Diplomatic victory = cheating?

[Johnpecan]

I've played through about 5 Civ5 games and an an Immortal player. For every game I've won, I've done it via domination or spaceship.

This recent game I cleared my continent (only 1 player) and set to teching/ics etc, standard stuff. So I meet my neighbors across the sea and I notice that Harun is significantly ahead in techs. I shrug, I know I'll catch up to him. Seems pretty standard.

Around when I hit the industrial age, I get a notification about who's got the most techs. I'm in 2nd, but Harun is 30 YES THIRTY techs ahead of everyone else. A few turns later he completes Apollos. I don't know how he got so far ahead, but that's irrelevant.

So I decide to try for a diplo victory (or a money victory)... I focus on gold, stockpile a ton of gold, ally a few CS. Wait for a turn or 2 before the UN vote and bribe a bunch of CSs. In the AI's defense, they did make it their goal to try to take out these CSs in the last hour.

Then I win as Harun is building his spaceship.

I'm sure this is a known issue but wanted to express my individual amazement and how broken the diplo victory is (at least in single player). It's funny because Harun had 25k gold lying around and could have easily beat me this way.

I don't think I'll ever aim for a diplo victory, only as a backup plan if all else fails because I don't like losing!

 

[MykC]

Most things in this game a broken at Emperor or below. Thank god Civ 5 is only looked at as a single player game.

Doing an OCC on emperor I was able to do it via Cultral and Domination. I don't know if you can really do the other two because of the amount of science required. You probably can since the AI sucks so bad in this game that you only need a handful of units to hold off any amount of AI. Since they can't just stack a billion units on a single tile and brute force their way through anymore.

In non-OCC games for a scientific or diplomatic victory you need a lot more tech then you can really generate in a OCC game even with Alexander. But again all you have to do is rifle rush or just be aggressive and keep your super soldier squad alive and just keep taking cities. And the more cities you take the more science and money you get. Lots of science and money is what you need for diplomatic and scientific victories.

And reason why you generally want to Rifle Rush is because you can only expand so befoer you can't expand anymore because some other guy has already setup shop. If your right next to some guy your going to need an army to defend yourself and if you have an army capable of depending your own lands you might as well put them to work. And by putting them work, I mean going to war and taking out your neighbors. Then you might as well take out your new neighbors... and so forth.

I stop looking at this game for balance about a week after I got the game and just enjoyed creating challenges for myself and variety of ways to play the game. In a perfect world each victory path would be seperate and distintic from the other rather than requiring domination to achieve it (which is backwards because if you can win via domination then you dno't need the other two but its normally less work since you can stop moving your toops around and just pass turns).

 

[stormerne]

The diplomatic victory is a focused (i.e. narrowed down) science victory where you concentrate on a single part of the tree. Plus an exploration 'victory' to find the city states. Plus a money victory to pay them off at the end and to buy lots of units to gift them to stave off the AI. It's probably the second easiest victory.

But sometimes, when you just can't bring yourself to do another tedious domination rush, or to build another Utopia project, or to research the whole tree, the diplomatic/money/single-threaded-science victory makes a quiet break, and you can try build a few extra wonders and enjoy the scenery of the game for a while.

 

[elthrasher]

The diplomatic victory is a focused (i.e. narrowed down) science victory where you concentrate on a single part of the tree. Plus an exploration 'victory' to find the city states. Plus a money victory to pay them off at the end and to buy lots of units to gift them to stave off the AI. It's probably the second easiest victory.

But sometimes, when you just can't bring yourself to do another tedious domination rush, or to build another Utopia project, or to research the whole tree, the diplomatic/money/single-threaded-science victory makes a quiet break, and you can try build a few extra wonders and enjoy the scenery of the game for a while.

Except you don't really need the science part of it since the AI will eventually build the UN for you.

 

[CBPE]

It's probably the second easiest victory.

Which is the first?!?

 

[bryanw1995]

domination.

@mykc: you don't get extra science for destroying cities in a OCC. if you mean that you only build one city and puppet a bunch that's not a OCC. OCC is an ingame setting, playing that you autoraze every city (including capitals) that you "capture". iirc you don't get any gold for that, and obviously you get 0 science for it.

I read a writeup about a OCC AW emperor domination before the first patch came out, it looked like a lot of fun but I haven't done one yet.

 

[MykC]

Sorry that second paragraph was poorly written and it was not intended to say that you can puppet in OCC or capture.

 

[biohazard72]

Diplo is broken, mainly because humans see it as a possible victory condition and aggressively ally CSs with their cash, while the AI won't. Furthermore, since you can ally the required amount of CSs and then declare war on every other civ (assuring that your CSs won't change allies before the vote), it's an assured victory if you have the cash.

It's borderline cheating. Now what DID feel like cheating was doing as above, but to get the cash, selling EVERY CITY I OWNED (post-patch: if it was pre-patch, I could sell only one city to get the cash!). But hey, what was I supposed to do? Let Hiawatha launch his turn 270 spaceship?

 

[alpaca]

Cheating? No. Interesting? Not either. The reason is that city state relations are just ridiculous. In Civ4, I thought it was fine, even though the most common way to get it was to vassalise or conquer everyone and to get a huge amount of population.

