Liberating City-States

[Davadin]

[Vanilla Civ 6 question]
I'm in an early-era game where my AI neighbor conquered the only nearby City-State, and I'm playing as Pericles. I'm curious what the consequences would be of declaring war on the AI, then trying to capture the City-State. Would I be able to restore it to an independent, quest-giving City State? Would they give me free Envoys? Would my neighbor ever let me live it down, or would they hold a grudge against me for 4000 years?

On this topic... what happens if you conquer City-States yourself? You don't get the Suzeran bonus, correct? Do you permanently lose all envoys that you deployed there (relevant if you lose the city later)? Will the AI players hate on you for it, and if so, do they need to have already met you to incur this penalty?

[Synavix]

Yes, if you capture a city-state you would be given the chance to liberate it and return it to the game as long as you didn't previously capture it for yourself (in which case it would just count as returning one of your own cities and the liberate option would be gone). The city state should then give you enough free envoys to automatically make you the suzerain. In most situations this just means giving you 3 envoys (the minimum required to be a suzerain) but if the city state previously had other civs with more envoys to it you'll get equal to their amount +1. However, in my experience liberating a city state and returning them to life kind of permanently messes up their AI. They will probably never recover their military or enough builders to repair/improve their titles. That's no big deal if your only goal is to get them to give their suzerain bonus or get the diplomacy bonus for liberating a city, but don't expect them to be any kind of powerful ally. They will need constant babysitting or they'll be captured again if they border an enemy AI.

Other AI will be upset at you for declaring war, but the warmonger penalty (unless vanilla uses grievances now? I'm not sure) will mostly be erased by liberating the city state. As long as you don't take any other cities it will be an overall net positive for you with most civs.

If you conquer a city state yourself they just turn into a normal city. Sometimes this can be good if their bonus is useless to you and you need more cities in the early game. They're generally pretty easy to conquer. I'm not sure if that makes you lose your envoys.

I believe the AI are only supposed to be upset if they've met you when you take something in war, but I think it can get a bit weird if they've met your enemy but not you.

[Davadin]

Thank you so much for this response!

[Davadin]

Also- Vanilla uses Warmongering Penalty. Unless "grievances" is a player term, I've never seen reference to that term in game that I can remember. I don't know if there's a term to communicate the list of diplomatic +/-'s

[Synavix]

Grievances is just the new system in the expansion. It works mostly the same as the warmonger penalty with only small changes so I just wasn't sure if it was patched into the old game or only in the expansion. It works mostly the same either way.

[Deriand]

Agree the City State AI can be broken after you retrieve a city state and doesn't build units - although Fez did 50 turns later...

I'm not sure if liberating a city state is a net positive - you can't use the protectorate war or other casus belli to liberate a city state already conquered so you incur the grievances from declaring war and have to make sure this is less than the grievances inflicted on you by your oppoenent civ when they invaded your city state. Sometimes you might have just lost suzerainty before the invasion in which case you don't receive any grievances but cause some when you declare war. When you liberate a city state you get diplomatic currency and I'm still confused as to whether diplomatic currency and grievances can be traded off each other but it seems like they can't - diplomatic points are just for World Congress votes?

It's also unclear when you can call an emergency session when a city state is invaded -a city state I was sovereign of was conquered and I didn't get a click through to convene one. For other city state wars the emergency session has been slightly arbitrary.

[Deriand]

Sorry I'm on Gathering Storm as well...

[corwing]

Let´s vote:

If a player liberates a city state conquered by A.I., the player ought to be given the opportunity to restore the city state to the original state, instead of just being given the opportunity to add it to the list of free cities ( btw: emissaries lost with city state topic ( lose 1? due to exploitation/risky placement strategy? while the others are restored to the pool ( arbitrary disadvantage against players whose city states get lost? ) ). date/version april 7 2020

[Deriand]

There should be a loot option where before you liberate / raze / make a free city, you can take all the great art, inspirations, great people and gold and a tonne of food (and possibly citizens), faith, luxuries, strategic stores like coal etc. Actually this for all cities.