Diplomacy victory - City State votes

My suggestion is that City States should vote
for the civ that they had the most number of turns allied with...
...if not liberated (that rule can stay as now)

(so you cannot simply buy them before the vote...)

I agree, and then I also disagree.

I understand that Diplomatic/Economic Victory is somewhat a cheap way to win when you can bribe them at the end. But making the change as you suggest would make less sense when the Japan's current City State allies don't vote for them when it come to UN Leader. In my opinion, I think it makes more sense that City States vote for whoever is willing to look out for the City States best interests (their current allies).

The last game I completed was on Deity going for a cultural victory. I had previously won a game with diplomatic, and this was my first shot at a cultural victory. Actually, there were 4 Cultural and 1 Maritime CS on my continent so that kind of started me down that path in the early game. I found one more CS on an island when I got Astronomy (another cultural, yay!) and the AI Civs on the other continent in the game had taken out the CS's there.

At the end of the game, I had to vote for another Civ in the UN election 5 times because I was allied with all the City States. I don't think they should change the method they use to determine who they vote for - it should be the current ally. But what I would think would be an improvement would be if the AI would see a UN vote is coming up and realize a player has all the CS votes locked up. Then they should dump all their cash into bribing at least one CS to ally with them instead. That would be one situation where "AI play-to-win" actually makes sense to me.

V. Soma said:

My suggestion is that City States should vote
for the civ that they had the most number of turns allied with...
...if not liberated (that rule can stay as now)

(so you cannot simply buy them before the vote...)

Click to expand...

That wouldn't really make all that much sense.

Also, isn't the idea that you have to maintain the friendship? Working with them at the beginning of the game simply builds a basis for continued alliance. But it should be that you have to continue that friendship in order to reap the benefits in regards to diplomatic victory.

I agree with OP. Except I would make CS vote for whoever has obtained the most "total influence" over the course of the game. But it amounts to about the same thing.

I'd also like to see something like diminishing returns over time for gold gifts, meaning doing the "quests" for CS would be more important.

Alright, so then let's combine the two criteria:
1.
At the time of vote, you need to be allied with CS to get the vote
2.
You have to have the biggest overall influence gained with the CS during history,
that is, a calculated and cumulated score of some kind...
eg. taken form the number of turns you had in the different states (war, angry, neutral, friendly, allied)

V. Soma said:

Alright, so then let's combine the two criteria:
1.
At the time of vote, you need to be allied with CS to get the vote
2.
You have to have the biggest overall influence gained with the CS during history,
that is, a calculated and cumulated score of some kind...
eg. taken form the number of turns you had in the different states (war, angry, neutral, friendly, allied)

Click to expand...

This is an improvement, but why stop someone from utilising a city state if they weren't friends with them for the entire game.

What if, for instance, a city state is on the other side of the world, and you don't get contact with them until late in the game. It would virtually impossible to get them to vote for you. This would seem rather unfair, and in some situations could completely break the diplomatic vote mechanism.

The way influence decreases could be different.

Quests could bring a small permanent amount of influence. (including help during war)

Pledging to protect could make the decreasing much slower. If you do defend one when it's attacked, all the other CSs will take good note you kept your word and trust you more, if you don't, they think you're a coward and influence decreases faster.

Building long-term relations would be much more fun and strategic than just making gold in the end-game. Of course we could still buy late alliances but at a higher price.

I think you're onto a very important flaw in the CS Voting system.

Personally though, I agree with the idea that they should always vote for who they are allied with however, diminishing returns for each gift of gold. So that performing missions for them is most important, and you can't easily just buy them off when the UN is finally built.

I also think you should always get a relationship bonus for killing barbarians within a couple of hexes of their territory. And they should give you one turn to get out before the tresspassing penalty kicks in. (How else can you help them kill barbarians with melee units?)

I think you should also get to spend gold to decrease reputation with another player (for the relationship hit of course)

Gifting units should be more in line with the power of the units versus their existing ones.

I.e. if Monaco has 2 Rifleman and a Cannon, and I gift Mobile Rocket Artillery it is way better than if I gift a Scout.

Camikaze said:

What if, for instance, a city state is on the other side of the world, and you don't get contact with them until late in the game. It would virtually impossible to get them to vote for you. This would seem rather unfair, and in some situations could completely break the diplomatic vote mechanism.

Click to expand...

How about incorporating both?

