Slowing Down Diplomacy Victory

I was trying to think of a way to slow down Diplomacy Victory so it won’t be so easy. I might have come up with some ways that I don’t remember seeing anyone else suggest (offer not guaranteed):

1) Limit the number of times a Civ can give gold to a CS per turn (you can give 250g, 500g, or 1000g to Tyre this turn, but you have to wait until next turn to give them another 250g, 500g, or 1000g)

2) Limit the number of times a Civ can give gold to any CS per turn (you can give gold to Tyre, Wittenberg, and Jerusalem this turn, but you have to wait until next turn to give gold to Valetta, Ormuz, and Quebec City).

And if those aren't enough:
3) Combine the 2 (you can give 250g, 500g, or 1000g to Tyre, Wittenberg, and Jerusalem this turn, but you have to wait until next turn to give 250g, 500g, or 1000g to Tyre, Wittenberg, Jerusalem, Valetta, Ormuz, and/or Quebec City).

Thoughts? Criticism? Outright flaming? Overwhelming praise and a statue of me in your hometown?

My idea for this is that you can only give 250g and the 500g and 1000 only opens if the CS have the quest for money (and of course that quest don't yield more influence, just that you can give more).

or

That you can only give if you have a spy in the city (and perhaps also a city link to it).

DemonMaster said:

That you can only give if you have a spy in the city (and perhaps also a city link to it).

Click to expand...

This would dramatically slow down the DiploVic since there are a finite # of spies in the game (7 for England, 6 for everyone else).

Your suggestion won't slow down a DV at all. Most of the time I already have all the city-states as allies well before the voting for a World Leader comes about. I gradually accumulated allies over the course of the game, and there is very little last minute vote buying going on.

My idea for improving the DV is this. All civs will receive two votes that they can use for WL voting. The first vote they can cast whichever way they like (AIs will always vote for themselves, unless they had been wiped out and were resurrected, in which case they will vote for the civ that resurrected them), while the second vote must be cast for another civ. In practice, the AI will cast the second vote for the player whom they have the best relationship with.

For a civ to win the DV, it must fulfill the following two conditions:

1) Receive a majority of votes from all the CSes still left in the game (i.e. 50% + 1); and
2) Receive a plurality of votes from the other civs (i.e. receive more votes than any other civ).

In the case of a tie, only the civs who tied will be eligible for being voted for the next round. The civs who tied will not be able to vote at all.

This will make the DV significantly harder to achieve since you must both control a majority of the city-states and maintain good relations with other civs. It prevents a ridiculous scenario where a civ universally hated by all the other civs nonetheless wins a "diplomatic" victory based on CS votes alone.

diplo victory is too easy because late game gold is too easy. with 200gpt by the modern era, you could get a new ally every 5 turns.
maybe if the AI is tweaked to buy city states more often, winning diplo would be harder.

DemonMaster said:

My idea for this is that you can only give 250g and the 500g and 1000 only opens if the CS have the quest for money (and of course that quest don't yield more influence, just that you can give more).

or

That you can only give if you have a spy in the city (and perhaps also a city link to it).

Click to expand...

Those solutions, - especially the second one - when you have a lot of allies, could have the unintended consequence of making you lose alliances with some CS for many turns. It would affect far more than the diplomatic victory.

The best way to slow it down would be to greatly lower the impact of having CS allies and rise the base number of votes any civ gets . Every 3 or 4 allies would provide just one 1 extra representative. They'd no longer be enough to make you win but might eventually be the edge you need. Instead, the way to gain extra delegates would be more diversified and spread over time.

Advancing era after the WC is started: 1 more delegate
building the Forbidden Palace ---> 2 extra delegates
Having hosted the WC ---> one extra delegate per congress held
building the UN (available at the start of the Information era) ---> x extra delegates
Liberating 1 city conquered by someone else ---> one extra delegate
Liberating someone's capitol: Get x% of their delegates
Winning an emergency proposal to stop a war between 2 civs, passing a cap on military strength, banning Nukes, forcing the liberation of a conquered city (all available at the UN after Globalization) ---> one extra delegate per measure

The concept of ideological pacts (defensive/offensive alliances) equiv. to NATO/Warsaw Pacts could be introduced. Civs must share ideology and be neutral or better to each other to form one. Founded by a civ after reaching a certain tech. You can opt out or renew membership every x turns. Founder of the Alliance gets x extra delegates. Members of an alliance get 1 extra delegate after X turn without the alliance DoW anyone (you lose those acquired in the current era if you DOW someone).

