I usually go in advanced settings and turn the number of city-states down to no more than 2, or none at all. I decided they take all the fun out of the game for me. Too busy giving away all my money to them every other turn just so I can access the resources they're hogging. The default setting certainly puts them everywhere I want to be.
I like the City States, they provide me with too many benefits. Especially the Maritime City States and Cultural City States if I can do something to impress them enough early on in the game. Boost to food and cultural rocks. And China makes it easy to build up enough wealth to buy the loyalty of City States, especially a bunch of Military City States all at once in order to get a few military units to help bolster my army.
I am definitely interested in hearing what's good about them. May give the default setting another try, eventually.
Well, it really depends on the Civilization you like to play.
Siam, China, Greece, Mongols, and Persia in my experience do well with City States.
- Siam gets a 50% boost to Food and Cultural gained from City States
- Greece has a benefit of reduce relationship decay and boost to relationship recovery with City States
- Mongols have an attack bonus against City States
- Persia has a boost to Golden Ages which can fuel cash flow and make it easier to give gold to City States
- China has the Paper Maker which gives +4 gold to the city it was built in and in turn make it easy to have the funds to give gold to City States
And this allows for a diplomatic victory. Or in the case of the Mongols, it allows for capturing of City States and turning them into puppets. Also, with the right policies City States can provide you with boosts to your research, happiness, and generation of Great People. And buying the loyalty of a City State near somebody I plan on going to war with provides a great distraction for me when I start a war. Or a buffer if they declare war on me.
No, you are not. I turn city-states off in every game.
I like to turn the City States down so there are just not quite enough for a diplomacy win just using CSs. They can be useful, but not if they're spread everywhere. It's more fun, IMHO, to make it a bit more of a competition for the better placed ones, and not just have so many on the map that everybody can have as many as they want.
I think they are an integral part of the game, but putting them everywhere somehow weakens it.
It would also be nice to be able to choose in the set-up panel the type of CS you would prefer, i.e. if there should be no maritime CS, more culture CS, equal militaristic and culture but less maritime etc, etc.
I rarely play with city-states.
I hate city-state dependency... They are still so OP forcing you to play ICS to get enough money. IA is so crazy with ICS you have no choice :/
I play with city states purely as they give an extra dimension to play with in a game that is lacking in dimensions. Having said that though i turn off dimplo victory as it's not really a diplo victory and seems quite a cheap win by it's design.
I also turn cs off... to me, the entire concept is pretty lame.
You are not alone man, CSs are more of a nuisance to me, especially in huge maps when the game defaults to 20 or 32; i prefer to fight off other Civs rather than CSs and additionally it sucks that you can't raze a city state since it was a "capital"; not to mention (well this is minor but it stills bother me) that their name is a city while it would be better if it was the name of the state itself (e.g. Switzerland instead of Geneve).
That is a good point. It adds another dimension of play with the City State quests and that like. They basically become pawns of the Nation States. Really it would be nice if they added more quests, kind of like random quest events from IV, to the City States, providing more benefits than what is obtain from having a good relationship with them. And if one could liberated a City State conquered that one has captured it would be a nice feature.Originally Posted by Furball
I enormously like the city-states. I changed diplomatic victory into requiring 50% more votes than default to win however. Otherwise the game always ends when the UN is built.
That problem could be addressed by making it so that in order to get a City State's vote it requires more than being on good terms with them. It might mean having to complete a unique City State request or quest. It could be that a Cultural City State will not vote for a Nation State unless that Civilization has three cities with a cultural value of 10,000 each. Or a Military City State may not vote for a Nation State unless that Civilization has an army within the top 3 ranked armies. Or with a Maritime City State it may request the Nation State to control at least 5 luxury resources of different types.
Added:
And these are just examples that can vary, maybe one Military City State will not grant their vote unless the Civilization has 10 military bases. They might insist that "We need to know you are serious about defense" or something like that.
I just wish that if you didn't finish a CS quest within so many turns, a new quest would be requested. I don't do the destroy another CS one and now the road quest also becomes a dead end. Guess it's Mongols next time and I'll be on those destroy quests ASAP.
