The Diplomatic Victory - observations, notes and tips

this was an outstanding post. i immediately started a diplo game, and unfortunately still lost. well, gave up after i realized i'd never get the vote--although i was winning the game overall.

what i found is that it was near impossible to overcome the relations the civs had with each other. it was easy to get the civs that started on my continent in line...lots of trading and getting one of them to switch to my religeon did the trick, even with the civ i went to war with early on. where i ran into trouble was when the other civs found us. because of their religeons, they were hated by my allies from the outset. this meant that i couldn't trade with them or i'd lose the vote of my allies. their religeon never spread to my civ either, so that was also out of the question--even if i could afford the negative effect with my existing allies.

how do you overcome this? do you trade with them anyway, and live with deficit on your other allies' relations? i also read in a recent post on this thread that each civ only has ONE other civ that's their "worst enemy". this would make things easier...

i wasn't able to convince anyone to switch civics, even when they were pleased with me. i guess you have to be "friendly" at least?

you could try a number of things,

the first is to ignore your allies attitude toward the other continent and get your relations up with the biggest civs over there (except for your competitor), also your state religion might be the biggest problem here, i almost always go for free religion if not the universal free religion civic because it takes out a lot of hate, you cant get very many on one religion anyway, on higher difficultys. you can try to get the positive modifier back by waging mutual war on a small civ with as many civs as you can, firstly with the ones you havent befriended yet (target civ shouldnt be to small so that it will die in 5 turns)

another way is to beeline for a few advanced techs and pay everyone on the other continent to war with eachother and then helping one (or more) of your allies to conquer their continent (to increase the size of the population that votes for you. take note that you might be capable of turning one or more people on the other continent into an allie, if you are to lazy to do the fighting yourself you can gift them units (and techs). youll get a higher score by doing the conquering yourself.

in all cases, be carefull with who gets how much population, if you dont control whos going to be your competitor things might get ugly really quick.

Am I the only one disappointed with the Diplomatic Victory screen? I got my first one last weekend and it was just my leader's pic sitting infront of the the UN logo.

All the other victories have cool movies to go with them - why is this one so lame?

the diplo win is a lot more subtle then other victorys, after all you dont go out nuking everyone in a spectacular explosion.
It has a lot of context you dont see.

Is the winner for control of the U.N and the winner of the Diplomatic Victory counted in different ways or something? Last game I was in, the U.N. was built and the world looked like this, for score.

Roosevelt(me) in first, with a decent lead
Louis
Catherine, just a few points behind Louis.
Ceaser, a fair amount behind
Toguwa,under a thousand, and lucky we left him those two cities.

When the vote for head came up, it was between Louis and Roosevelt. Catherine, Toguwa, and Louis voted for him, Caesar and I voted for me, and he barely won. However, a few turns later, he tries to push the cultural victory through, and even though there had been no serious changes in diplomatic relations, this time everyone but Louis voted for me. Even Toguwa, and I had conquered half of Japan!

it takes fewer votes to be voted for control over UN. diplo wins takes a lot more votes

I should clarify then. Is the other Civ's way of choosing who to vote for different between Control of U.N. and Diplomatic Victory? Because in that game, Toguwa absolutely hated me, I had overrun half his cities while France had stayed out, had remained on good terms. Yet when Louis tried for Diplomatic Victory, Toguwa voted for me instead of his good buddy. Same with Catherine. They had both voted him into control of the U.N. a few turns ago.

i dont know
perhaps it was the difficulty you were playing on

Does anyone know the rules on Abstaining from UN votes? Can you only Abstain once or not twice in a row? Are the Abstain votes just removed, or do you still need to get the same number of votes for a diplo victory?

Very theoretical example: 5 civs each holding 20% of population. If 3 abstain, would it prevent a diplo victory, or would the vote of the other two prevail?

the required amount of votes required to pass a UN resolution is fixed in regards to abstaining voters.

I think diplomatic victory is often just a quicker domination victory. Would you really bother to curry favour with almost all of the AIs? In a typical game of 7 civs, I will be hostile with at least 3 of them. It makes it hard to get the votes, considering not all the other 3 would necessarily vote for me, unless I have a huge empire. In my last game I had to be able to field more than 250 votes out of the required 386 on my own to finally secure victory.

Another thing, I find that the 3rd largest civ, who is not directly your competitor, would most likely abstain. I observed that Saladin, who was pleased with me throughout the whole game, did not vote for my victory (he was the 3rd largest). Asoka, on the other hand, who got annoyed at me from time to time voted for me all the time when he was pleased (his empire was one of the smallest). Montezuma, a regular enemy, was the 2nd largest civ until I bashed into his country with tanks and artillery. Then he became the 3rd civ and he too abstained. But that could be cause Monte wasn't too happy with Saladin either. Could this be due to some quirk in the Saladin AI?

