Diplomatic Victory too easy

[PostConsumerWat]

I was playing as Marrakesh and won the diplo victory on emperor. I was on my way to winning all the other victory conditions as well. It got pretty easy..

Then again, I started over enough games until I liked my position... so it would be more challenging if I wouldn't be so picky about my start position.

 

[Jezvin]

There's an obvious solution which is to lag votes for 1 voting cycle so your vote count is tallied at the end of each congress and those are the votes you have for the next congress/UN; And if you gain additional allies in the next 10/20 turns, those won't count until the next UN proposal phase is over.

Given how people play this game so differently, I am 100% certain you'll have 10 threads the next day complaining how they ruined Civ5.

Also, it's not going to fix the CS buying perse, only delay it.

I think the issue with UN victory at this point is it should require Globalization tech, and rebalance CS strength (keep them at 1 delegate for UN votes?) and provide more wonder/SP based options to gain extra delegates so there's at once more votes per Civ, and fewer votes from the CS.

---As an aside---
I have to say I'm not sure people understand what they are asking for when they say the 'AI shouldn't vote for themselves'. The AI usually outnumber the human player by a wide margin on most map types.

It only takes 1 or 2 AI to vote against the human player to either make it an insta diplo-loss or an unwinnable stalement that requires conquest /war which brings us back to domination-lite mess I didn't like in Civ4.

On even if there's a perfectly rational algorithm for determining how AI votes, you're going to get people complaining that the entire AI is playing against them and it's not 1-1 fight.

The mechanic of AI voting for UN in this case needs to be clear and simple.

Right now, the only known way they will vote for you is through Liberation. And I think that's fine as it is. Expanding it more in that direction means we go back to domination-lite territory; But I would be interested in the option of buying votes or the AI splitting their votes if you're culture is influential & share their ideology.

I Intentionally added the word instant there for a reason, the idea is suppose to delay it in a sense that the father a CS is the less of an impact you should have on it. Just a little change to add some more depth to a bland mechanic.

About the AI, I think we really need to look at a diplomatic victory from a perspective that none of the AI want you in or would vote for you unless in dire situations. Which would mean that diplomacy victory should revolve around CSs and competing with the other Civs outside of war.

So I have a general idea of how I feel Diplomatic victory should work. DOW and capturing a CS would make it very hard to get Diplomatic win. You would have to compete via trade deals, protection, embargoes, and spies with other civs to gain the influence. As an example Instead of quests like get the most culture in 20 turns they would have stuff like set up an embassy in this Civ near us or have open boarders with the Civ that touches our CS boarder. Stuff that actually makes you have to play with the AI and get them to do things.

I would leave a lot of the voting functionally the same, extra delegates for the wonders and hosts but I would just change the method to rely on city states and create a diplomacy thing around them. The AI does not want to lose, it almost never makes sense for them to vote for you.

 

[georgie]

All you need to do for Diplomatic is rush Treaty Organization in Freedom and Pledge to Protect all CS. Then just make sure you don't die before the World Leader vote.

 

[VainoValkea]

Does protection pledge cut it? I thought only a trade route gives that +4 influence per turn. Doesn't change the fact that Freedom is a fast forward to diplo victory, though. Even before getting Treaty Organization one can get cheap CS allies by spamming cheap units and gifting them to everyone for +25 influence thanks to Arsenal of Democracy!

 

[dexters]

I Intentionally added the word instant there for a reason, the idea is suppose to delay it in a sense that the father a CS is the less of an impact you should have on it. Just a little change to add some more depth to a bland mechanic.

About the AI, I think we really need to look at a diplomatic victory from a perspective that none of the AI want you in or would vote for you unless in dire situations. Which would mean that diplomacy victory should revolve around CSs and competing with the other Civs outside of war.

So I have a general idea of how I feel Diplomatic victory should work. DOW and capturing a CS would make it very hard to get Diplomatic win. You would have to compete via trade deals, protection, embargoes, and spies with other civs to gain the influence. As an example Instead of quests like get the most culture in 20 turns they would have stuff like set up an embassy in this Civ near us or have open boarders with the Civ that touches our CS boarder. Stuff that actually makes you have to play with the AI and get them to do things.

I would leave a lot of the voting functionally the same, extra delegates for the wonders and hosts but I would just change the method to rely on city states and create a diplomacy thing around them. The AI does not want to lose, it almost never makes sense for them to vote for you.

Well they 'wont' vote for you. If you have a diplomat in their capitals; you can discuss UN issues with them. On the issue of UN election, they will flat out refuse to vote for you,but can be bribed to vote for another Civ. Why this mechanic is even inplace I'm not too sure as you're unlikely to be taking votes away from a likely UN winner if all the AI always vote for themselves. This mechanism seems unfinished and could be patched later.

So anyways, there is that mechanic in place.

