Civ AI Survivor: Season Five

[T-hawk]

I will Worldbuilder the Apostolic Palace into the player-controlled observer civ on the first turn of the game

Why do this?  Just edit the XML to disable it completely.

You could also edit the thresholds for espionage visibility to zero, to get rid of that Great Spy nonsense that screws up the AI economies by inducing them to spend EP against the player civ.  (That might be in the Python UI screens rather than the XML.)