The three top Civs (calculated by awarding points for population, literacy-culture, military strength on the turn the WC meets) are nominated to the "Security Council" of the UN and their vote counts for x% more, or they get extra delegates.

Any civ that manage to reach 50 (or 45)% of the number of delegates (or "x% "diplomatic influence", whatever) can call a session of the UN to vote for World Leader. To spice things up, it happens 10 turns after being called, so the one who calls it needs to close the gap to 50+1% of votes and the other Civs can attempt to make the top runner lose delegates (bribing a member of its alliance to DoW someone, conquering its allies, reconquering a capitol he liberated etc.) before the vote. If it fails, the top runner gets extra delegates and can try again after 5 turns.

That needs refining, but something like this would not only be far more "diplomatic" but would also need planning to acquire delegates - choosing between the alliance-peace strategy or the "liberation wars" strategy, and would be blocked to warmongers/conquerors. It would require high culture/tourism to avoid a rival winning a CV without destroying him militarily (or clever bribing other civs to war on the cultural leader) . Balanced right, it would be hard to achieve too long before a tech leader could manage a SV. It could trigger a leading aggressive Civ into attempting a domination victory to stop you (well, not with the current AI...).

First of all, I'll say that I seriously think that Diplo. victory should actually primarily involve Civs rather than City-States... but I guess that might be too much of an overhaul of that victory type. So excluding that concept, here's what I think:

It would be interesting if CSs didn't vote based on their CURRENT attitude towards you, but rather their historical attitude towards you over all time (compared to the other civs). Basically, say you were an ally with them for 90% of the game up to that point. That should count for more than some Civ who swoops in, pays cash, and only allied with them for the last, say, 5% of the game.

More concretely, something like:
Every turn, each CS records what the current relationship value is for every civ. These values (every turn) get added to a counter (separate counter for each civ) that just keeps adding up for the rest of the game. When it comes time to vote, whoever has the highest total value gets that CS's vote.

So let's say we have a 10 turn game. If my relationship with the CS for the first 7 turns was zero but then I paid money and got a relationship of 60 for the final 3 turns, my total sum is 180 (3 turns of 60). If another civ, however, was at 30 for all 10 turns, that civ's final tally would be 300 (10 turns of 30). Of course, all this tallying can be modified or made easier/harder by various wonders, policies, great people, etc. And maybe the tallying ramps up (i.e. multipliers) as time goes on to weigh recent history more than past history.

This way, victory would involve making a conscious game-long effort to pleasing CSs. You can't just swoop in and buy up all the votes -- it has to be something you've focused on doing and have done well game-long, maintaining relationships with each CS better than anyone else over all of recorded history.

TheBlackHole said:

First of all, I'll say that I seriously think that Diplo. victory should actually primarily involve Civs rather than City-States... but I guess that might be too much of an overhaul of that victory type. So excluding that concept, here's what I think:

It would be interesting if CSs didn't vote based on their CURRENT attitude towards you, but rather their historical attitude towards you over all time (compared to the other civs). Basically, say you were an ally with them for 90% of the game up to that point. That should count for more than some Civ who swoops in, pays cash, and only allied with them for the last, say, 5% of the game.

More concretely, something like:
Every turn, each CS records what the current relationship value is for every civ. These values (every turn) get added to a counter (separate counter for each civ) that just keeps adding up for the rest of the game. When it comes time to vote, whoever has the highest total value gets that CS's vote.

So let's say we have a 10 turn game. If my relationship with the CS for the first 7 turns was zero but then I paid money and got a relationship of 60 for the final 3 turns, my total sum is 180 (3 turns of 60). If another civ, however, was at 30 for all 10 turns, that civ's final tally would be 300 (10 turns of 30). Of course, all this tallying can be modified or made easier/harder by various wonders, policies, great people, etc. And maybe the tallying ramps up (i.e. multipliers) as time goes on to weigh recent history more than past history.

This way, victory would involve making a conscious game-long effort to pleasing CSs. You can't just swoop in and buy up all the votes -- it has to be something you've focused on doing and have done well game-long, maintaining relationships with each CS better than anyone else over all of recorded history.

