The Diplomatic Victory - observations, notes and tips

i was running a pure-diplo-focus one-city-challenge game, hoping for no wars at all, just to finesse the whole thing. hand-pick civs for hopefully no wars (washington did declare on gandhi but no cities were lost, and only one worst enemy was made). so i had mansa, gandhi, asoka, washington, roosevelt, hatty, and freddy, standard/inland seas/normal speed/monarch. my goal was to just convince them to like me more than they like the other guy, no matter who the other guy is, inflencing population via health/luxuries is fine, decimating population by warfare is not, etc. that's the game i was looking for, OCCs are quick and they can be really suspenseful sometimes.

i'm trading with all of them, all the way through, to get good relations, to speed up my beelining since if i don't build the UN myself i'm hosed, etc. religions spread nicely, i got CoL first and it spread well enough for me to get good use out of OR and pacifism safely for a bit there, then at the end there was the buddhist set, the hindu set, and me off in free religion land.

check out this picture:


it looks weird to me, because the +1 shared technology is there but there's no "our trade relations have been fair and forthright". i'd never had the shared without the fair/forthright before. i hadn't realized that you could. i mean now that i think about it, it's not illogical. i just hadn't had it happen. i never got fair and forthright with this guy, altho i had been trading techs (and resources) with him all along. note that there's also a +2 for supplying resources, even tho i'm not any more, but i'd recently cut his off supply, he was voting for the wrong guy after all. even supplying him with luxuries forever tho hadn't done the fair/forthright thing. tech-wise, he was first to banking/econ that part of the line and stuff. any techs like that, which he had and might trade before i absolutely needed them, i'd wait on him to trade them rather than others, and i gave him good deals on stuff, obviously at least one monopoly, since i knew his trading limit was small. i handed out freebies. but i never got any progress at all on the bonus. i know some have stingier definitions of fair than others but he was driving me CRAZY. that +1 shared your tech bonus is there from the first save i have, at 780 AD so clearly i got that very early. i just freaking gave up on fair/forthright tho. i felt so close, he didn't really like mansa a lot, it was mostly the religion, but i couldn't crack his definition of fair.

everybody else i got to +4 fair/forthright eventually. some i had to monitor to keep at 4, and one of the americans was slow to get up there but they did all got to 4. freddy tho, no progress. he liked me almost as much as he did mansa, but i didn't want to risk a vote for free religion since the -s mansa was getting from the hindus were good for me in some ways. so, i figured i'd keep my side in happiness (had some spare engineers, build rock&roll and broadway for lack of anything better to do) and just hope we got big enough before too many space ship parts got built. i gave us biology and medicine, etc.

some folks had built apollo, and the first few parts were rolling off the line. purely to make money to pay for sabotage i might need, i held a tech sale, and i hit freddy since he was the richest. he offered me all of his cash+world map for mass media (one, maybe two, other civs had it by then). i took world map out of the deal since i don't like the pause for the map to refresh itself. it's only monarch, so normally i'd not worry about them launching, but they're not gonna go to war, and they're pretty much the set of opponents that are most likely to get a tin can into space if they are left alone, so, i got my spies ready.

next turn, UN vote comes up again, i call diplo victory as usual since to see how much progress my side has made. and i hit enter, and ... i won? freddy voted for me?

turned out, selling him MM finally got me the +4 fair and forthright. that was what did it, and got me his vote. i checked the turn after the win to see what had happened since i'd forgotten about that trade! to me it wasn't even a trade, it was "getting money for spies." but that was all that had changed.

i've had a lot of games where i've been able to get someone up to +4 on the first turn that i met them. i've had games when i don't care if i get to +4 because i just want them to die. and i've had games (including this one) where i've had people get to +1 or +2 fairly quickly but then had to put in real effort to hit (or to stay at) the +4. i've never had a game where for the entire game i wanted so badly to get somebody to +4, but they stubbornly stayed at 0, and then zoomed to +4 in one move without me even noticing, lmao. and how very convenient, it won me the game. why didn't i think of gifting him radio or MM the turn i was going to finish the UN? i had just given up, i mean hubby had been laughing at me for centuries (in gamewise) talking to the screen going "what in the heck do you consider fair and forthright???" so then to have finally found the key when i wasn't looking just makes me feel utterly brilliant and completely stupid at the same time.

looking back, probably what i could have done to fix that early was doing one of the "ok, time to hand out a freebie to everybody, who gets it first?" rounds like i did with compass. those i tended to look at who i was overall lowest with in points, and then see who'd of the low-in-favor ones i get a big trade/shared boost with by giving them first dibs. i think maybe i was already fairly high in points with fred already, so he wasn't one of the first ones i looked at, and instead favored the lower ones, when i ought to have favored him once in a round of that for the +4 fair and forthright. would have won me the game so much earlier. neither asoka or gandhi liked me as much as freddy did at first when i built the UN, but they voted for me for diplo since they didn't like mansa. if i'd had freddy at +4 from that early on ... /sigh *giggle*