I'm somewhat mystified by the degree to which the amenity CS have dominated this thread. Certainly, they're all above average city states that do a job and do it well, but to have them make spots 1, 2 and 3 as easily as they did would seem to imply that amenities are a truly dominant force in controlling the game, and I don't think anyone's really made that argument, nor has it been my experience in game. I do wonder if their success is partly an artifact of the voting format (with its heavier weighting of downvotes than upvotes), since their bonuses are generic enough (unlike, say, Carthage) not to illicit many strongly negative opinions, and any downvotes towards amenity suzerain bonuses in general had to be divided three ways (I suspect that a lot of the downvotes Muscat got late in the thread would have gone to Zanzibar or Buenos Aires instead if Muscat hadn't been there).
