I did some testing which turned out extremely interesting
There's 2 ways you could build war success, capturing cities or gifting and killing units.
I think gifting cities is the much worse option. In my tests I could gift 4 cities to a far away ai before they would start refusing them. Capturing all 4 would give 40 war success, but they would only give me Mysticism+Masonry for peace. So you're trading 400
for 210
. Not good. You also have to consider either capturing cities immediately at size 1 which will autoraze them, or wait for them to grow to size 2 before capturing, which will take longer and also risk the ai builds an archer before it grows which could complicate the capture, but you keep the city.
You could maybe grow to size 2 yourself and then gift, since it will not drop to size 1 once you gift it, but then you risk the far away ai settling it's 4th city which prevents you from gifting a far away city.
The other way to build war success would be gifting scouts to an ai and then killing them.
With this method it looks like each war success gives 5-8
, so each scout killed gives 15-24
The cost per war success varies a lot, it could be as much as 30
per 3 success (15
for a scout and 15
for a warrior to kill it) You could reuse the warriors but it will also cost maintenance while building up numbers. Something you could try is gifting a city on a peninsula chokepoint and then trap the scouts, which would let you use less warriors, maybe down to 20
ish per 3 success?
If you wanted to try the scout method you wouldn't even need to mess with gifting cities; you can just gift scouts to any neighboring ai. In theory you could build up to 50 scouts by T100 or whatever while developing your empire as normal, then gift them to the ai to release the 1200
bomb.
Power seems to matter but not by much and you're probably better off not worrying about it. For example killing 64 scouts = 192 war success = 1622
, but the same 192 success then gave me 2514
when I WBed some modern armors and my power jumped to x30.0 the ai but obviously you're not going to get anywhere near that power in a real game. That's what's causing the 2 outliers which should be ignored.
Fun test, want to try this in a real game