through diplomacy instead of sending it to them directly, it takes 3 turns. It disappears for 3 turns and then appears at their site, irregardless of distance.

Hope that helps.

 

[Gath]

When you gift a unit to a city state and you do it through diplomacy instead of sending it to them directly, it takes 3 turns. It disappears for 3 turns and then appears at their site, irregardless of distance.

Hope that helps.

Ahhh! Thanks. I guess I didn't watch long enough.

 

[Xentropy]

As Stalker said, there's a 3 day transit time (as mentioned by the in-game tooltips).

To your last point, I don't believe the influence gain is the main reason to gift units. It's balanced to make gold a far better option for influence gain. For one thing, if unit gifting gave too much influence, it'd be possible to be perpetually allies with any militaristic City-State after the initial gold expenditure or quest to become allies the first time, by just regifting every unit they gave you. That'd be a little silly.

So why put in unit gifting at all? Diplomatic reasons. There needs to be some way to "secretly" protect a City-State. Without this option, if you had an important ally City-State half a world away and they were attacked by another Civ, you'd have no recourse other than all-out war with the other Civ and manually shipping units halfway around the world for protection. This lets you protect the City-State without going to war to do it. Perhaps after a few years in a stalemate with those tanks you gave them, the Civ in question will be willing to negotiate for peace with the City-State.