Don't be too disheartened about waging war with Sweden. The key is to build up a bloc of solid BFFs; anyone outside that bloc can potentially be treated as an enemy, and denouncements in common or war against a common enemy can be an excellent way to begin or cement those friendships. Plus if you're waging war you've probably got a decent sized army, which helps stop your BFFs getting any funny ideas. Also war means extra generals/admirals for your city-state purposes.
Re the city-states, you'll be surprised how good gifting great people actually can be, and I recommend at least trying it. You can get a lot of extraneous great people if you focus a couple of cities on maxing specialists, and even if you're keeping a large percentage of the scientists/engineers for yourself there will still likely be a solid helping of other great people to feed to the citystates. Plenty of prophets, artists, merchants, generals and maybe admirals. In combination with the Patronage tree, you can get an excellent core of solid CS allies that are firmly entrenched in your camp. And when you've got the really high influence that GP gifting gives you, it's my experience that the AI tends to back off trying to fight for that CS and goes for easier targets instead (for the most part).
Last time I tried though, prophets could NOT be gifted if they'd spread religion even once - but that was prior to the most recent patch so I'm not entirely sure now.
