Athens in particular looks really juicy, what with it controlling iron, horses, and an ivory, and having no overlap with any of my cities. I establish an embassy to get the free investigation, and we discover this:
Only two hoplites and stuck building the Oracle for the forseeable future? What a slacker. Silly Monarch AI :)
But we need Iron to build swords, and our only iron is two spaces north of Minsk, out of its cultural radius. I can't afford to wait for Minsk's second border expansion and then for a road to be built, so Minsk nobly gives up its worker to build a colony there and trains a replacement.
I pull about five warriors from various places, and build a barracks in Kiev to upgrade them. With those five plus two built swordsmen at the ready:
They march on Athens, and easily capture it, losing only one!
But the rest of the war doesn't go so well. One sword loses attacking a hoplite-settler pair, and another loses attacking an archer in the open. All my communistic cities are too interested in their own infrastructure to build any more swords, and also a stray barbarian horseman wiped out my iron colony and it'll be a little while before we get Athens and its iron connected. My remaining four swords all advance on Thermopylae - another city with no overlap anywhere, so it'd be great to take. But all four lose in the attack! Well, that's the end of that aggression.
We make peace, Greece ceding Code of Laws, a worker, 54 gold, his world map, and Corinth. Corinth does have some overlap with AI cities, but with none of mine, so it's a full city for me. All my captured Greek workers merge into Athens. And that's eleven of my allowed 14 cities; good enough to continue building for a while.
