Aid Requests and Diplomatic Victory

[Hogimus]

I'm 260 turns into an attempt at a diplomatic victory. There have been zero aid requests. I have 16 victory points from votes, World's Fair, Mahabodhi Temple, and Statue of Liberty (I missed Polata Palace), and have gone through two rounds of voting on Diplomatic victory points where I was just able to keep what I had by voting for winning resolutions and myself to lose points. I'll get the points from Seasteads and Global Warming Mitigation which will bring me to 18. Unless an aid request does finally come along, I will have to wait for and win both the World Games and Climate Accords which means waiting an extra 30 turns each, plus the wait for them to come up at the world congress (they didn't come up at the first vote in the Atomic Era).

Has anyone else noticed a lack of aid requests? When I thought about it, I couldn't remember one coming up in my recent games that I hadn't started for myself. My disaster setting is at 2, the default, but do you have to set it to 4 to reliably get aid requests?

More generally, does anyone else enjoy the current system where you can have more favor than everyone else combined, but you'll never win votes for diplomatic victory points and only be able to hold on to what you've got by cheekily voting for yourself?

 

[Archon_Wing]

Aid requests are definitely a matter of luck and as you noticed, take too long.

And yes Diplo victory sucks for a variety of reasons; one being that it's not even diplomatic at all as players only oppose you and almost never help (better to remove civs if you can avoid excess grievances). 30 turns between Congresses is too much.

 

[GKShaman]

The Key thing is I wish you could speed up an AID request - like 4k gold or 10 send aid projects. Some method. It can be steep 10k gold or 20 projects.

Also I do like the wait because it lets the AI catch up. But I remember I almost never win. Diplo - Culture and Science usually come before it.

 

[leandrombraz]

More generally, does anyone else enjoy the current system where you can have more favor than everyone else combined, but you'll never win votes for diplomatic victory points and only be able to hold on to what you've got by cheekily voting for yourself?

I don't like the way that the diplo vote works but I like that you can't dominate the congress, that having a lot of favors put you in a good position but doesn't guarantee anything, the other leaders can still outvote you if they all vote together, even if you have way more favors than them all combined. Firaxis probably should get rid of the diplo vote and replace it with something more intuitive and less frustrating, but the way vote cost scale should remain the same, it works well imo.

As for Aid Requests, the diplo victory could use more sources of points that doesn't depend so much on luck, more direct diplomatic actions that you can do, I'm not sure what. Maybe they could add more ways to get alliance points, then give you a diplo point if you reach a tier 3 alliance. Meanwhile, instead of losing points in a vote, the player should lose points for doing things that aren't diplomatic, like eliminating a Civ or a CS.