Diplomacy Changes Needed Next Patch

meowschwitz said:

1 I mistyped. I changed it but they shouldn't vote for things that would give you more delegates is what I meant. So world ideology and religion.

2-3) Your Base Vote already grows by 1 for each era the world congress represents. it ends up being 4 by the end game and definitely would have an affect the outcome.

4) Since AI will actually have to vote for someone else that even when they aren't being paid, they'll need a preference and this makes sense from a perspective of actually encouraging better diplomacy

5) They'll still have 4 votes for being a member so it wouldn't be exactly small

6) That's not necessarily true as another culture civ could be competing with you or there still could be some fierce science competition going on. This would also actually put an importance on actually playing the diplomatic game. The AI wouldn't be voting against you as long as you play diplomatically. However this could be changed to withing the last X amount of turns based on game speed so that earlier transgressions aren't such a huge deal especially since we wont know ideological differences so early.

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1) That still doesn't make much sense if it helps them too. Picking a world ideology also helps encourage other AI's who still need to adopt one into picking it, which means less likely to have pressure from another ideology. I'd say it's almost always in the AI's best interest to vote yes if you pick theirs.

2-3) The outcome will still be determined in the same way if you've got all the CS bought up. World religion, world ideology + all CS is enough to win with or without your 4 base votes. The real issue is the AI needs to contest city states more when they see what you're doing, which is difficult to balance due to the massive gold bonuses they get on higher settings.

4) The AI doesn't seem to care about your vote unless it was part of what made the proposal pass/fail. If you vote yes and the outcome is no, any AI that wanted yes won't care. If you vote for an AI as host and someone else wins, the AI won't care.

5) I suppose, but when compared to the relative ease at which you can usually obtain CS votes (2 each), that feels rather weak.

6) This is why the AI needs to be more aggressive about taking some CS back. If you can afford to buy every CS, and keep them even as the AI tries to outbid you (which it currently doesn't do much), then I see no problem with getting the win. I mean it's called diplomatic victory, but it really is more like economic victory anyway.

Not sure how your suggested changes are supposed to improve the game

godman85 said:

none of this is important.


They need to focus on getting the early game to work properly again. Early era civs are using late game strats from peaceful civs.

Everyone is scared to take advantage of their UUs. Its simply sad that 0 wars or even denouncements are the norm for anything before the medieval period.


People have played entire games with no more then 2 archers.

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1.play huns
2.find nearby poor bastard
3.bronze + zeus
4.smash and grab everything they own, early 2-3 ram destroy spears and city walls

I smashed every civ that where near me before they even got to medival era, it set me back a little but hey! I got free city's and needed to fight the unhappines to I got court (it is fine as long you focus on holding it below 10)

Ai still have this fetish to send out settlers unprotected and early on no Ai dare to retaliate or go to war so free worker "shrug"

the Ai is to passive but I guess it because the penalty to go to war early on is not to rewarding if you don't have civic that have this option. lack of early seige vs a simple wall town is just to costly if it fails, a unwalled town need less passive defense from growth. I don't even feel afraid of enemy lurking on border more than for my workers. the towns are fine and you get a bowman easy out before it is seiged to ground (bows is to effecient hiding in towns early on (except if you huns, seriously just play huns as khan and the other is not deadly before they got their first seige weapon in classic era and a 11 seige unit in bronze age with COVER is what make them great )

but I would love to see more pillaging runs by enemy AI early on than just barbarians

I discovered the truth of this by accident last night... I was playing Elizabeth, on King as I wanted to test the new mechanics, and diplo victory was so easy.

4 cities. Build all the commerce and naval wonders, set up max trade routes, buy every city state, and there is nothing they can do. World religion? Done. World ideology? Done. Vote for host? Thanks very much. Now I embargo my main competitor, and then an easy cruise to world leader.

Russia tried invading me once, but couldn't get past my ships of the line. The main strategy it used against me was to militarily annex a couple of city states, but it hurt itself considerably in the doing of it... especially with me helping them out.

CornPlanter said:

Not sure how your suggested changes are supposed to improve the game

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There was some discussion here saying how this is meant to make diplo victory actually difficult and something you don't just stumble into. Something that encourages playing diplomatically like the victory should require.

I think this idea would be nice, but it would probably take a lot of work to create.

Instead of it being where everyone votes for themselves, you could have like ideology elections elected a candidate for world leader. For example, if you chose freedom and you liberated some city states or civs, building a lot of culture, not being a war monger, etc then you would be the ideal candidate for the freedom ideology.

After that if you be like the presidential elections of America where there's one candidate from each party, or ideology in this case. Then in order to gain votes for world leader you would have to like campaign for the votes. I'm not sure how you could obtain the votes, but maybe have it involve newspapers, airports, tourism, spies and so on.

This would make it so you have to actively make it a point to follow your ideology and then to win you would have to out campaign the others and the votes would come from the city states that you campaigned for. In the off case that all the city states are taken over the votes could also come from the civilizations that are following your ideology.

One issue I could see with this is the ambiguity of it. It's not going to be a definite thing that you win. I'm not sure how it would be possible to make a diplomatic victory feel more real or rewarding without making it somewhat ambiguous though. I'm sure other people might be able to think of a way to make it better though.

To sum it up, make it so you have to follow your ideology, 1 candidate from each ideology, Create a campaigning feature, Vote based on that.

ptoss1 said:

The problem with CiV is that there are victory conditions at all.
Firaxis has to balance between making CiV a simulation and an actual game.

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Wrong answer.

Seriously, why is everybody complaining about the lack of aggressiveness early in the game? I think it's ok. It let you concentrate in other things and not in controlling a crazy warmongering civ... Want a war? START IT!!!

I agree with this guy:

Killlbray said:

...the AI [is] more active on pursuing early wonders which also contributes to their lack of early army.

Only those civs who ignore early wonders and favor early conquest (Assyria, Zulu, Huns) seem to be prone to attack relative early.

The AI now, warmongers apart, seem to pursue other victory conditions more actively and not rely on war alone.

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SO, what's the problem with that? I think the game becomes then MORE DYNAMIC and FUN!!

godman85 said:

none of this is important.


They need to focus on getting the early game to work properly again. Early era civs are using late game strats from peaceful civs.

Everyone is scared to take advantage of their UUs. Its simply sad that 0 wars or even denouncements are the norm for anything before the medieval period.


People have played entire games with no more then 2 archers.

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This is important. Yes, Brave New World has other problems that need to be addressed(and a lot of them!), but the diplomacy victory in BNW is gutwrenchingly bad right now, contrary to the focus of the expansion, and the last diplo victory I went for was the least satisfying win I've had in all of civ. The diplomacy is problematic and a bigger issue than AI aggression, which can be solved with a patch.

I'd also like to add to maybe help fix it:

7.The World Leader election shouldn't become available until Globalization is reached, to make it so you don't just stumble into a diplo victory but actually have to pursue it. (I also think that Globalization should have one more required tech as right now it's really easy to beeline)

8. When other civs see that you have 75%+ of the total city-states allied they should go on a major city-state offensive and try to wrest control from you.

I think the biggest problem is that Civ's get too few votes compared to what you can get alone + citystates. It shouldn't be possible to completely ignore all the other major civ's in DIPLOMACY win.