Civilization 5 Gods and Kings Walkthrough

City States and Diplomacy

City-States play an even bigger role in Gods and Kings. There are even more quests that each City-State will give to the world, allowing you to rack up favor with them quickly. You'll need this quick amount of influence repeatedly as influence now drops more rapidly. The new systems of Religion and Espionage are great ways of maintaining allied status with City-States, but always be ready to rely on the hold method of paying the nation off.

For the Religion focused player there is also a new Religious City-Stay that will provide bonus Faith upon reaching friendly status.

Diplomacy with other empires has also been improved. First off embassies can be established after researching writing. Not only will these enhance relations, but an embassy is needed to conduct Open Borders, Research Agreements, and Defensive Pacts.

The new Religion and Espionage systems also work wonders for easing diplomacy. Any nation of the same Religion (As long as they actually want to be of said Religion) is more likely to work with you and avoid wars. However, this same faith will not negate their already formed treaties and alliances with third party empires.

Espionage can be used to give information to potential allies and forgiving nations that spy on you will improve relations.

While the rival empire AI's have been toned down they are still remarkably aggressive. Expect strange requests, irrational declarations of war, and rampant amount of spies in your cities. You'll need to balance playing nice with the AI, all while keeping yourself and your territory well guarded with soldiers.

You can quickly prevent some of these headaches by amassing new luxury resources, including copper, crabs, incense, truffles, and more. As long as you have two of these new luxury resources, trade them off to the nation that is giving you the biggest problems.