Don't you think diplomatic victory is the easiest? I just get too lazy to wage more war that I feel is necessary - just enough to make me superpower. War makes every turn extremely long and tiring. And I think winning the elections saves me from the nightmare of further micromanaging a huge modern empire that is nowhere near completing the spaceship. I really don't know how anyone can be bothered to do anything else

if you'r to lazy to do it by conquest or domination you have diplomatic, provided you'r not going for a pre 1500AD victory. Going for diplomatic from the beginning is a whole other, longer and more painfull process.

oops, wrong thread. sorry

TheGreatSteve said:

I should clarify then. Is the other Civ's way of choosing who to vote for different between Control of U.N. and Diplomatic Victory? Because in that game, Toguwa absolutely hated me, I had overrun half his cities while France had stayed out, had remained on good terms. Yet when Louis tried for Diplomatic Victory, Toguwa voted for me instead of his good buddy. Same with Catherine. They had both voted him into control of the U.N. a few turns ago.

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yes, it's a different function, so a different result

There must be a SG, so Ais will simply vote for the guy they like most.
(I believe they will abstain only if they are annoyed with both candidates)

But when it comes to victory, you need to be at +X at least, or they will abstain.
X is 8 IMHO, but it may vary.

Some hidden relation modifiers :
- agressive AI setting : hidden -2 modifier for all AIs towards the human!
- warmonger respect : warmonger have a hidden -2 to start with, and a hidden +1 or +2 towards other warmongers. This is why alex and montezuma start at pleased to each other and at cautious at best with you.

spiceant said:

You have shared your technology with us, when you gift techs to the ai often it will not only develop a menacing tech lead (on emperor) but also give you a whoppy +1-4 to its relations with you. i believe this also triggers the negative bonus of you have TRADED WITH ENMY penalty with 3rd party civs, im not sure.

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I'm not able to find anything about this in the AI leader attitudes excel sheets in the war room. Any idea where this is coded or what specific factors affect it?

I'm just wondering how to increase the likelihood of it happening. Are there specific techs that particular AIs like that might trigger it? Or does it have to do with what the tech opens up?

I also couldn't find anything about when AIs give you negative modifiers for trading with their enemies. Where can I find that info?

For that matter, where can I find the xmls that people study to make the excel sheet?

about the shared technology bonus

LowtherCastle said:

I'm not able to find anything about this in the AI leader attitudes excel sheets in the war room. Any idea where this is coded or what specific factors affect it?

I'm just wondering how to increase the likelihood of it happening. Are there specific techs that particular AIs like that might trigger it? Or does it have to do with what the tech opens up?

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It has a lot to do with trading monoploy techs. If you trade a well known tech, you get no bonus. If you trade away a monopoly tech, the Ai will be honoured and give you this bonus.
If you run agressive trading with a friend (usually Mansa Musa, the only one with which you can trade all game long), it can climb nicely

cabert said:

yes, it's a different function, so a different result

There must be a SG, so Ais will simply vote for the guy they like most.
(I believe they will abstain only if they are annoyed with both candidates)

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they will abstain when they have an attitude of 0 or less with both candidates (note: this is still cautious - annoyed starts at -3)

cabert said:

But when it comes to victory, you need to be at +X at least, or they will abstain.
X is 8 IMHO, but it may vary.

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it is +8 and does not change

cabert said:

- warmonger respect : warmonger have a hidden -2 to start with, and a hidden +1 or +2 towards other warmongers. This is why alex and montezuma start at pleased to each other and at cautious at best with you.

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warmonger respect works a tad different: they do not have -2 necessarily, they have their base attitude. all Leaders have a warmonger respect value of 0 to +4 - when to of them meet the lower of those two values becomes their modifier (so two leaders with +4 will have +4 and two with 0 and +4 will have 0).

LowtherCastle said:

I also couldn't find anything about when AIs give you negative modifiers for trading with their enemies. Where can I find that info?

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the Worst Enemy is explained here whenever you trade with that one you start earning negative modifiers

LowtherCastle said:

For that matter, where can I find the xmls that people study to make the excel sheet?

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it is CIV4LeaderheadInfos.xml in assets/xml/civilizations

ori said:

they will abstain when they have an attitude of 0 or less with both candidates (note: this is still cautious - annoyed starts at -3)

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OK

it is +8 and does not change

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yep, but the hidden modifiers (base attitude mostly, and agressive AI setting) made it hard to tell . With your table, it gets easier of course, thanks.

warmonger respect works a tad different: they do not have -2 necessarily, they have their base attitude. all Leaders have a warmonger respect value of 0 to +4 - when to of them meet the lower of those two values becomes their modifier (so two leaders with +4 will have +4 and two with 0 and +4 will have 0).

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It's strange, the excel sheet only has 0, 1 and 2s.
is it double somewhere, or is there a multiplication of the warmonger respect that gives some 0, some +2 and others +4?

cabert said:

It's strange, the excel sheet only has 0, 1 and 2s.
is it double somewhere, or is there a multiplication of the warmonger respect that gives some 0, some +2 and others +4?

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I should get some sleep - it is 0 - 2 of course.
However the PeaceWeight modifier explained in my signature link can make the difference much higher (in theory Gandhi and Monty can start out with a -9 PeaceWeight modifier between each other while Monty and Alex can start with +4) the +2 for Warmonger respect is then added for Monty and Alex, so they start out as buddies...