City-State Coalition

I plan for my next game to be a one city challenge (city state challenge?) with Alexander, eventually going for a diplomatic win. General strategy: defend city states as much as possible, befriend as many as possible, and take revenge on those pompous multi-city civilizations. I hope to gift units to city states and encourage them to expand, taking cities from other civs.

My main issue is difficulty. One city challenge won't be easy. I want to have an active military to help the city states conquer. It may be tough to have enough money to ally with many city states, but quests, patronage, and being Alexander should help. I'm comfortable with king and can fairly easily win (see my Montezuma game), but not sure how difficult this game will be. Any suggestions?

Other settings will be pangaea (exploring overseas may be impossible), standard pace, probably a small map. I'm considering bumping up the number of city states a bit to force conflict and leave a little bit less room for the other civs to expand.

Lol well, one thing you could go for is really aiming for Great Merchants, which helps a lot in bribing the City-States, and also grants you a huge amount of money to... bribe more City-States. >_>

I suggest playing on prince and be aggressive yourself burning extra cities your opponent happens to build and have them give you gold for peace.

I settled on a tiny pangaea with one extra civ and three extra city states. Prince difficulty with a legendary start. To make things interesting, I added Mongolia as one of the AIs. Once my other game is finished I'll get going with this one.

One thing you have to worry about, is that city states are incredibly stupid. If you ally with a few of them, then go to war, they send maybe one or two units to help fight, and only if they're like 6 hexes away or less. They do, however, make awesome shields against civs.