Gunboat Diplomacy + United Front OP?

Does anyone find these two policies quite op? Gunboat basically gives you ~5 relationship per turn for every city state, as long as you park a big army/navy in their vicinity.

Demand tribute nets me around 200 gold each for 15 relationship, and incur a 10 turn period where I can't bully the city state. This brings the total cost per bully to be about 25 relationship, or about 5 turns worth of bullying. Once I get a city state to a comfortable level of relationship, usually ~130 or so, I can bully each city state for 200 gold every 15 turns. With 41 city states max, that's 8200 gold every 15 turns, or 546.66 gold per turn average.

United Front synergies fairly well with Gunboat. You park your army next to military city states. Then they give you the most advanced unit you can field, thus saving you the cost of upgrading your existing units. Finally, you use your new upgraded army to bully more city states.

Getting an army big enough to bully all the City-States is not free, though. I'm fairly sure you get the same influence for less trouble and much less setup with Treaty organization and Arsenal of Democracy.

VainoValkea said:

Getting an army big enough to bully all the City-States is not free, though. I'm fairly sure you get the same influence for less trouble and much less setup with Treaty organization and Arsenal of Democracy.

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I usually go for early Consulate to get every city state to friendly status. Free units have been coming in for quite a long time, just not as fast as Allied status and United Front.

VainoValkea said:

Getting an army big enough to bully all the City-States is not free, though. I'm fairly sure you get the same influence for less trouble and much less setup with Treaty organization and Arsenal of Democracy.

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but you get big discounts on troop maintenance in autocracy as well. I've found gunboat diplomacy to be quite powerful if you're already playing as a warmonger but domination VC is difficult due to AI capital placement or something. 5 influence per turn is a lot, if you already went consultates in patronage you'll have everyone allied in no time.

VainoValkea said:

Getting an army big enough to bully all the City-States is not free, though. I'm fairly sure you get the same influence for less trouble and much less setup with Treaty organization and Arsenal of Democracy.

Click to expand...

In my last Autocracy game, that was not really a problem for me. Most city states are in clusters, and I only needed something like 3-4 units parked in an area to keep all city states around them afraid of me. I got a swarm of units from City States and just parked them in city or on the map all over the place, my influence sky-rocketed, and I was still doing a handy gold surplus.

Arsenal really is stupidly strong, though. At Industrial, Arsenal and Factories let me make Privateers for 1 turn each - 1 turn to make 25 Influence. You just sail your navy across the map and you can bully each CS in turn while keeping them all your allies. You can even gift the units your Military CS's give you so those CSs are actually self-sustaining.

I'd say they're roughly on par - equally OP.