Diplo win needs serious rebalancing.

I've played 4 games now since BNW came out (2 king + 2 emperor) and everytime, no matter win I was going for, I could have taken diplo win way more easily. This is especially silly considering they made domination even harder to accomplish in BNW by requiring you to hold all capitals(even those of dead civs) to attain it.

Every other win type requires serious effort to achieve it, but as it is diplo win is completely different case. In fact after taking it in my first game(where I was going for science win originally) I actually have to be careful to avoid it since getting enough delegates is extremely easy if you actually want to have any citystate allies+build wonders.

It's basically an economical victory right now. Who has enough gold to buy up all the CSs wins. Which can be quite hard sometimes, with other Civs stealing CSs from you.
I agree with you that all victories are harder than the Diplomatic.
Domination: hard
Science: Mediocre
Cultural: Requires effort but doable
Diplo: when you have enough gold, no effort at all

Yeah I agree, Diplomacy is too easy. As one example, I was playing at Shoeshine on Deity, and after fighting a war with the Zulus from Composite Bowmen right up to great war infantry, I found myself about 6-7 techs behind, and Babylon, the only cultural civilization in that game, putting my city in unrest and approaching victory.

Solution:
I switched Ideologies to Freedom (Babylon's civ), made a declaration of friendship, gave up a city to Shaka for peace, traded all my gold per turn (at cost with DoF!) and missed a diplo victory in the next ten turns by one delegate (I got it 20 turns after that with plenty to spare). I went from sure defeat to victory really quickly, taking advantage of the AI's inability to play diplomatically to the fullest.

They'll probably patch this.

Meanwhile, we probably can find solutions :

- include siam / greece / mongolia / austria / venice in your games
- play with less city states
- don't focus on diplo win
- play on immortal or higher where they've got more money to bribe city states.

I agree it's the main problem now, the AI doesn't fight enough for city states. Diplo victory should be rebalanced anyway, you should never easily get 30 delegates...

Even for congress city states probably get too much power OR you bribe them too easily. Maybe it should cost more, I don't know.

Still, the game is absolutely fantastic, best Civ expansion ever in my opinion.

I won diplo yesterday and I have no idea how I did it.

I'm Going to swith off diplowin in my games for that reson. Hopefully, the rest of WC/UN works.

Even before BNW, I generally turned off Diplo win... it's always been too easy to get imo.

I don't know...the 2 immortal games I've won diplomatic victory has been very tricky to pull off. The AI (or you, if you're Venice) takes over so many CS's (especially warmonger civs like Attila, Monty or Genghis) that even the votes given by allying all the CS's is really low.

I won my first diplo victory only because I had freedom as world ideology, an extra 2 delegates from being a top contender, AND every available CS ally. I had a 20K bank and 500+ gpt and it didn't matter how much i bribed the AI to vote for me.

I won my first science victory mostly because I could keep on par with the AI's gpt, and the most delegates anyone had was like 10, not even close to 30.