[GS] Liberating City States - bug or feature?

[Bee7]

The game mechanics around liberating city states are very strange. If you liberate a city state, it becomes your ally - but all of your troops are kicked out of its borders. Not only that, but the CS now no longer behaves like a CS, and it will flip to the whichever side exerts the greatest loyalty pressure on it.

The positive side is that you can have your cake and eat it - you can liberate the CS, wait for it to flip, and then recapture it, which I am sure wasn't a feature prior to RS. The negative side is that if you liberate a CS within enemy territory, the mechanic that kicks all your troops out neatly spreads them all over the place, which can be inconvenient, if not disastrous, when they end up sandwiched between enemy cities and encampments.

I am sure that this is new behaviour - can anyone confirm it?

 

[MrRadar]

The game mechanics around liberating city states are very strange. If you liberate a city state, it becomes your ally - but all of your troops are kicked out of its borders. Not only that, but the CS now no longer behaves like a CS, and it will flip to the whichever side exerts the greatest loyalty pressure on it.

The positive side is that you can have your cake and eat it - you can liberate the CS, wait for it to flip, and then recapture it, which I am sure wasn't a feature prior to RS. The negative side is that if you liberate a CS within enemy territory, the mechanic that kicks all your troops out neatly spreads them all over the place, which can be inconvenient, if not disastrous, when they end up sandwiched between enemy cities and encampments.

I am sure that this is new behaviour - can anyone confirm it?

Yes, the kicking out of your troops is very annoying, unfounded and most probably is due to a dev oversight, like many other strange things in this game.

I'm not sure about them no longer behaving like a CS and flipping, though. The turn of liberation the UI is not yet updated and does not yet take account of the inherent 20 loyalty for CSs, so it shows an approaching flip. But the next turn the inherent loyalty kicks in and UI updates. Have you seen them to continue losing loyalty and actually flipping? Usually only extremely strong pressure can achieve this on a CS.

 

[Swissy]

Kicking your troops out is just a bad sequencing of events. You capture the CS, liberate it, it establishes borders,expells your units and then awards you the alliance. Most of the bugs in the game are related to the devs not actually playing the game outside of testing fixes for specific bugs. There once was a group of community play testers and bug hunters, but the first thing 2K did when they aquired Firaxis was close that program.

 

[WillowBrook]

The turn of liberation the UI is not yet updated and does not yet take account of the inherent 20 loyalty for CSs, so it shows an approaching flip. But the next turn the inherent loyalty kicks in and UI updates. Have you seen them to continue losing loyalty and actually flipping?

I had a CS in one game that didn't seem to get that extra loyalty applied for some reason, not sure if it was a bug as the game was highly modded. But, yes, that extra turn for the loyalty to appear throws me sometimes.

Kicking your troops out is just a bad sequencing of events. You capture the CS, liberate it, it establishes borders,expells your units and then awards you the alliance.

Yes, really annoying sometimes, and I can't see any good reason for the current ordering.

 

[universecreep]

Most of the bugs in the game are related to the devs not actually playing the game outside of testing fixes for specific bugs. There once was a group of community play testers and bug hunters, but the first thing 2K did when they aquired Firaxis was close that program.

That's a great point.

There are a myriad of things that just aren't fun (diplomacy - it works but is boring, world congress - inconsequential voting options other than for diplomatic points) or are frustrating (the troop bug described above, the repeated silly demands for gold from the weakest civ in the game, the endless denouncements repeated every 30 turns) that someone who is just looking for bugs would never consider.

They need the play testers to actually tell them what is fun and what isn't rather than just looking for bugs. The loss of that group may have been beginning of the downfall for Civ.

I'd never considered that!

 

[criZp]

Agree, game would be better if AI-demands and congress in its current state was removed. And pulling up the diplo screen when somebody denounce you for the first time is OK, but they don't need to pull it up every time when you are just getting repeat-denounced.

 

[Bee7]

I'm not sure about them no longer behaving like a CS and flipping, though. The turn of liberation the UI is not yet updated and does not yet take account of the inherent 20 loyalty for CSs, so it shows an approaching flip. But the next turn the inherent loyalty kicks in and UI updates. Have you seen them to continue losing loyalty and actually flipping? Usually only extremely strong pressure can achieve this on a CS.

The delay was because I was trying to check it out, but the only saves I have are well before and well after the incident. But you are correct - I didn't actually see this particular CS flip, I just saw the number of turns to flipping come up and had my troops dumped outside the borders as usual. So I will check it out in another game. It certainly threw me.

I totally agree with all the other comments about the diplomacy mechanic - it is so predictable that it can be gamed and a diplo victory is no fun because of it. If more testing had been done, someone would also have noticed that the MacOS version crashes every. single. time. a game is loaded from a save while another game is in play. This alone made checking out the CS bug tedious, because I was having to restart Civ every time to avoid the crash. For what they charge for the game, having so many major bugs is not impressive.

 

[Pietato]

Sometimes it takes more than 1 turn for the CS innate loyalty to kick in, after liberation. I have no idea why.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I had a recent game where I liberated two city states and they did not appear in the list anymore.
I guess it was a bug. I asked about it in questions and answers but no reply.
The next game I played I did not see that problem when I liberated a CS so it only happened once so far to me.
Must of been a bug.

I don't like how the CS throws your troops out of the borders either so I try to get all my troops out before I take it over if possible.

 

[Bee7]

Agree, game would be better if AI-demands and congress in its current state was removed. And pulling up the diplo screen when somebody denounce you for the first time is OK, but they don't need to pull it up every time when you are just getting repeat-denounced.

Congress is so predictable that not only the motions, but the votes, go the same way most of the time. However, the single most annoying feature of it is all the message after you have voted, plus the totally unnecessary screen refresh before the outcome is announced. Call me picky, but for some reason it annoys me to bits that the (usually irrelevant) result isn’t delivered automatically after I have voted and I have clicked OK once.