Click to expand...

The problem with this is on any non Pangaea game you gain a huge advantage if you start out around a lot of CS. Time lapse might be good (weighing recent history more) but it probably needs extensive testing

My solution (which I still need to try modding in) is giving city states ideologies at random. If they don't match your civ, you get 1 less world leader vote from them even if you're allied. You'd have to convert them to your ideology to get the full 2 votes.

Then you'd have to not only ally most city states, but control their ideologies via threats, bribes, spies performing coups or rigging elections, and maybe also a small random chance of them switching to their current ally each turn. You could still buy out the world in 1 turn, but if the bribe cost were high enough, you'd need a much larger stockpile of gold.

MarshalN said:

The problem with this is on any non Pangaea game you gain a huge advantage if you start out around a lot of CS. Time lapse might be good (weighing recent history more) but it probably needs extensive testing

Click to expand...

I suspect it would make civs like Greece, Siam and Venice overpowered for the diplo victory. Beside it could become grossly imbalanced on many maps when for e.g. you could have no access to 2/3 of CS before Astronomy while a bunch of rivals could find them by trireme.

I think a system where all civ gather "diplomatic influence" for certain actions and achievements through the game, with the later eras weighting more would be far more interesting to spice up a "peaceful game".

The problem right now is that it depends altogether too much on the CS and a strong economy and excludes the diplomacy with civs completely. The proposed solution would just force players to bribe CS through the whole game, incl. those that may not be part of your strategy (allying a whole bunch of Religious ones for the whole game when you don't have a religion nor Scholasticism, for e.g.) instead of piling up gold to steal those not allied with you away from other players at the end. It would be really hard and frustrating to keep up with the likes of Greece, Siam or Venice.

MarshalN said:

The problem with this is on any non Pangaea game you gain a huge advantage if you start out around a lot of CS. Time lapse might be good (weighing recent history more) but it probably needs extensive testing

Click to expand...

I suspect it would make civs like Greece, Siam and Venice overpowered for the diplo victory. Beside it could become grossly imbalanced on many maps when for e.g. you could have no access to 2/3 of CS before Astronomy while a bunch of rivals could find them by trireme.

I think a system where all civ gather "diplomatic influence" for certain actions and achievements through the game, with the later eras weighting more would be far more interesting to spice up a "peaceful game".

The problem right now is that it depends altogether too much on the CS and a strong economy and excludes the diplomacy with civs completely. The proposed solution would just force players to bribe CS through the whole game, incl. those that may not be part of your strategy (allying a whole bunch of Religious ones for the whole game when you don't have a religion nor Scholasticism, for e.g.) instead of piling up gold to steal those not allied with you away from other players at the end. It would be really hard and frustrating to keep up with the likes of Greece, Siam or Venice.

The problem is that few AI:s really care about DV. If the AI would try to ally more CSes (others than Alex and Siam, too), there could be a really competation of City-states. Especially in higher difficulties AI has so ridicuously gold, that they could buy many allies if they just would want to.

Half the world has to enter the Information Age to start world leader voting?

i think in general, that diplo victory should require you to have at least votes from 1-2 civs, and only be a victory for single player

I'm not a fan of any solutions where we can use tactical voting (voting for civs less likely to win), while the computer can't do that. When the vote is for victory, I don't care how good a relation I have with another civ, I'm not voting for them, so I don't want the comps to vote for me! I've mentioned this before in other threads, but I do want only the top 3 diplomat getters to be eligable for world congress hosting. That is where civ relations could come in to play, as this would prevent me from being able to either get the world congress without any civ diplomacy or choose who hosts.
Also, instead of the person with the most city states choosing what to propose in the world congress, the host of the world congress can each time choose a civ to propose the second proposal (and you can't choose the same civ twice in a row?). This would make it so that if you want world congress power, you need good relationships with the AIs that have good relationships with other AIs. Diplo victory can stay as it is, although push it back to later, or maybe even make there be a world congress proposal to enable diplo victory sessions. That could be where the good relations come in, or at least you need to make sure the others are focused on voting for the other resolution in this stage.

What difficulty you people are talking about? Its deity or immortal? I don't like playing those, but still they have their own abuse with RA and worker steals.
On prince king and emperor i reach science or culture well before UN starts voting. Even if i just fooling around, ill get those victories like 20 -10 turns before voting.