Peng Qi
Emperor
Imagine the following scenario:
You are maintaining peace with a powerful rival; neither of you is strong enough to eliminate the other without significant risk of damaging your infrastructure too much and leaving you vulnerable to subsequent attack. Each of you have scooped up city state allies along your shared border to further discourage aggression. The situation is stable, but precarious. The situation goes on like this for some time, until you pass turn only to find out that one of your rival's city state allies, Almaty, has declared war on one of yours, Kuala Lumpur.
This kind of scenario would inject a lot more diplomatic tension into the game. Superpowers funding secret armies inside their smaller allies' borders to fight their wars, or directly intervening in them, happens a lot in real life and is often the catalyst of major wars. It doesn't have to be limited to wars, either; consider that for each kind of city state, different independent actions could be taken, which would also act as a tool to balance the different types of state; Maritimes might more often take actions that cause problems for their great power ally, and Militaristics might take actions that could be less irritating or even helpful. Just off the top of my head:
Maratime States:
1. Send ships to blockade ports of civs they don't like; those civs ask player to rebuke their maritime ally. Player either rebukes the maritime, who backs down and player loses relation points with them, or refuses, getting a diplo hit with the requesting civ and risking that civ going to war with the maritime state.
2. Establish "trade stations;" tile improvements in unclaimed territory that have +1 gold over trade posts. Civs settling the territory don't remove the post and gain a small relations boost with the state.
3. Establish "privateer havens;" function like barbarian camps, except they only produce boats, and those boats never attack the city state or its ally. (Basically hidden nationality units the AI controls.)
4. Declare war on and invade other coastal city states.
Militaristic States:
1. Send out small (2 unit) raiding parties to clear nearby roaming barbarians and camps. If they successfully clear a camp, they give their ally a unit (or if no ally, get a free unit). While at war, the raiding party stops its current activity and tries to pillage enemy tiles.
2. Sometimes build a "training camp" in their territory; a tile improvement which provides no resource boost but gives +1 XP to any unit sitting in it each turn, to a max of 40.
3. Declare war on and invade nearby city states.
Cultural States:
1. Build "minor wonders," buildings only cultural states can build and only one of each per map (maybe one or two such wonders for each age), which provide +
to the controller of the wonder and + to their ally. This would make some cultural states more valuable than others and provide additional incentive to invade city states.
2. Send out explorer units and share their findings with their ally.
As I said, those are just rough ideas off the top of my head, but some of them as you can see provide more reasons to invade city states or more reasons to align with one or avoid aligning with one. The concept of city states is so good but the implementation is so barebones at the moment, which is unfortunate. They really could be the driving force behind a lot of diplomacy and interest with a little work.
You are maintaining peace with a powerful rival; neither of you is strong enough to eliminate the other without significant risk of damaging your infrastructure too much and leaving you vulnerable to subsequent attack. Each of you have scooped up city state allies along your shared border to further discourage aggression. The situation is stable, but precarious. The situation goes on like this for some time, until you pass turn only to find out that one of your rival's city state allies, Almaty, has declared war on one of yours, Kuala Lumpur.
This kind of scenario would inject a lot more diplomatic tension into the game. Superpowers funding secret armies inside their smaller allies' borders to fight their wars, or directly intervening in them, happens a lot in real life and is often the catalyst of major wars. It doesn't have to be limited to wars, either; consider that for each kind of city state, different independent actions could be taken, which would also act as a tool to balance the different types of state; Maritimes might more often take actions that cause problems for their great power ally, and Militaristics might take actions that could be less irritating or even helpful. Just off the top of my head:
Maratime States:
1. Send ships to blockade ports of civs they don't like; those civs ask player to rebuke their maritime ally. Player either rebukes the maritime, who backs down and player loses relation points with them, or refuses, getting a diplo hit with the requesting civ and risking that civ going to war with the maritime state.
2. Establish "trade stations;" tile improvements in unclaimed territory that have +1 gold over trade posts. Civs settling the territory don't remove the post and gain a small relations boost with the state.
3. Establish "privateer havens;" function like barbarian camps, except they only produce boats, and those boats never attack the city state or its ally. (Basically hidden nationality units the AI controls.)
4. Declare war on and invade other coastal city states.
Militaristic States:
1. Send out small (2 unit) raiding parties to clear nearby roaming barbarians and camps. If they successfully clear a camp, they give their ally a unit (or if no ally, get a free unit). While at war, the raiding party stops its current activity and tries to pillage enemy tiles.
2. Sometimes build a "training camp" in their territory; a tile improvement which provides no resource boost but gives +1 XP to any unit sitting in it each turn, to a max of 40.
3. Declare war on and invade nearby city states.
Cultural States:
1. Build "minor wonders," buildings only cultural states can build and only one of each per map (maybe one or two such wonders for each age), which provide +
to the controller of the wonder and + to their ally. This would make some cultural states more valuable than others and provide additional incentive to invade city states.2. Send out explorer units and share their findings with their ally.
As I said, those are just rough ideas off the top of my head, but some of them as you can see provide more reasons to invade city states or more reasons to align with one or avoid aligning with one. The concept of city states is so good but the implementation is so barebones at the moment, which is unfortunate. They really could be the driving force behind a lot of diplomacy and interest with a little work.