To go off on a tangent, if we want the AI to do anything other than vote for themselves *as some have complained* then the mechanic needs to be clear, and it maybe should just be an automatic vote split.

Before we get to how vote split is determined, I also agree the Civs themselves to increase their own delegate count, while nerfing the delegate count from city-states; perhaps leave it as 1 from CS instead of the current 2.

That will rebalance how votes are counted. On top of that, Civs themselves could earn extra delegates as the game progresses.

Extra votes could come from
- Globalization (diplomat in another civ's capital add 1 delegate - same as it is now, but this tech will be REQUIRED for UN victory) Once tech is researched; the bonus applies to all Civ; with the Civ researching receiving a bonus 2 delegates.
- a Social policy finisher?
- a National Wonder?
- A flat boost of delegate count for UN by an extra delegate
-

Extra votes removed from City states
- 1 delegate instead of 2

Once the votes have been slightly rebalanced; we may also consider vote splitting in situations where your cultural is influential to another Civ and their share their own ideology.

It can be on a sliding scale, where they split more of their votes your way if you meet more of the requirements.

This way, it will be another mini-game /sidequest with a set structure and rules, and not opaque which leads the human player to immediately accuse the developer of crafting an AI that is anti-human, even if there's perfectly legitimate diplomatic reasons programmed in.

At the same time, we want to avoid AI throwing entire blocks of vote against the human player just for 'challenge' as it opens the door for statelmated games, frustration and domination-lite situations that we've so far avoided in Civ5.

 

[Jezvin]

Well they 'wont' vote for you. If you have a diplomat in their capitals; you can discuss UN issues with them. On the issue of UN election, they will flat out refuse to vote for you,but can be bribed to vote for another Civ. Why this mechanic is even inplace I'm not too sure as you're unlikely to be taking votes away from a likely UN winner if all the AI always vote for themselves. This mechanism seems unfinished and could be patched later.

So anyways, there is that mechanic in place.

To go off on a tangent, if we want the AI to do anything other than vote for themselves *as some have complained* then the mechanic needs to be clear, and it maybe should just be an automatic vote split.

Before we get to how vote split is determined, I also agree the Civs themselves to increase their own delegate count, while nerfing the delegate count from city-states; perhaps leave it as 1 from CS instead of the current 2.

That will rebalance how votes are counted. On top of that, Civs themselves could earn extra delegates as the game progresses.

Extra votes could come from
- Globalization (diplomat in another civ's capital add 1 delegate - same as it is now, but this tech will be REQUIRED for UN victory) Once tech is researched; the bonus applies to all Civ; with the Civ researching receiving a bonus 2 delegates.
- a Social policy finisher?
- a National Wonder?
- A flat boost of delegate count for UN by an extra delegate
-

Extra votes removed from City states
- 1 delegate instead of 2

Once the votes have been slightly rebalanced; we may also consider vote splitting in situations where your cultural is influential to another Civ and their share their own ideology.

It can be on a sliding scale, where they split more of their votes your way if you meet more of the requirements.

This way, it will be another mini-game /sidequest with a set structure and rules, and not opaque which leads the human player to immediately accuse the developer of crafting an AI that is anti-human, even if there's perfectly legitimate diplomatic reasons programmed in.

At the same time, we want to avoid AI throwing entire blocks of vote against the human player just for 'challenge' as it opens the door for statelmated games, frustration and domination-lite situations that we've so far avoided in Civ5.

I don't really like any of this. A lot of the stuff you mentioning here doesn't directly relate to diplomacy short of the leader vote. Also it's diplomacy not democracy victory, so really the vote isn't even that important. But it is there, so working with it you could make the votes heavily based on CS and diplomacy with them. Getting the CS to vote for you for world leader makes more sense than the other Civs from a game perspective.

Diplomacy should be about maneuvering yourself through deals with the other Civs and CSs to your victory.

 

[VainoValkea]

One way to get started with diplomacy would be encouraging co-operation between civs. Currently, there is fairly little. For example, there is no reward for helping another civ by voting for them in the WC apart from an imaginary diplomatic boost. The ideology system has some good elements to work on, already.

 

[dexters]

I don't really like any of this. A lot of the stuff you mentioning here doesn't directly relate to diplomacy short of the leader vote. Also it's diplomacy not democracy victory, so really the vote isn't even that important. But it is there, so working with it you could make the votes heavily based on CS and diplomacy with them. Getting the CS to vote for you for world leader makes more sense than the other Civs from a game perspective.

Diplomacy should be about maneuvering yourself through deals with the other Civs and CSs to your victory.

Well the complaint is Diplo is 1) too easy 2) just economic victory

Diplomatic victory has been hard to quantify and do right ever since it was added in Civ3; there's always complaints about it.

The idea is to tweak it and rebalance it, not throw everything out.