I often use it to wrap up games if I really want to finish them but can't be bothered to conquer everyone or wait through the additional 50-100 turns it takes to get a science win, though.

In a way, I would prefer if you had to select your victory condition before the game and couldn't switch, but I do that in any case.

 

[avl8]

Diplo is broken, mainly because humans see it as a possible victory condition and aggressively ally CSs with their cash, while the AI won't. Furthermore, since you can ally the required amount of CSs and then declare war on every other civ (assuring that your CSs won't change allies before the vote), it's an assured victory if you have the cash.

It's borderline cheating. Now what DID feel like cheating was doing as above, but to get the cash, selling EVERY CITY I OWNED (post-patch: if it was pre-patch, I could sell only one city to get the cash!). But hey, what was I supposed to do? Let Hiawatha launch his turn 270 spaceship?

Heh on immortal and above AI gets CS pretty much the same rate you can get. On lower difficulties you doesnt need to diplo win to prevent that t270 spaceship launch.

I myself see diplomatic is a simpliest way to test new strategies. Benchmarks are already done with HoF/GoTm games, there are many numbers about science/culture/production/commerce output. So its pretty easy to compare things.

Diplomatic is also fastest way to win the game unless your conquering everything that moves. And the easiest one comparing to spaceship and cultural.

So, is it cheat? Hell, no, wake up, Neo. Is it simpliest - yes, of course.
So its a player who decides what he wants, not the rules.

Better tell me, does selling your city/conquering it in 2 turns and resell to another AI is cheat?
Or "everything for your cash, then DoW" sounds like cheat?

 

[kurtkage]

Yea Diplo victory needs some serious changes imo. It's way too easy and cheesy right now. However since the upcoming patch is supposed to make the AI pursue it more aggressively that may make it more of a challenge or even too hard if the runaway AI is willing to spend it's 40k gold on CSs outbidding you.

I think they should require a larger percentage of the votes and maybe some restrictions to curb exploits. Or perhaps rework the way that you earn votes to not be based on influence somehow.

I love to go around the world and liberate CSs and conquered civs(I play with smaller sized empires no ICS and don't start wars for territory really so there are lots of other civs still alive until the runaway), but I like to do it more as a roleplay free the world from the runaway warmonger/world war type thing freeing occupied europe. The problem is that I end up with a million votes from everyone and then the AI builds UN and I win on accident when I really wanted to go for a different victory condition lol.

 

[neilkaz]

I remain of the opinion that "financial" victory is really cheesy and that maybe this is a better game with that victory condition turned off.

I fear that post patch, it will be impossible to stop and AI on Immortal or Deity from doing this with 40k cash.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[cman2010]

I dont think its a cheat its just a lackluster way to win. I have resorted to this in games that I dont want to keep hitting next turn in to finnish after I have clearly won.

 

[stormerne]

I remain of the opinion that "financial" victory is really cheesy

Cheesy seems to me an overstatement. As alpaca rightly said, "Cheating? No. Interesting? Not either." And like many others before him, cman2010 described it as "lackluster."

We all agree, in effect. And many of us who use the diplomatic victory only do so when we really can't be bothered to grind out yet another win in another way. It's a sad indictment of Civ5 that this is currently the case, but I remain optimistic that it'll get better when the new game patch is released.

 

[Shilkanni]

I don't think it's cheating or 'cheese', I like that it's a viable alternate victory condition to Domination. Obviously it's a bit broken that the AI will not effectively pursue this victory condition or try to stop you when it should be obvious you're going for it, and that is one of many areas the AI is weak. If we avoided any aspect of the the game the AI is bad at you may as well not bother at all.

The game can easily be won or lost before UN, as it does still take about 75% of the Tech to reach. I'd like to see Space Ship and Culture Victory also be significantly easier to be more in line with Diplomatic victory.

 

[Trev]

If the AI sought to achieve diplo or to prevent human from achieving it, then the game would be a lot more balanced. At present nearly every win of mine is by diplo victory, I find it by far the easiest to achieve, particularly on Immortal.

 

[LordTC]

The problem is the AI is written to be fun.

Instead of having X difficulty levels, CiV should have 2 modes each of which has Y difficulty levels.

The first mode should be sandbox oriented where the AI is written to roleplay and tell stories, and the difficulty levels are used to make the AI more challenging so that the story can be more compelling (the player suffers some setbacks etc..)

The second mode should be competition oriented where the AI is written to try and win, and the difficulty levels are used to offset the fact that the player is much better at winning than the AI.

Diplomatic victory would not be broken in this second mode, just like it isn't broken in multiplayer, if you want to stop it you either conquer the civilization trying for it, raze the city containing the UN, or conquer enough city states to make diplomatic victory impossible.

The problem is because the AI is oriented towards fun, and has to support roleplay elements its designed to allow you to succeed with a diplo-victory, so you can achieve this spectacular story of your way behind civ achieving a spectacular diplomacy victory in the face of a much superior opponent. This is the David vs Goliath situation the sandboxers love, and programming the AI to systematically crush it is unfun for them.