Can I conquer one city state (almost) free of diplo effects, post-patch?

Playing as Genghis on Continents I conquered a centrally-located/isthmus City State whose territory I wanted for all sorts of reasons, and it was important enough that I did so despite having friendships with several city states. I noticed no negative reaction whatsoever with any City States, except my target whose cries were silenced quickly, either upon declaring war or annexing the CS outright a couple turns later. I was in the Classical era. The only negative I experienced was Bismarck's denunciation of me, and one other civ as well had a temporary concern. When it came time for me to trade a luxury a few turns later, I could still get a trade deal with Shaka or maybe it was Alexander, one-for-one.

Post-patch, maybe you get one almost-free city state conquest per early game. Any other observations out there?

Let me clarify, by almost free, I mean mostly economic/trade effects. The diplomatic effects should be temporary especially in the Classical era, where there's a 40% discount on warmonger penalty, not to mention of course, the 50% discount on beating up City States. I wonder if the values here are multiplicative or additive? Whatever they are, the small, temporary penalty should fade with time. Is this covered by some article somewhere -- is the precise math known?

I would like to know this as well.

Scale warmonger penalties by era (50% of normal strength in Ancient up to 90% in Industrial; 100% thereafter). Penalties for warmongering vs. City-States halved.

Click to expand...

From my games, the second out-of-the-blue DOW v CS still results in the -20 penalty to all CS relations, so that penalty remains the same.

Pre-patch, conquering CS didn’t cause negative reactions whatsoever with other City States. CS react to other CS being DOWed, not other CS being conquered. Which is odd, but that is the game mechanic, and has not changed.

You have hit on the main implication: post-patch you get one free city state conquest per early game. But that’s not all!

My reading is that pretty much all the early conquest you can manage ends up having little or no late-game consequences. Since the limit to DOWing CS is still one-and-done, a player can only safely conquer CS that are allied with an enemy AI. So DOW the allied AI and take their CS without much penalty. Early DOWs were already quickly forgotten, and now the early CS conquests will be forgiven too.

Huge caveat: I have not experimented with this myself!