I doubt for example, you're going to be able to get them to redo the whole system and if they did do it, to get an agreement of a diplomatic victory based on your 'actual' actions in game, as many casual players who are casually warmonger/builder hybrids will fail to win all the time due to their bad behaviour and I assume it will take out a lot of fun for people.

You'll also never get people to agree to limit how badly they can behave in-game; so many diety players exploit a lot of loopholes as it is.

I made a thread in ideas and suggestions; you can share your thoughts as well
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=501692

 

[PhilBowles]

One way to get started with diplomacy would be encouraging co-operation between civs. Currently, there is fairly little. For example, there is no reward for helping another civ by voting for them in the WC apart from an imaginary diplomatic boost.

It would be less imaginary if ideology didn't basically ride roughshod over any and all other diplomatic modifiers - if you share an ideology, they won't care how much you oppose them. It can stablise relations with civs with a differing ideology, though - it kept Hiawatha on my side for most of one game.

The ideology system has some good elements to work on, already.

One odd omission is the lack of any impact of ideology on city-states, very far from the Cold War scenario they're trying to recreate.

 

[dexters]

They'd have to make ideology spread like religion, could be too much data to handle?

But yeah, I kind of dislike how city states are still ultimately gold driven.

There needs to be clearer tiers to quests. A CS that has been your ally for a long time should be easier to sustain by giving you easy quests or predictably easy ones.

I often I have trade my lone luxury of something away and hope a few of my CS pops up asking for it to be connected to my trade nextwork. But I'll never know which CS and on what resource.

In the games I'm doing well, its' less of an issue as the fullfill faith/culture/science quests that come up the most often are easy to achieve. But imagine playing middle-of-the-pack Civ in a hard game and keeping your handful of CS allies gets really tough.

 

[budweiser]

I just did an Autocracy Diplo as Venice. You need science to get to the UN and money to buy the CS. That's it. I embargoed Greece and forced the world ideology to Autocracy. Messiah owns, it basically removes all the other religions.

 

[dexters]

I won diplo without researching Globalization on my last game. Not sure if its a bug, but that's one thing Im hoping they fix.

 

[NinjaGnat]

One odd omission is the lack of any impact of ideology on city-states, very far from the Cold War scenario they're trying to recreate.

Actually, that could be the ticket to making the diplomacy win interesting.

What if city states started adopting preferred ideologies, based on the total number of accumulated +/- relations boosts they've gotten over the ages? When they hit industrialization / modern, they'd pick the matching ideology of whoever has been their historically closest ally. This rewards having long-lasting relationships with city states throughout the game, and works to create natural spheres of influence.

Add massive penalties to accumulating favor for city states which don't favor your ideology (maybe even a 50-75% reduction in favor gains), and it suddenly becomes much more difficult for a civ to buy their allegiance. This penalty must be in the form of a favor reduction, if it only increases the rate at which relations fall it is stil possible to buy them out the night before the vote.

You could alter a city-state's ideology in 2 ways.

1. If a spy performs a coup on a city state successfully, it switches its preferred ideology to yours.

2. You can also use the threaten mechanic to force a city-state to change ideologies, but this should incur larger diplomatic penalties with their allies than just demanding gold. There may need to be a cooldown before they can be threatened back.

I'd be tempted to mod this in if I knew anything about how civ 5's resources actually worked.

 

[dexters]

Actually, that could be the ticket to making the diplomacy win interesting.

What if city states started adopting preferred ideologies, based on the total number of accumulated +/- relations boosts they've gotten over the ages? When they hit industrialization / modern, they'd pick the matching ideology of whoever has been their historically closest ally. This rewards having long-lasting relationships with city states throughout the game, and works to create natural spheres of influence.

Add massive penalties to accumulating favor for city states which don't favor your ideology (maybe even a 50-75% reduction in favor gains), and it suddenly becomes much more difficult for a civ to buy their allegiance. This penalty must be in the form of a favor reduction, if it only increases the rate at which relations fall it is stil possible to buy them out the night before the vote.

You can alter a city-state's ideology in 2 ways.

1. If a spy performs a coup on a city state successfully, it switches its preferred ideology to yours.

2. You can also use the threaten mechanic to force a city-state to change ideologies, but this should incur larger diplomatic penalties with their allies than just demanding gold. There may need to be a cooldown before they can be threatened back.

I'd be tempted to mod this in if I knew anything about how civ 5's resources actually worked.

I like coups being a switch in ideology rather than annoying switch in influence, often a huge chunk.

It keeps the late game interesting without it being too rigid. Part of the reason the CS are easy to acquire and there's no algorithm to determine relationship history IMHO is to prevent early game exploits and to lessen emphasis on the early game.

ie: If you befriend a bunch of city states early, it shouldn't just be a ticket/license to coast; Civ5 is designed to have several inflection points; and I think it's good to keep those in.

