Trade embargo = game over ?

[SocialEnemy]

So I just finished a game where I played as Greece and controlled every city state easily by the end of the game. I paired his UA with patronage and after doing city state quests, I rarely ever even had to gift gold to the city states to keep them as allies. Also, I had the new freedom policy that gives you a +20 influence boost for military gifts to city states and because I had a bunch of military city states gifting me units, I would just gift them back for the free influence. Anyway, late in the game I got into a fight with the Zulu and hit him with a trade embargo which took his income down to -95g per turn and just devastated his economy and never even had to really fight him after that as his units were probably just disbanding every turn due to the negative income. I ended up winning a diplomatic victory easily of course but this got me thinking... What would an effective counter be to a trade embargo? If I get hit with this in a multiplayer game with my friends is this just pretty much game over? Also, I think a lot of people have over looked how huge of a buff the world congress is to Greece by itself. I never liked Greece before but in BNW where controlling city states is key they might be worth playing now eh?

 

[apocalypse105]

Greece was allways worth playing can get city state alliances pretty early and keep them.

Side note you can still trade with city states so its not completly over.

And to prevent is to trade with other civilizations so they iwll not vote for a embargo

 

[ptoss1]

The counter to this is to just conquer the city states. That's what a smart human would do against Greece.