A little bit more digging in the SDK got another quirk.
Q: Why we cannot bribe Vicky to war though she's pleased as well with us as with Mansa?
A: The attitude relevant to trades (in contrast to the attitude_val relevant for diplo vote) is the average of the attitude towards the team (Mansa and us = pleased) and all the vassals. Every vassal counting as much as the whole team. So Vicky is annoyed to us wrt to trade, because she is annoyed with our vassals. Even one cautious towards a vassal would cause cautious, because of integer truncation arithmetic.
Well done Firaxis
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For diplo vote only the attitude_val towards us and Mansa is relevant. This is currently 10-3=7 for us and 4+x for Mansa. x= 0..3 depending on random at game start.
We need x=3 to get her short term
. We need 16 sum to get the 8 average needed for diplo vote. We can get an immediate +1 for civic and probably a +1 for shared tech. Every other point for civic needs 10 turns. The only other fast thing is shared war (8 turns per 2 points) and we cannot bribe her to war, because of the quirk mentioned above
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We messed up some things long ago (that includes me
). We still import furs from Mansa, though we have our own. Mansa could export otherwise to Vicky (he has no bonus trade with her). And we export crabs to Vicky, which could also be delivered by Mansa. But it's too late now to make a difference.
OK, long write up, what's the point.
We can probably get up to enough gains from Huayna shortly (maybe even in the 4 turns to the next vote), if Vicky votes for us. But that works only with 2 points more for us (civic and shared tech) and the most favorable RNG in the beginning.
We can further gain another 2 points 1 every 10 turns by keeping the civics, which still might not be enough. Or we can try to win w/o Vicky.
So my amended suggestion is: do the above mentioned things to please Vicky, but also declare on Saladin as next target. Currently, declaring on Saladin doesn't come with a diplo penalty with our friends. And maybe Mansa does something (one can hope).