Roading a City/State

[klail]

Hi, I had a City-State that was in a bottleneck location on the border of my empire (I had cities on all sides, and there were some mountains that made it hard to go around the City-State), so I basically just put roads on 90% of the City/State's tiles to help make it easier to get my units across it with the City/State unit spam. However, while these roads (eventually railroads) didn't cost me anything, I noticed the City/State never built more than 3 units. Which is very odd (this game was at Immortal difficulty, and they usually have quite the army by the information age).

So my question is how does spamming a City/State with roads & railroads affect it?

 

[MisterSaturnine]

No hard evidence, but I don't think building roads or railroads effects the behavior of City-States. Sometimes city-states build a bunch of units, sometimes they only build three - I have seen that particular number of units many times, and it seems to be a standard part of city-state behavior. Maybe the "personality" of city-states, at least in terms of their proclivity towards unit-building, varies from game to game like other Civs do. I am about as far as you can get from an expert in programming though, so take it with a grain of salt.

 

[mintcandy]

Hi, I had a City-State that was in a bottleneck location on the border of my empire (I had cities on all sides, and there were some mountains that made it hard to go around the City-State), so I basically just put roads on 90% of the City/State's tiles to help make it easier to get my units across it with the City/State unit spam. However, while these roads (eventually railroads) didn't cost me anything, I noticed the City/State never built more than 3 units. Which is very odd (this game was at Immortal difficulty, and they usually have quite the army by the information age).

It wasn't terribly clear to me, but what was the primary reason for spamming roads in the bottleneck location the City State occupied?

Was it simply to facilitate the movement of your army from one half of your empire to the other half, or was it more to connect trade routes from one half of your empire to the other half?

I consistently spam roads in City States I am Allies/Friends with for the latter reason, because I don't pay maintenance for roads that aren't in my cultural borders.

I'm leery about doing so with City States I am not at least Friends with because I tend to be at war most of the time, and there's just too much risk that an enemy Civ will ally with a neutral City State I'm trying to build roads through....besides, building roads through neutral City States don't count as trade routes.

 

[klail]

It wasn't terribly clear to me, but what was the primary reason for spamming roads in the bottleneck location the City State occupied?

Was it simply to facilitate the movement of your army from one half of your empire to the other half, or was it more to connect trade routes from one half of your empire to the other half?

It was for both reasons. I wasn't worried about someone taking over the city since if that happened I was just going to take over the city ... it was quite literally in the middle of my expansion path with mountains on either side.

I also had my religion in it so it wasn't that expensive to keep allied and I also liked both the luxe and the culture it provided.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

City States pay maintenance on roads within their borders. So it's conceivable that they didn't have any money left over for unit maintenance after you spammed railroads.