













Ways to Keep/Improve Favor with a city-state:




  4. Do Quests offered by the city-state.



  7. Gift Units to the city-state.

  8. Gift Money to the City-State.



Play as Alexander the Great of Greece



  • You lose the benefits of your other favorite civilization.

Still, I believe its important to mention.













Here's the strategy I used to make sure a couple of city states would be on my side when I recently (finally) won a game at Deity level (where I didn't have any spare cash to spend on city states while my opponent was swimming in gold, needed all my units, didn't want to play as Alexander, and had more important things to spend culture on than Patronage).

  1. Use the Raging Barbarians option when you set up the game.
  2. Explore territory around you and be the first to find city states if you can so you get a head start increasing influence, as well as some extra cash. Explore around city states as well.
  3. Adopt the Honour social policy tree (even if you don't plan on adopting any other policy from that tree) as soon as possible. This gives you:
    • a 33% combat bonus against barbarians,
    • extra culture for killing barbarians,
    • info on where barbarian encampments spawn in areas you've explored.
  4. Leave barbarian encampments alone near city states - let barbarians spawn, and let them become a bother for the city states (you can help this along by using scouts and/or archers early on to lure barbarians there).
  5. When barbarians capture city state workers, free the workers and return them.
  6. When barbarians enter city state tiles, kill them.
  7. Complete quests they give you when feasible; quests to get rid of barbarian villages will (at least I believe so; could be wrong) have an increased chance of occurring. (Optional: reload from the end of the previous turn to get a better quest, though some (many?) consider that cheating.)

The last three points above are the ones that will increase your influence with city states.

One nice side-effect of this strategy is that you train new units up pretty quickly (at least until they hit the barbarian exp cap) at the start. In my case, playing as Montezuma on a duel map against just one AI opponent, I was able to keep one cultured and one militaristic city state (out of 4 total city states) on my side, and baited the AI (and I use that term very loosely) into declaring war fairly early. On higher levels, AIs get ridiculous bonuses and boosts, so they build units/buildings/wonders much faster than you can. The one area where you can really dominate them is in combat.

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