Using your gold

[yanner39]

I won a diplo victory the other day and my gold was used to maintain my allies with my city states.

When going for one of the other types of victory, what is the optimal number of city states to have as allies? I assume have one maratime, one cultural and one militaristic would be important, but at what point do you think the gold is better spent in military or science buildings or culture building?

Would you look at the luxury resources they are providing and not go for duplicates? Maybe it depends on the VC? For a domination win, you'd like a few more militaristic CS for the units they provide. A science win, food is king so more maratime cities. You can ignore the others however.

I just wonder what a good number is to have as allies.

 

[ArbogLi]

Well, the maritimes I don't like too much, I prefer (depending of my gameplay) militaristic or culturals. If you see that you are gonna have a lot of battles, militaristics city states are very usefull with their gifts and if you see that you will be easy and don't need a big military streng, culture city states are ok to earn culture point for new policies. At the end it depends of the strategy you wanna develop.

About the duplicates resources, remember that you always can sell to another civilization for money, strategic resourcer or gold.

 

[yanner39]

Well, the maritimes I don't like too much, I prefer (depending of my gameplay) militaristic or culturals. If you see that you are gonna have a lot of battles, militaristics city states are very usefull with their gifts and if you see that you will be easy and don't need a big military streng, culture city states are ok to earn culture point for new policies. At the end it depends of the strategy you wanna develop.

About the duplicates resources, remember that you always can sell to another civilization for money, strategic resourcer or gold.

I'm surprised to read this. For me, maritimes are the best simply because population for me is king. I mean, the faster your cities grow, the higher your beaker rate and the more pops you have working trade posts, hence the more gold you have to buy an army.

Your points are well taken. I was just wondering is someone had crunch numbers in terms of a breakeven point where investing in City-states is not as good as keeping your gold for buildings or military. For a diplo victory, the B/E point is when you have enough CS for the votes.

 

[ArbogLi]

I know... I must be the unique one over here that think this, but I didn't use it a lot... maybe I still need to discover their advantages

 

[milk steak]

All of them.

 

[King Jason]

In my current game I'm making enough GPT to maintain both allies, purchase buildings, and upgrade military. For units specifically, I build, never buy. I have Big Ben and Commerce policies to reduce my buying costs on buildings to the point where my GPT is enough to buy most buildings in a couple of turns, beating most of my cities production rates.

I still have production cities though, for wonders and units, and usually still build buildings there, opting to use my cash on cities that have crap production rates, like my all Jungle/tp city that has a measly 4 production (but is producing close to 150 science).

Also, I have patronage too. I find city states invaluable. With a slew of maritime ones, before my economy got to the point where I could buy everything, in above production poor cities like that jungle one, I could turn all of my citizens into +1 hammer workers to produce any buildings I wanted. With rationalism those workers give 2 science too. I can't count how many times I used Maritime food to run Unemployed citizens to boost production in a cities when it mattered.

Plus, in cities with hills it's even better, cause all of my 7 citizens in one city are working nothing but hills, producing zero food... yet the city is still breaking even. Maritime states can fuel your production cities from afar. It's glorious.

 

[DrwHem]

i usualy save my cash to buy tiles cause the game does it too slowly for me when i play marathon games.