For determining a CS vote:
You get X points for your current influence
You add 99% of your influence with them last turn
You add 98% of your influence with them two turns ago
...
You add 1% of your influence with them 100 turns ago
Anything older than 100 turns in the past is irrelevant

Calculate this sum for each faction; whichever faction has the most points gets that CS's vote. Factions that currently have negative influence are excluded.

This means if you've been on solid friendly terms with a CS during the past 100 turns, and you they aren't currently pissed at you, nobody else is going to just buy their way in at the last moment. It also means that little war you had 80 years ago is mostly forgotten about, but the war you had 5 years ago will hurt your chances, even if you pay your war reparations.

Long-term steady relationships get a strong advantage, but it's not everything.

Namaspamus said:

The way influence decreases could be different.

Click to expand...

This is a better way to attack the problem, IMO.

Paeanblack said:

How about incorporating both?

For determining a CS vote:
You get X points for your current influence
You add 99% of your influence with them last turn
You add 98% of your influence with them two turns ago
...
You add 1% of your influence with them 100 turns ago
Anything older than 100 turns in the past is irrelevant

Calculate this sum for each faction; whichever faction has the most points gets that CS's vote. Factions that currently have negative influence are excluded.

This means if you've been on solid friendly terms with a CS during the past 100 turns, and you they aren't currently pissed at you, nobody else is going to just buy their way in at the last moment. It also means that little war you had 80 years ago is mostly forgotten about, but the war you had 5 years ago will hurt your chances, even if you pay your war reparations.

Long-term steady relationships get a strong advantage, but it's not everything.

Click to expand...

This is probably an improvement on the OP suggestion, but I still don't see why you shouldn't be able to become friends with a city state late in the peace to get their vote. Perhaps you shouldn't be able to buy in very easily, but that would be rectified through altering the rate of friendship decay, or something, rather than by simply not allowing late buy ins to be useful for a diplomatic vote.

Camikaze said:

This is probably an improvement on the OP suggestion, but I still don't see why you shouldn't be able to become friends with a city state late in the peace to get their vote. Perhaps you shouldn't be able to buy in very easily, but that would be rectified through altering the rate of friendship decay, or something, rather than by simply not allowing late buy ins to be useful for a diplomatic vote.

Click to expand...

This method doesn't stop you from buying your way in near the end. You could dump 10,000 on a CS for ~1400 influence and ride that for a few turns. That would put you ahead of someone who has been riding 60-90 influence for many years.

I have no problem with this, since it's only practical for the threshold vote. Nobody could afford to suddenly dump that much cash on ALL of the City States to spring a UN victory with no preparation whatsoever.

V. Soma said:

My suggestion is that City States should vote
for the civ that they had the most number of turns allied with...
...if not liberated (that rule can stay as now)

(so you cannot simply buy them before the vote...)

Click to expand...

This is a sound idea, it makes those last minute buys worthless. My idea is quite similar.


Liberated CS
- held 30 turns or more full vote
- No held for 30 turns fractional vote depending on how long you held it

Liberated Civs
-Same rules as above.
-If liberated Civ is reconquered, no vote.

For non-Liberated CS
-If allied for 100 turns. Vote counts as 1
-Less than 100, you get fractional votes (ie: 90% or 0.9 vote for 90 turn alliance), with a hard cap at 0.3 votes.
-Less than 30 turns of alliance = 0 votes.

I would also propose a 'balancing' mechanic.

-CS that have been allied with you for more than 100 turns who are then take over by another Civ, retains 0.5 votes (in exile)
-Less than 100 turns it reduces by a fraction. example 90 turns of alliance with a conquered CS is 90% of 0.5 or 0.45 of a vote.
-Up to a hard cap of 0.15 votes if you have been allied with them for 30 or more turns.
-No votes if the allied city is for less than 30 turns.

This will reward players for cultivating a CS relationship who due to bad luck or an AI runaway is unable to prevent them from being conquered.

Will prevent human players from knocking off AI votes by just taking over CS. Which is extremely easy and the AI is often reluctant to declare war if the humans are powerful enough.

We need to emphasize UN victories as largely peaceful. Liberation bonuses of perma votes is already a very domination centric bonus.

Well, part of the issue is the AI, if the AI civs actually attempted to buy your votes away after the UN was built, then the Diplomacy could actually be a competitive victory (you are fighting off every AI)

Paeanblack said:

This method doesn't stop you from buying your way in near the end. You could dump 10,000 on a CS for ~1400 influence and ride that for a few turns. That would put you ahead of someone who has been riding 60-90 influence for many years.

