As Austria, acquire a City-State with 15 or more units through Diplomatic Marriage.
 
 
For Civ V achievements advice, I have relied on Xalehander’s excellent and comprehensive Civilization V Achievement guide.
 
 
For this achievement, I found that I needed a little more and offer my explanation of my (ultimately successful) results.
 
 
My results were with all of the DLCs loaded.
 
 

Why this is tough …

Xalehander’s guide rightly says this is a tough cookie. The reason it is tough is that it is difficult to have a city-state with 15 units.
 
 
So, you feed them units. Great, you’re on your way! But then, you count their units, and find they are deleting them. Xalehader recommends playing on a higher difficulty so that they hold onto more units. I did not do that, quite the opposite.
 
 
 

Focus on the goal

Yoink! is one of several achievements that require fulfilling specific criteria, but winning is not required. You can meet the criteria, and if you see the achievement appear, you’ve got it; you can win, loose, or quit. You can also, with most of the win types, choose to continue, and still meet the criteria and get the achievement.
 
 
I used a small map, set the map to two small continents, then used advanced settings, and deleted six of the opponents. I set the remaining one to Enrico Dandolo of Venice. He might well consume some of the possible city-states, but you need only one. By using a two continent map, we each had our own region to grow in, our own set of random city-states, so he was not a distraction.
 
 
I played on an easy setting, #2, but pretty much any of the lower end should work well.
 
 
I also reduced the number of city-stated to six to avoid crowding. It was a good call, it turned out that crowding was an issue.
 
 
 

How this played out …

I could expand, Enrico has limited ability to expand. I focused initially on growing my Austrian civilization. When I had three towns, my capital, Vienna was able to focus on Wonders while the other towns did some growth, made units to fight barbarians, and made more settlers and workers. I filled my continent and found only two city-states. Unfortunately, they were right next to each other, and though there were barbarian threats in the area, their layout did not seem conducive to either one having fifteen units; it was just too small of an area. I made them allies, then annexed them through Austria’s diplomatic marriage power.
 
 
I then focused on sea power and exploring. I found that in addition to Dandolo’s continent, we had four islands. I colonized the two empty ones, the Hanoi city-state encompassed the entirety of a small one, and the last had a city-state occupied about half of one of moderate size. Dandolo had two city-states on his continent, and he had not claimed either one.
 
 
Since I had many towns, each generating research, I was well ahead of Venice. I think the barbarians scale to the highest level civilization; it may be because I was the player. In any case, Dandolo was fighting barbarians who were more advanced than he was, and it was hemming him in. I colonized the West side of his continent, cleaning up barbarians as I went, then I set up, declared war (saving the game first), and in short order owned Venice. I continued the game to get the Yoink! achievement, now having no one who might interfere.
 
 
 

Feeding units to my target city-state.

I chose the city-state on its own island, but bigger than it was. I let the barbarians grow there so the city-state would be motivated to accept units. Then I moved many of my units to its island.
 
 
Xalehander makes the excellent point that while you can gift units in the diplomacy menu, you can only do one at a time, and there is a delay between each offering; it is too slow. You want the units to be close to the city-state so you can move to their land and then use the gift option on the unit.
 
 
I also paid them to be allies, since I would need that anyway, and it would mean there was no negative effect from moving my units in.
 
 
I brought over my artillery, since there was no one left to siege. These were good unites to gift, because the city-state tended to retain them as powerful enough, yet they left the spawn point in place to retain the encouragement to accept units. I only had a few lancers, I gave them those, they weren’t quite outmoded.
 
 
I also donated several ships, privateers. One seemed to disappear, but they used one as a sea scout and one as a garrison unit.
 
 
A couple of rounds of donation, Gatling guns and Hussars, and I had fourteen units in the city-state – yes, you want to keep a count. But the one privateer had disappeared. I realized that by moving the last Hussar in to the city-state, I lost sight of the privateer, it was probably still out there. So I saved the game and acquired the city-state through diplomatic marriage, and the achievement appeared.
 
 
I think the key to this success was the city-state felt the pressure of the barbarians I left in place on their island. It would have been easy to clean house, but then they might not have needed the units.
 
 
 

What is a unit for the purposes of Yoink!

What is a unit and what units can you donate?
 
 
If you look in the game interface in the upper left, where you can see the tech tree, there is a ‘units’ icon. Selecting that lists all of your units, settlers, workers, military units, and so on.
 
 
For the purposes of this achievement, I counted military units as ‘units’. Sea units, ships, are fine.
 
 
You can donate obsolete units, and you get the same reputation benefit, but it seemed to me they were more likely to discard them (this was my second attempt). I did not bother with this during my successful run.
 
 
I don’t know that workers don’t count. They had only one, so it did not make much difference.
 
 
I was unable to donate a scout. No donation option. (attempted)
 
 
I was unable to donate a Great General. Similarly, no donation option. (also attempted)
 
 

 
 
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