World Congress Host and World Leader Fix

As many of us who've tried the UN in GnK have noted, diplomacy, the World Congress, and the UN has been forward and back. Forward, in the sense that they have expanded diplomacy and interaction to not only be footnote, but rather as a vital and integral aspect of your empire.

As for backwards, there is really only one big backwards, and one that rears its ugly head once again from CiV vanilla. The AI votes for themselves constantly, essentially turning Diplomatic Victories once again into Economic Victories, which while reasonable isn't very diplomatic. GnK changed this by forcing you and the AI to vote for other players, which is reasonable and realistic enough, but with the current changes added on to BNW this is now nigh impossible to replicate due to the delegate system giving you extra votes to vote for other players, which is counterintuitive and more than a little unfair.

I propose a simple fix, and one that I believe will satisfy most players. We, quite simply, vote for candidates.

To elaborate, we are allowed to change the host of the WC twice, barring the host civilization being destroyed, over the course of the game. At this point, a pop-up appears calling for conference to talk about who would be the next host for the duration of the WC. Here lies the crux of the problem and the start of this solution. The AI will always vote for themselves, while not being allowed to vote for yourself would be counterintuitive to the delegate system.

The best solution would prevent everyone from voting for themselves, but allow the truly diplomatic nations to continue to host the WC through their diplomatic focus/acumen.

So, instead of a pool of all the the civs, we instead choose a civ to elect as candidate, either during the sudden conference or a few turns before World Leader vote, with the actual election being held during the next WC/UN. And to show diplomatic tact amongst one another, no civ is allowed to vote themselves as candidate. The top two civs and the host would then vie for the position of host/World Leader as normal with corresponding diplomatic modifiers for your nomination as candidate towards your target civ. In theory, this would reward friendly and diplomatic civs by allowing them the chance to host the WC while preventing the warmongering, but rich, civs from just buying out everything as the sudden conference for candidacy would prevent buying candidacy votes though candidacy votes for World Leader would probably be fair game. (For those concerned that this would further nerf warmongering, it rather tries to encourage diplomatic warmongering and tries to discourage random warmongering. Or you can just host the WC from the very start and constantly vote yourself host. You, after all, went through the trouble to find everyone and should be rewarded)

Thoughts? Criticisms? Nitpicks? Flaws?

They should change the AI so that it will vote for you if it understands that it will not win with their own delegates. For example, if Germany has 5 delegates and Portugal has 16, but they hate Portugal and don't want them to be host, they will vote for you. You will be able to win thanks to Germany's extra delegates.
Also, one should only be able to use their base delegates to vote for themselves. So the leadership/membership ones. The extra ones, from Citystates and Wonders, must be used to vote for someone else.

Only one problem and thats if one or two Civs get a large proportion of the votes (I have had 60 once) this would mean that whoever they vote for but most likely not them would get in even if they are the most liked party as whoever they vote for would win.. seems like an odd way of working things. How about if the players with the top 4 most delegates (or top 3 and the current Host) are the 'candidates' and all civs must vote for one they can vote for themselves in this case. if there is a tie for number of delegates go by score.
this Should be scaled for number of civs as well. 2 candidates for 6 or less and every 3 civs more than 4 that are in the game will make another candidate (so 7-9 is 3 and 10-12 is 4 13-15 is 5 etc)

I think the world leader is silly and have that WC disabled. You still get the congress and all the other votes and you can still use diplomacy as an integral means to a victory. It's just not feasable that a military power such as Nazi Germany would accept another leader just because everyone else voted for him/her. Wasn't there an earlier civ where you had to choose between accepting the leader or declare permanent war until the bitter end against all who accepted the vote?

I think all that's needed is a change to the AI, so that it will pool its votes rather than divide them so that the civ with the largest number of votes will always be the host. The algotrithm I'd use would set priorities as follows:

1. The civ will vote for itself only if it has the most delegates, or if none of the below conditions apply.

2. If it does not have the highest number of delegates, it will vote for the civ that's most likely to vote in its interests, based on its voting history (i.e. votes/proposals that please it vs. those it dislikes).

3. If there is a tie (or there has been no prior voting), it will vote among tied civs for the civ that shares its ideology.

4. If there is a tie (or there are no ideologies, or no other civs that share its ideology), it will vote among tied civs for the civ that shares its religion.

3. If there is a tie (or it has no majority religion, or there are no other civs that share its religion), and the civ is going for cultural, domination or science victory, it will vote among tied civs for a civ that it calculates is going for the same victory condition (the code for inferring this for player civs has existed since vanilla, since it used to apply a modifier), as that civ is more likely to propose motions that favour other civs going for the same condition.

5. If there is a tie it will vote among tied civs for the civ it likes best.

6. If there are no tied civs - because none of the above conditions are met, or because none of the tied civs share ideology, religion or victory condition - it will vote for itself.

This system deliberately gives the highest weight to diplomatic actions - particularly shared voting interests and intentions, and shared beliefs (religious or ideological).

But that will make earning the Dark Horse achievement impossible.

simonthesinner said:

Wasn't there an earlier civ where you had to choose between accepting the leader or declare permanent war until the bitter end against all who accepted the vote?

Click to expand...

can't recall if this has been done in civ, but this is how Master of Orion 2 handles it, and it's amazing. Basically you can defy the diplomatic win vote, but when you do, all the other civs merge into one super-civ and declares permanent war on you.