Same here. Played only my first games with CS, felt that they were extremelly broken and disapointing, then never played with them again.
Reggarding the Civs that have UA related to CS, I think their UAs so lamme comparing with their UU or UB that I don't see an issue, except perharps Siam, but it has an overpowered UA when playing with CS and the most overpowered UU of the game, imo, so I also see no problem playing it with no UA. The AI also doesn't, as Siam always kick ass in my games without CS.
I really, really like this idea a lot. I like City-States, but their requests as they stand right now are pretty bland and uninteresting and unfocused. For not having amibitions on ruling the world they sure are interested in blowing one another up.
I find it fun to have the city states.
Allied city states make for nice buffer zones and if a "friendly" nation is bugging you it's possible to run a proxy war by giving a city states lots of units and have them fight for you. If it's taking place at your doorstep then be ready to move in a build cities where the city states have burned down "friendly" cities and if it's far away it's a magic way to have units teleport across the world.
I do find the food delivery from the maritime states to be very powerful and it would be better if they delivered like 3-5 food units which you could then distribute freely. More realistic that way and it would mean the benefit from a city ally would be less significant for a big nation which also makes sense.
Well, I like the idea of city states, but usually I simply cannot afford to make friends with them. I always spend my money for research agreements (to stay up to date in technology) and the rest of my money I need to upgrade my military. Even when I'm lucky and I have let's say 1000 gold more than I need, I don't give it to a CS, because I know after a few turns I again won't be able to pay the CS. Maybe I'm always poor because I'm playing the wrong way, but I guess the AI is just able to pay all those CS because it is cheating/has not to pay for its military.
I have put City Stats to ZERO and found the game so much more fun. It is an actual Civ game. I put City States in my last game on to see if anything changed with the patch, and it seems a bit better for some reason, I can't put my finger on. But I think the game is more better with CS off.
I like the idea behind City-States, but the implementation just feels wrong. Especially with the Culture Flipping no longer in Civ 5, City-States just get in the way for me. There's no way to absorb them into your empire unless you conquer them, which has never been my forte with Civ games.
TL;DR: BRING BACK CULTURAL WARFARE!!!!
I agree I loved culture flipping. I will have to get myself the complete Civ IV. I only ever played the original.
The way I see it, a city-state that's a long-term ally is sort of absorbed as it is. Maybe there should be an absorbtion factor to strengthen alliances - if they are already allied, or maybe at least friends, slow down loss of influence (maybe go as far as to halt it, or increase influence if currently friends) based on amount of border shared. Could be too powerful, but would be kinda realistic. Maybe modulate the effect based of personality of the city-state.
By absorbed, I mean it becomes a city in your empire, maybe with a Capitol Building or some other pseudo-Unique building that takes the place of their palace, providing some bonus culture/gold/happiness(?), and your empire getting their entire Science, Gold, and Culture.
As it stands now, City-States are pretty much just free food and culture for your empire until you run out of gold at the end of the Renaissance.
I don't run out of gold then... and it feels more real to have them be distinct, rather than absorbed into a homogeneous mass.
No,you'r enot alone. I've been turning them of for a while, too. I hate when a city-state occupies someplace that ruins my nice, symmetrical pre-planed city layout.
As much as I would love to see that, the problem is how they established obtaining territory in Civ V. That is, you can buy it now with gold. That and strategic resources that could be loss in hexes flipping from one owner to another. This can really cause major problems with units suddenly fighting at half this strength.
However, I think it should be possible. Maybe have a cultural influence meter in cities near different Empires. Basically, if one Civilization builds a city away from this main Empire near a city with a powerful cultural influence that small city begins to be influence by the powerful culture of the other city. Once the meter is filled the city has a chance of revolting and flipping to control of the other Civilization.
This can be warded off by building a lot of cultural influence in the small city or many happiness buildings. Just a random thought on how to handle this. I am sure it needs lots of refinement.
Or, a diplomatic option, at least with City-States. If your influence is high enough, AND, if you own/control enough hexes around them (especially if they're completely surrounded by your territory), they should be very willing to accept a Treaty of Annexation, or whatever, to join your empire.
