Protecting City States

You can protect CS by surrounding the CS city center with your own units. This assumes you are not at war with the attacking AI and have good relations with that AI.
 
Yeah, I pull that trick all the time, too. This instance, though, I don't have enough land units in the vicinity. He's about to capture one of the two city states he's roughing up, so I'm building up forces to smack him back down.
 
Yes, this has become prevalent with R&F. I suspect the addition of emergencies necessitated a change that causes AI civs to be more aggressive against CSs, thus triggering this newly added aspect of the game (they added a feature and want to show it off). Personally, I am still evaluating and trying to decide how I feel about it. While I enjoy playing the CS/envoy game and hate loosing them, I have also enjoyed the emergencies quite a bit.

Several ideas have been floated to address/mitigate this, but none of them satisfactory, in my opinion. Until we come up with a good solution, there are a couple of mods out there that strengthen CSs by giving them walls and/or additional units.
 
Protectorate wars. They work very well, granted, it's not the perfect solution (it will come in the form of a diplomatic feature and/or a global diplomacy body), but helps as of now... just be careful not to "scope creep" the PW, or else it backfires...
 
I feel you; the ability to demand the cessation of hostilities is much needed, especially if you're friendly/allied with the civ in question and they won't leave your tributaries alone. It would be nice if that could lead to the dissolution of an alliance and enable an immediate protectorate war, if you really want to do that.

Then again, if I wanted my alliances to constantly be in tatters, I'd just play Total War.
 
It would be great if "make peace with ..." was one of the menu of trade options (which would make it also eligible for the Demand options)

I recall it was available in Civ V (or was it Civ IV?)

Maybe the AI is too stupid to value that request property, and it's too easy to abuse?
 
If only we could gift units to city states we could fight proxy wars.
 
Call me cynical, but the increase in AI aggressiveness towards city-states that happened with R&F was such a blatant attempt to create more Emergencies. I find Emergencies to be R&F's weakest feature: either it's free gold for the player, since the AI rarely participates, or the emergency gets declined if (for example) I've been asked to liberate a city on the other side of the map and my units aren't anywhere close.

Agree with above posters that the "make peace with..." diplomacy function would greatly help with this. Make it expensive, sure, but at least give me the option to buy off an AI to stop them taking a friendly city-state without having to go to war.

Also, while city-states seem to be rubbish at defending themselves, they are frighteningly good at wiping other city-states off the map, as I've found to my cost...

"OK, time to go liberate Auckland... wait... where's Auckland? Valletta, what did you do?!" :lol:
 
Also, while city-states seem to be rubbish at defending themselves, they are frighteningly good at wiping other city-states off the map, as I've found to my cost..

Would be nice if a city is conquered by a city state that you're the suzerain of that it's treated as if you conquered it.
 
Protectorate wars. They work very well, granted, it's not the perfect solution (it will come in the form of a diplomatic feature and/or a global diplomacy body), but helps as of now... just be careful not to "scope creep" the PW, or else it backfires...

It's ridiculous that Protectorate wars are available in the Renaissance. It should be Early Empire. The Peloponnesian War was started as a protectorate war.
 
It would be great if "make peace with ..." was one of the menu of trade options (which would make it also eligible for the Demand options)

I recall it was available in Civ V (or was it Civ IV?)

Maybe the AI is too stupid to value that request property, and it's too easy to abuse?

Both. Why it's not in civ 6 (yet) given the relative importance of CSs, is a mistery... or not. It will come with the diplo expansion, I am sure. In the meanwhile, as I said, PWs are the temporary tool.
 
Well this is why diplomacy is so poor in this game. They tried to help by making Protectorate War defensive tactics, but this is still too late, and of course I really think allies shouldn't be able to attack your city states.

It's kinda silly how the best tactic is actually to wait for the CS to fall and liberate it. Even with no emergency, you have a good excuse of taking most of the offender's cities.

It also doesn't help the notifications system is complete garbage and besides the war sound that keeps going off anyways, it can be hard to tell who has declared war on what.
 
Can you somehow see in game which AI cities used to be city states? On large maps quite a few city states are occupied very early, I'd like to liberate them, if I only knew which they were... (YNAMP player, so the names don't give that away)
 
Sometimes I quite understand why the AI love to conquer nearby CS. In one of my game Kabul was between me and Rome. Rome declared war on Kabul. I tried to protect Kabul by declaring war on Rome and took their city. Kabul became safe and more and more horseman were produced. I went on to conquer Indonesia but all of a sudden they sent more envoys to Kabul than me and Kabul declared war on me. My army was just fighting far away and the sea of horseman just made me mad. I think I just should have conquerred Kabul to ensure my safety.
 
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