Diplomatic Victory Guide?

[CivAddict2013]

Well I've heard people say getting the diplomatic victory is easy. But I'm not seeing it. I tried to do a diplomatic victory with Alexander; settled about 8 cities, but all I ended up with was low money and low happiness.

One of the biggest problems I ran is to is, NOBODY wants to be my friend; so I can't trade resources for money. I don't have any bad diplomacy with any Civ other than Cashmir; but nobody wants to be my friend in this game. I can give them resources whatever; but they remain nutreal.

So is there a step-to-step guide to doing a Diplomatic Victory? Because I've searched and searched but haven't found anything. It was easier in Vanilla because you didn't need a DoF to trade resources.

 

[Resipsa]

It seems like you want to go wide and pursue a DV with Greece
1. Open Liberty with a two city NC and then pump out the rest of your settlers
2. Use your finisher to get a GE to get Hague Sophia and get Tithe/and Happiness beliefs or buildings
3. Open Patronage and get consulates and Spam Proptections
4. Spread you religion to the CS
5. Your Influence can now never go down only up
6. Tech to globalization and enjoy the win

 

[joshua43214]

8 cities is too many. The AI will like you less for over expanding, it slows your tech down, and gives a lot of unhappiness.Just stick with 3 or 4.

Resipsa covered most of the high points, I would suggest using the GE on the Forbidden Palace rather than the Hagia Sophia unless on Immortal or below. All you need is a good income, and a small mobile army for barb hunting. Tradition will give you better gpt and more happiness. Take Commerce and patronage, do CS quests, win.

 

[eewallace]

Also, you don't need the other civs to be "friendly" to win diplomatic victory. Neutral is fine. You want to have most of the city-states as your allies, and you want to have enough gold to occasionally buy votes from the other civs in the world congress. But unless you have liberated their cities after another civ has captured them, the other civs aren't going to vote for you. Just keep them happy enough so they aren't attacking you while you amass the CS allies you need to win.

 

[Deau]

The easiest fix is to not go wide. You kinda needed to in GnK because your gold income scaled very well with width. With trade routes being best centered to a single city trade hub now, this is no longer true.

DV can very well be achieved as OCC.

On top of this, there is an additional layer of difficulty to going wide in the happiness it requires. Ideology happiness goes as follow: Order > autocracy > Freedom. Given the typical 4:2:2 distribution of ideologies amongst AIs, it is even further shifted in favor of order thanks to unhappiness from other ideology pressure.

As far as "helping towards retaining CSs allies" goes, the order is reverse. That is, Freedom > Autocracy >> Order. Freedom has 2 extremely powerful tools to ally all CSs easy. Sadly, it's nearly impossible to sustain an 8+ city happiness with freedom.

Anyway - Alex is the easiest civ to achieve DV with. I'm afraid that the only reason why you see it as difficult is because you sit in the older mindset that wider is better for it. It's not. Typical 1-4 city trad with a bunch of DoFs to trade GPT for lump gold 1-2 turns before vote will make it feel trivial. Or at least significantly easier than going wide and being stuck in defensive wars all game long from the overkill early game land claiming diplomacy hits.

 

[Buccaneer]

And as long as you have good city placements (couple of coastal sites, lots of luxuries), not isolated (within trading range of multiple civs) and don't have Greece in the game, you can win Diplomacy even with a small capital/population/army at Immortal. You just have to be aggressive in exploring, control WC/UN and have a great gold economy.

 

[Tich]

Venice is the easiest diplo civ IMO. It's like not even possible to lose as Venice insofar as you don't die to some war. You can literally do nothing but amass gold and win once the AI techs to the Information Age. That's obviously not optimal but I mean it's not even remotely realistic to lose.

Something that people aren't telling you is that you can sell lategame cities for thousands of gold to your AI allies. Since Deity AI often have 10k by then anyways you can sell your satellite cities off for 2.5k a piece (or more, it always depends) and use that extra ~8k to secure the last CSes that you still need as allies. You obviously trade all of your GPT for lump sum gold too and if you're Venice... well... let's just say that 300gpt converts to a lot of raw gold . It's uhhh... yeah... not even close to being fair :3.

Serious question, has anyone ever had a hard DV game as Venice? I'm not saying that they're more OP than say Poland since it's a bit tough for them to win on turn 20X given their weird science problems but like... really... I dunno lol, Venice just seems so mindlessly OP when it comes to DV.

 

[justanotherturn]

Venice is the easiest diplo civ IMO.

I more often win diplo without wanting it with Alexandre (Greek).
but i agree that venice DV is a pretty easy ride.

 

[Tich]

I more often win diplo without wanting it with Alexandre (Greek).
but i agree that venice DV is a pretty easy ride.

To be fair I don't play much Alex because I funking hate his guts. He's the worst AI to have in your games for obvious reasons. Guess that means I should play him though eh? Hmmm!

 

[justanotherturn]

He's the worst AI to have in your games

agree.
but,
choosing alex is faster than setting manually 7 other civ to not play versus alex. (and i love the surprise of meeting some IA on some map, but not alex )

so sometimes i play alex it's a OP civ.

 

[Acken]

Serious question, has anyone ever had a hard DV game as Venice? I'm not saying that they're more OP than say Poland since it's a bit tough for them to win on turn 20X given their weird science problems but like... really... I dunno lol, Venice just seems so mindlessly OP when it comes to DV.

No Venice is easy if you go diplo. But I don't see the point trying to DV anyway.

I just keep the condition available so that the AI can focus City States if it wants but otherwise I would just remove that victory condition. It's just way too easy and come too soon.