To SD question.
Akhetan is borderline already - in my opionion. Allowed, but critical.
Another city to create a "save" harbor for GT (and prolong war wariness for Ljub/Nauf) is for me not a "good faith" deal.
GT is at war with Gav, and last I saw, still had a stack in his territory. That stack may go poof at any moment because while off in Gav land, it isn't defending GT's core and his last city may die quite soon. So SD would in effect be getting a free bonus stack of anti-gav units - in fact, not only for free but with a bunch of cash to go with them - by "hiding" GT's newly-last city from his would-be conquerors.
But wait; there's more.
According to the voting spreadsheet, the rule seems to be "1 city per deal." This implies that technically there's nothing wrong with offering one city for 300g (or whatever). But I think it's entirely possible that some, many, or most of the players who voted that way in effect meant "one city per peace deal" - not only because that's what the rule always was before MJMD snuck in what he wanted by creating the spreadsheet and controlling its language, removing one word, but also because "1 city per deal" doesn't actually mean anything: Surely nobody was saying, "Well, it's okay to trade 3 cities for 900g, but only if you split it into three separate trade window instances!"
Also, the spreadsheet voting is not a comprehensive set of rules. A big part of the reason city gifting was forbidden in the first place was so that e.g. you can't give away a city under siege to a third party just before it would otherwise fall. Back to your original point and mine, I feel like this is a case that falls into that general category (of cases where a city gift is just a way to cheat a victorious party of their victory - or in Gav's case, yoink out from under him his reasonable expectation of relief from a ridiculous attack).
And I really like the expasion to 1 city per deal, because this allows a bit more freedom - I'm for even more freedom, good faith deals.
This allows it to try to create a peaceful border after a common war or ven a trade - city against gold, which I used in the PB 72. My trade with Bing was important, to stop the first strike and remain a factor in the game. Discussion over 1 per peace deal/ 1 per deal/etc. besides, we both are against the city trade in this case ?
Quick in terms of tech - and turn pace. Monarch instead of Deity is massive in terms of tech pace.
Okay, this game seems to be a bit slower than usual, but I think, a comparision to the CF PB91 is possibly.
The PB91 is perhaps a little more barren, but if I take a look at Ljub's cities...
Pictures from the CF PB91
Our capital in this game and our best city overall. Fun Fact. We provoked even a war to secure Sugar, which we didin't needed, because we had not enough food.
I think we were maybe the third best, but we were still a contender.
The research leader had macemen.
I'm not sure, but who has no knights here ?
Gav, GT and Greenline ? - SD too, which makes a possible counter weight with SD a bit harder.
Seeing as how ljubljana's attack on Aksum is really coming down to the wire, I wonder if an induced strike option was on the table earlier. If Zulu put a unit on all of Aksum's workable tiles, wouldn't the city pretty quickly starve down to size 1 with just the palace commerce and like 3h of wealth building? A quick WB test says you can support at most 25 military units in those circumstances, and this is without factoring in inflation. As of the t154 screenshot, it looks like there were 38 units in Aksum, so unless another player was willing to donate gold, striking defenders would definitely have an impact.
Does anyone remember if this kind of thing has happened before?
EDIT: Those sure are some interesting and timely posts from Ginger and greenline about the feasibility of the attack on Dreylin Very curious to see how this plays out.
Looking at this map now that it's been settled reminds me a lot of that Civ3 Epic where they wanted to test how the AI functioned on a rectangle map, for some reason. It looks good.
I have not closely lurked this game at all. Anyone want to summarise each player's chance from here? It's hard to figure out without score on.