City-State tech level not advancing

[RagNoRock]

Let me preface this, I have only played one game to completion so I do not know if this was a bug or what.

None of the city-states in my game progressed past crossbowmen even when the rest of the world was at infantry or higher. Their cities were majorly undeveloped since they didn't have the tech to build many buildings. This also made controlling them much less valuable as time went on as they couldn't mine modern resources (coal, aluminum, oil, niter, etc).

In my game I ended up needing to take attack helicopters to Toronto to acquire it's coal, aluminum, and oil even tho I had been it's benefactor for 1000+ years. Ended up making a lot of other civs mad at me :(

So my question o the people, have any of you seen city-states progres past crosbowmen?

[T]

same here

[drakeavari]

Building most of the industrial age units require some special resources which city-states won't have. I've played on a small islands map and couldn't get them anywhere either. I had to play crossbowmen all the way to modern era, where I could finally find some oil and build cruisers.

[RagNoRock]

Originally posted by drakeavari:

Building most of the industrial age units require some special resources which city-states won't have. I've played on a small islands map and couldn't get them anywhere either. I had to play crossbowmen all the way to modern era, where I could finally find some oil and build cruisers.

At some point most of the resources become obsolete. Like Field Cannons, Infantry, Rangers, AT guns, and Bi-Planes don't require any special resources.

[EvilVictor]

You can also improve their land with your workers if you really want the resource and you're allied with them.

Remember though, it's not 5- you really only need 2 at most of any strategic resource, and you can normally get by with just one. The rest end up being little more than fancy bonuses that you can't harvest.

The bad part is that by the time you reach the industrial age they end up being worthless allies and the levy mechanic is wasted so I just conquer them anyway. Yeah, everybody hates me for that but honestly they all hated me long before I started conquring all of their pet nations. Having them less valuable military allies later in the game is ok and even somehwat historically accurate but if that's the objective they should just give them far fewer units rather than keeping them using the old ones.

[RagNoRock]

The problem I had with Toronto was that it already had mines on top of the coal I wanted... they just were not producing coal it would seem (my guess is that they didn't know the coal was there). I wanted to try and remove their mine and build my own but Toronto had 3 COLONISTS, sitting on top of the tiles..... Why any city state would even build a single colonist is beyond me let alone 3.....

[DVLOS]

This isn't it:
They AI is dumbed down too much.

Originally posted by drakeavari:

Building most of the industrial age units require some special resources which city-states won't have. I've played on a small islands map and couldn't get them anywhere either. I had to play crossbowmen all the way to modern era, where I could finally find some oil and build cruisers.