I have no problem with this, since it's only practical for the threshold vote. Nobody could afford to suddenly dump that much cash on ALL of the City States to spring a UN victory with no preparation whatsoever.

Click to expand...

The problem here doesn't seem to be that it's possible to buy your way in, but that it might be too easy to buy in, and that the AI is incapable of doing the same.

Camikaze said:

The problem here doesn't seem to be that it's possible to buy your way in, but that it might be too easy to buy in, and that the AI is incapable of doing the same.

Click to expand...

It might be good to alter the ability to buy favor as well.

Limit how much you can spend per turn on them.

ie you can only spend gold for influence once every ~20 turns or so. (so a continual investement would be rewarded)

Krikkitone said:

It might be good to alter the ability to buy favor as well.

Limit how much you can spend per turn on them.

ie you can only spend gold for influence once every ~20 turns or so. (so a continual investement would be rewarded)

Click to expand...

This is probably an elegant way to go about it. Without a lot of formulaes and calculations. Though I think the 20 turn cap might be an issue. 250 gold is too few, and you'll get situations where you switch someone to an ally and they quickly go back to becoming a friend and you have to wait 15 turns before you can dump money.

But 500 gold seems like a bit too powerful.

What's your take on how much influence you can buy per 20 turns?

dexters said:

This is probably an elegant way to go about it. Without a lot of formulaes and calculations. Though I think the 20 turn cap might be an issue. 250 gold is too few, and you'll get situations where you switch someone to an ally and they quickly go back to becoming a friend and you have to wait 15 turns before you can dump money.

But 500 gold seems like a bit too powerful.

What's your take on how much influence you can buy per 20 turns?

Click to expand...

I'd go with the 500 (and make it give the extra benefit, ie slightly more than 2x the 250) .... someone that has been consistently putting 500 gold into a city will get a solid benefit.

Another option is for the different purchases to 'close out' the city state for different amounts of time
250-> no $ for 10 turns
500->no $ for 20
1000->no $ for 30

That seems a slightly clumsy way of dealing with the problem, though. Smarter AI would be a better start (although I guess arguing for that is a bit redundant). Maybe making the influence gained from gold semi-dependent on the time over which the gold is given would be a good way of doing it. So if you spent 2000 over a period of 50 turns, it would have more effect than 3000 spent in 1 turn.

Maybe the influence shouldn't decrease at all. We just couldn't buy it.

Purchasing food, culture and units would be a different thing. Of course a friendly CS would propose better deals for them, and an allied one even better. So befriending them would be important even if diplo victory is off.
For culture it would be: "we sent some of our greatest artists at your court for a while", etc... If we don't need the bonus that much we keep our gold but the influence remains.

Quests and active protection would be everything. As it's been said:

testdummy653 said:

it makes more sense that City States vote for whoever is willing to look out for the City States best interests (their current allies).

Click to expand...

Pledging to protect (PtP) would make influence increase slowly with time. But we would have to be careful cause letting one down when attacked would hardly be forgiven and badly affect relations with other CSs who wouldn't take our pledges for much any more. Asking for a 10 turns delay would be the maximum, later only a liberation could make them forgive, and not at all like if you had declared war on time. Every enemy unit you kill would count a little, especially close to their city. You could give an "ultimatum" (is that english?) to a civ who attacks a CS your PtP ("let them alone or we're at war"). If they refuse war is auto-declared. If they accept (maybe they just wanted to test you) your influence of course grows even if you didn't fight.

Also if you can manage peace for a CS you didn't pledged anything. Can be safer if they happen to sit at the other end of Mother Russia.

The current system is a bit confusing, I'd like a clear symbol like a shield that we could see from the main view on the CSs we PtP. Entering their screen, we could see other shields if other civs did the same. Also maybe the level of influence of other civs could appear on the bar. This could be a single bar divided in 3 parts neutral-friendly-allied (if positive..) so others civs could appear on it even if just friends. (By the way... maybe their screens could be more unique and colorful. They have different musics, wich is good, why not different screens with buildings or any stuff of their own style? I imagine Venice, etc.. It could give them just a little more substance)

And as it's been said barb camps could always matter (they just could make a universal call), and the strength of gifted units too. Maybe gold could still buy influence but at crazy price and disconnected from purchase of food, etc...

When a CS asks you to destroy another one you befriend, you could pay them to bury the dispute so they propose another quest and remove the target from the head of your protected.

Tu put some oil on the fire, the capture of a CS could bring a lot of gold.

Sorry I was a bit long with unperfect english but I love CSs, I think they really are a great add to the game with a lot of potential.