mabraham
Deity
We might be able to gift him a city, but since he has more than 3 cities he would only accept a city that is w/i 9.5 tiles of one of his other cities.
Yeah, I checked earlier that he wouldn't accept any current city we have, but didn't have time to post.
By the time we have the settler ready, we might be able to give him a city on those small islands west of GH. The advantage of gifting him a city would be we get a massive cultural bonus to the spy mission cost. This would rapidly fade since he is creative and putting his own culture into the city, but for the first few turns we would get ~50% discount due to culture.
Sounds like we'd have to own the city for a turn or two to get some monument+artist culture into it.
I suspect if we went this route we could pick up the espionage we need on him by running a few spy specialists (which are better than scientists under representation 4 espionage and 4 science each vs. 6 science) in the time it would take us to organize a settler to gift him the city.
Yeah specialists are probably the way to go here.
However by the time we organize all this I'm not sure we will have wanted to delay teching as much as we would have to.
Agreed. I kinda like the Mach->Eng play, so long as Eng doesn't mess with the bulbing ordering. Finishing Compass to bulb Mach is not clearly ridiculous, either.
However, even once we've done all of this, we're still setting up to trade Feudalism for Optics... and then hoping for Eng+Guilds(?) for Astro?
I suspect the spy is more likely to succeed in switching him from his favorite civic. I'm not sure but I don't think we can ask him nicely to switch away from his favorite civic.
My suspicion also.
I would do the following
1) tech hard ourselves
2) build up espionage on Willem using spy specialists (more efficient that using the slider)
3) build a settler with the intention of settling a crappy city and giving it to Willem as close to us as possible but still within 9.5 tiles of one of Willem's cities
4) build a spy and have him wait where we plan to build the city ~4 turns before the city is planned to be founded if possible
----the spy will get his stationary spy bonus even though there wasn't a city there while he waited
5) Use the accumulated espionage to either switch Willem's civic or even steal a tech from him we might want.
Seems fairly sound, and if it doesn't work, we've still got our EPs later to revolt a city on him, and we've still done some of our teching.
I'm guessing we are going to have to tech machinery then engineering while we build up and set up Willem's espionage city. I'm assuming Willem is beelining astronomy so the tech trading/stealing opportunities might be available still with him.
We could also do the same to Cathy, but she is farther away so it would cost more and take longer to set her up in a similar fashion. She has a few techs we would want to steal later in the game. Like civil service.
Yeah.
I'll do some digging in the code tomorrow to better understand the city-gifting mechanic, because we are going to have to run a tight schedule to get a spy there, then a settler there with about the right number of EPs in the kitty. Also check that the civic switch away from favourite is possible! Also check what diplo benefit we get from a city gift (if any), and whether we'll have reset the Taoism turn timer to zero by then. Also check how much culture is good for EP discounts.