Donating captured cities and such

[axisworks]

I wanted to cover two issues with this thread.

1. As far as I've been able to tell, giving away a city or two to a war ally doesn't appear to get you in any better standing with them politically.

Thoughts?

2. Apparently the game has some sort of algorithm only allowing you to donate cities that touch the borders of your allies, so you can't, for instance, give them a gift city that's alone on an island somewhere.

Has anyone been able to get around this?

[nbarclay]

I've been able to give away cities that are way off in the middle of nowhere. In the game I'm currently nearing the end of, there were a few times when I extorted a city out of one AI as part of peace negotiations and then gave it to another AI because it didn't seem worth keeping, didn't seem worth trying to hold (especially in light of how long it would take to get defenders halfway around the globe on a huge map in a time before airports), and/or would have had too many problems with surrounding AI culture. So limitations on AIs' willingness to accept cities that are a long way away from them are certainly not a universal, insurmountable obstacle. However, I should note that the cities I was giving away were small ones and the civs I was giving them to were relatively small civs that were not involved in any wars at the time I gave the cities away.

[axisworks]

Really? Odd, I don't think I've ever been able to give an AI a city that wasn't touching their border somewhere.

It would be nice, when negotiating peace with an enemy, if you could also force them to adopt certain civics and, in exchange, give them monetary assistance like the Marshall Plan. I'll go a step further and say, like the Marshall Plan, it'd be nice if the former enemy would then take the -20 hate down a bit, too as a result... but that's a whole other issue.