Making allies in domination?

Since eventually you will conquer your friends, is it even worth it to make alliances? Would it be a good idea to ally with a civ on one side and go conquering on the other side?

Also another one: When going for dom, does anybody ever set up trade routes with neighboring civs? I usually trade with city-states because it just seem safer.

Alliances are useful during times of war because simply if another civ isn't with you, they are most likely against you. Inviting civs to go to war with you also mitigates the warmongering effect. Unless you would enjoy taking on every single other civ in your game by yourself. The name of the game is divide and conquer.

Even in Domination, you don't always need to attack your friends. In some cases, your friends may get attacked by other civs and lose their capitals. In those situations you only have to attack the third party and never have to fight with your friends!

It may or may not be worth it because making alliances can be broken and the civilization that you made an alliance with could get the negative hit 'you broke our alliance' or something like that. Being allies with city states isn't that bad because you can get their resources and the unique benefit from the city state. Making enemies in domination is the trick because if you have a city state ally, an ai can automatically take the city state especially if you leave the city state isolated and next to an enemy.

You can always ally in order to get money or fight a common ennemy. As you keep conquering the alliance won't last anyway and the civ will denounce you allowing you to happily declare war without suffering an additional backstab penality.

Most certainly, if you can get the whole world to DOW your target or your target to DOW the whole world(just DOW on the same turn and you won't pay a penny) you will be more likely that your target will capitulate after you capture their capital. Furthermore liberation, and even better recalling a civ to life erases your warmonger score and you need other civs to do the capturing.

I've only ever tried domination once but I gave myself the goal of having every civ recalled to life so they would love me. I almost achieved that but Arabia would not love me even though I recalled them to life.

What about setting up trade routes with a nearby civ? I've been kind of wary doing this because either they will plunder the caravan during war or a barbarian will plunder it. Do any of you set up trade routes with neighboring civs?

I do that most of the time. I try to keep a neighbor at peace sometimes because trade routes are important. Being at war with local civilizations can deprive you from having a good economy and eventually military and technology.

Think of it like the Hunger Games. You would never survive if you just went out on your own from the start, and made it 7 against 1 the whole game. You need to try to make it 4 on 4, or at least 3 against 5, or 2 against 6. You'll naturally find somebody who will stick by your side, and you need to make sure that they're the last ones that you take out.

Liberation is your best friend in domination games. If you pick fights with aggressors who have previously captured cities you can run all over them and still be best friends with everyone else because A) you are fighting a warmonger and B) you keep your warmonger score low by liberating cities.

If you play it right by the time it comes to actually DoW your friends everyone who you haven't already defeated still loves you and maybe some of the ones you have taken their capital still do because you took it off someone else. By that point your just mopping up anyway so DoWing your friends and taking their capitals doesn't matter.