Would this work?

[Brael]

This would only be particularly useful in a situation where you have alot of territory but would it be possible to pull your units out of a bunch of cities (concentrating your defenses to a much smaller area), gift those now empty cities to an AI you're on par with, significantly increasing their maintence costs, wait a couple turns for the AI to spread it's defenses out to cover the newly acquired territory before it can build new units to adequetly cover everything. And then attack their core area with everything you can either conquering or razing the backbone of the AI empire leaving them with a mess of spread out partially developed territory. If you give cities in the right locations to the AI to do this you should be able to culture flip the cities back to you after a bit as well right? So the territory loss would be minor to you (eventually) but the AI would be severely crippled for the remainder of the game.

[xxFlukexx]

I believe this exploit was fixed in 1.09 or 1.52. If you are still able to exploit this, you should post how so it can be fixed.

[johnmcd]

Yeah, the AI shouldn't want cities that aren't close to it's core because they aren't value add. There are exceptions of course, but in general you won't find the AI is happy to take any old rubbish off your hands.

On the other hand, when faced with a huge threat on a city I can't defend I have in the past gifted it to a very weak civ that would take it. I'd rather a weak civ profited from my defeat in war than a powerful civ.