Two small questions and one BIG one.

[KevinLancaster]

After playing a CiV game to re-acquaint myself with it after a long hiatus for the Gods and Kings expansion, I had a few questions after finishing it:
1. What does the population graph in the end-game replay indicate? It's obviously not millions of people, so I'm guessing it's all your city populations added up. Can someone confirm this?
2. Does anyone use the Great Merchant for trade missions at all? They don't seem to provide that much influence.

3. Should City-States pay for unit maintenance? I ask this because in real life, smaller states (e.g. Greece, Vietnam, Afghanistan) have been able to hold off much larger ones (Persia, the United States, Russia) from time-to-time (and in the rare case of Greece, conquer the larger state). Although they usually have foreign help, in CiV if you donate units to a city-state they have to be disbanded after a few turns because they can't support them. They can't produce that many units anyway, because they build buildings as well, and if they did produce a huge amount of units and pose a threat to/overrun a major civilization it would make sense historically ("Barbarians" that brought down the Western Roman Empire, Huns, Mongols).

 

[SomeoneLikeHim]

I don't know about the third one but

1. I think it is an estimation of how many people live in your empire. It seems realistic that in the beginning you have 1000 and in the end several millions.

2. I personally always do trade missions. How is 30 influence plus 500(?) gold bad?

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

1 and 3 can be answered by others.

but on the rare occasion that i get a GM, thats all i do with it is the trade mission (unless all my bordered CSs are at war with me). even if the influence isnt huge, the 500g is always worth it.

 

[Callonia]

1. Dunno

2. I have, my great merchants just going to waste and i was making squillions of gold anyways. More interactive to move him all the way there to conduct a trade mission.

3. Its an iffy answer, part of reason why city states dont have a large military is cuz they build infrastructure in their lone city, and then farm the lands instead of cottaging them. Even then, a single city isn't going to support a large military anyways, you pay for having too much military by losing production, and more, gold/sci per turn. I've hit the cap very often as germany in stone age. 10-20 units is about one city i think. I forgot how much exactly. Too interested in skull busting to keep track of it.


so, i'm guessing the best solution would be the empire that's gifting units to the city state pay for temporary upkeep for those units for some XX turns then its his responsiblity. those soldiers gotta eat! Meh, worth a thought.

 

[FeiLing]

Gifting units seems ******** anyway. 1 influence point? Seriously?
I usually just gift them back the crappy unit they gave me (military ones) as they'd otherwise cost me maintenance and that can be much more than what you get for disbanding them in own lands (especially if they are on the other side of the world).

 

[The_Quasar]

Gifting units seems ******** anyway. 1 influence point? Seriously?
I usually just gift them back the crappy unit they gave me (military ones) as they'd otherwise cost me maintenance and that can be much more than what you get for disbanding them in own lands (especially if they are on the other side of the world).

Wonders why you would befriend a Military CS on the other side of the world and gift them back the only thing you get back from them. After all, you'd have had to be friends or allies a good while first, so it's unlikely to be diplomatic, unless you're preventing another civ from allying it, then declaring war on you, in which case it might be useful anyway.

Gifting units is done to prevent that CS getting taken over by another civ, or to give them more firing power against an enemy. I'd still do it for those reasons if I got no influence points.

As for the opening post:
1. I've always thought of it as an estimate, based on city sizes.

2. Yes, I use them most of the time for the 30 points and gold...

3. Personally, I think the CS are about right there at present, they can and do take over other's cities sometimes, as they should do, so I don't believe they should be strengthened or weakened significantly.

 

[ButSam]

1 and 3 can be answered by others.

but on the rare occasion that i get a GM, thats all i do with it is the trade mission (unless all my bordered CSs are at war with me). even if the influence isnt huge, the 500g is always worth it.

500g? I usually get about 1500g by sending them to a futher-away city-state. It's just a few turns extra to get there. As long as the area is somewhat peaceful, this is my preferred tactic.

 

[blackcatatonic]

Similar to others, I always use Great Merchants for trade missions, and try to send them as far away as they can. I find they're very handy when my influence is running low in a particular CS and sending the GM not only tops me back up without my having to spend gold, but actually gives me gold for my trouble. GMs are actually one of my favourite Great People.

I actually think there needs to be more ways to gain influence with CSs - something which I'm very much looking forward to in the expansion. With the quests, I really hate the way that after a while of issuing out the 'kill some barbarians for me'/'find me something'/'build me something'/'get me a resource' type quests, by the Modern era all of the CSs will be asking you to get rid of each other, something I can never be bothered with. The range of different CS missions is one of the things I enjoy most about the early game.

 

[DavidCAD]

I can all but guarentee that the population graph at the end of the game is the total size of your cities - so if you end the game with a size 20 city and two size 6 cities the population graph would show you ending at 32. This has been really obvious in my self imposed OCC games using the Aztecs and a super grow strategy; I end up being #1 in the population demographic (often 100 million citizens) but the population graph at the end of the game show me at ~60 (the size of my city) while civs with many cities have populations of 100 or more, the sum of all their city sizes.