I like city states
Yes I tunr them off in almost every game unless I feel like I wana give them another shot. I normally all ways play Huge marathon Island or pangea maps with every civ and no city states. If I do use CS's I will play with a slightly more civ heavy game, changing around 6 of the city states into civs.
I like City States. Early I try to pick up a couple of the maritime one to get food production and then I turn my cities to production (hammer) preference so they build faster.
Then in the middle I try to pick up a couple of military ones to produce units for me, it lets me concentrate on building. If I don't want the units I sell them off. You don't get much but it adds up. Then maybe culture cities if I need too.
The city-state social policy branch can give you some great bonuses with science and great people.
I turn them off. They're just a waste of system resources. It does strip another layer of functionility from the game. And i originally liked the CS inclusion, but i've now turned completely against them.
Culture flipping would be awesome. Perhaps one of the only Civ4 features i would have returned.
Can't speak to Civ IV, but Civ Rev allowed both gold and culture to grab up tiles, and that game had culture-flipping.
However, it seems to be a very conscious design decision to not have culture-flipping. Look at the great artist's rather puny culture bomb for evidence of that.
Just played my first game with no city states and it was interesting. I definitely noticed the difference, particularly the slow city growth and culture gain. I also did a lot more RA's since I wasn't dumping money into CS's.
I liked the impact it had on Diplomacy. Obviously the Diplo Victory wasn't an option, but more particularly I didn't end up having friction and trade disputes with other civs because we were "competing for the same CS" or I was "getting too friendly with someone in their sphere of influence." I'm not necessarily saying that the way to fix diplomacy is through CS's, but I think the presence of CS's is not helping the state of diplomacy in the game as a whole.
I wonder what impact there would be to making it so more than one civ can be "Ally" to a CS? It should eliminate diplomacy friction between civs due to both of them being Ally. Also, it allows their benefits to be used by more then one civ, which is important because frequently the civ that is wealthiest early and starts to build CS alliances just starts to increase their lead and runaway from everyone as their cities grow faster and their culture racks up. If you allow'd multiple Allies though, then the 2nd/3rd/etc place civs could still get the same benefits and keep pace. This might even be something that would increase diplomatic relations, as in "I see we are both allies to Budapest" (as a positive). We could certainly use a for more things in the game that have positive impacts on relations since everything seems to just erode into denouncements and war now.
As to wars and Diplo victory- fairly simple. In wars, if two civs who were both allied to the same city state go to war with each other, the CS just stays out of the war. If one of the civs drops down to Friend level while still at war, then the CS will declare on them, so it gives both civs big incentive to keep their influence up.
For Diplo victory, even though the CS may have multiple Allies, it will vote for whomever has the highest influence with it. The cool thing would be that you wouldn't know who that was. All you would know is that you are Ally, but not whether you had the most influence. The result would be that you might count that you are Ally with 9 CS's, but when you check the "UN Votes" under Victory Conditions it might say you only have 5 votes. You would have to try and and figure which four CS's you are getting beat on Influence on and then try and fix it. In the process, you might waste money bribing the wrong CS, thereby making it a little harder to get the Diplo victory. Blocking a Diplo victory would also be a little easier as you could just pour all your money into a couple of CS's instead of having to try and buy every single one from a civ with a super economy.
Just thinking out loud mainly. =)
To me it seems they wanted to have the players focus in on combat or buying off City States. Both are the easiest ways to victory as I have found playing on the King difficulty level. The cultural victory is by far more complex compared to these two methods, or even the Space Race.
Either way, I would like cultural flipping brought back in an expansion. That is assuming an expansion comes out. And as for the City States, I think there's plenty of room for expansion of their role in gameplay. That role could easily be an expansion of requests and quests.
I turn off city states. I dislike the whole "mission" feel of them. In Civ, I want freedom to do what I want to. Not be told by others what I should (yes, I know I could ignore).
Nah. They don't like me either.
How do i turn them off? I cant find an option for that in advance settings or standard settings, or anywhere
you move the city states icon, down to zero..its at the top top of the settings..its a bar line thing
O_O, that optiom turned me into a blind man... Thanks, that's what happens for not reading carefully
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