 

[PhilBowles]

I like coups being a switch in ideology rather than annoying switch in influence, often a huge chunk.

It keeps the late game interesting without it being too rigid. Part of the reason the CS are easy to acquire and there's no algorithm to determine relationship history IMHO is to prevent early game exploits and to lessen emphasis on the early game.

ie: If you befriend a bunch of city states early, it shouldn't just be a ticket/license to coast; Civ5 is designed to have several inflection points; and I think it's good to keep those in.

Well, this time ended up on a duel map Morocco vs. Portugal. I can't be accused of lacking money as Morocco - and yet somehow it still managed to keep only one of my CS allies while Portugal grabbed the rest. Granted I still had several centuries of play time and with over 100 gpt it would have been manageable with the CSes in the game (they seem to have upped the numbers of CSes on these small maps), but unless you're devoting all your gold production to CSes, and managing a lot of gold production, it's hard to see how you can win with just - or even mainly - gold.

Of course, if you can then the victory still comes from managing the gold resource well, just as culture victory comes from managing tourism well. Even if diplo victory was "merely" an economic victory, what's wrong with having an economic victory condition? Venice aside (so I've heard), accumulating that much gold is still a difficult skill to master.

 

[dexters]

Well, this time ended up on a duel map Morocco vs. Portugal. I can't be accused of lacking money as Morocco - and yet somehow it still managed to keep only one of my CS allies while Portugal grabbed the rest. Granted I still had several centuries of play time and with over 100 gpt it would have been manageable with the CSes in the game (they seem to have upped the numbers of CSes on these small maps), but unless you're devoting all your gold production to CSes, and managing a lot of gold production, it's hard to see how you can win with just - or even mainly - gold.

Of course, if you can then the victory still comes from managing the gold resource well, just as culture victory comes from managing tourism well. Even if diplo victory was "merely" an economic victory, what's wrong with having an economic victory condition? Venice aside (so I've heard), accumulating that much gold is still a difficult skill to master.

I think the ship has sailed on diplo being economic victory (there's nothing wrong with that IMHO); much better than Civ4's domination-lite victory which essentially rewarded vassaling neighbours.

That said, I think most of the discussion is around making diplomatic victory more interesting and less about just a pure rush for CS alliances on the final countdown to a vote.

 

[s0nny80y]

A diplo win is the equal of the world bank of former Civ economic victories. Favors, intrigue, economic management (gifts), practically spell 'economic' victory. Economic victory. Ha

The epic cold bidding war of handling spies, affording influence, and focusing resources in winning their favor against the competition highlights city state - civ relatioship as the barometer of the global 'marketplace.' (and luxury gifts!)

 

[NinjaGnat]

I like coups being a switch in ideology rather than annoying switch in influence, often a huge chunk.

It keeps the late game interesting without it being too rigid. Part of the reason the CS are easy to acquire and there's no algorithm to determine relationship history IMHO is to prevent early game exploits and to lessen emphasis on the early game.

ie: If you befriend a bunch of city states early, it shouldn't just be a ticket/license to coast; Civ5 is designed to have several inflection points; and I think it's good to keep those in.

True, the bar would need to be higher than just choosing patronage tree.

The overall goal of the system would be
1. Encourage more interaction city state politics late game, when gold bribes are much more effective than quest completion.
2. Raise the barrier to diplomatic victory, so one can't simply bribe the world in a single turn without crazy amounts of cash.

The reason I'd supported the idea of some carryover influence is to reward long-term alliances with city states, while preventing opportunistic exploits of the system. Consider the following:

America is nearby Brussels, and has been allied with them more or less the entire game. If Brussels chooses an ideology which doesn't match America's, it's just throwing an arbitrary penalty to the Americans. America is probably a position to threaten Brussels, but no player would be happy if that were really necessary in this situation.

On the other hand, we also don't want to encourage exploits. It should not be possible for America to opportunistically lock out Persia by bribing their allies just as the industrial era begins.

To get around this, all you'd need to do is raise the early game influence bar. Make it count turns at (90+)? influence only, a third level of allegiance which encourages the city state to adopt your ideology. If nobody has hit that level by the industrial era, or perhaps a required minimum number of turns at that level, it selects one at random.

Maybe I'll carry this on in the mods section if I get some time to look into it.

 

[thejayq]

I think diplomatic victory is also too easy. Not only from my own experience, but also many let's plays end with a diplomatic victory.

I think what makes it easy is that you can relatively quickly obtain this victory. When the voting for the world leader start the ideologies have not kicked in enough. I noticed that with the freedom ideology you could really boost your relationships with city-states (500 points was no exception), but for this you need a third tier policy.

I think that AI's have usually not reached this and therefore diplomatic victory is too easy. I mean if you had venice against you with the freedom ideology and trade routes with many city-states. Now that would be a challenge!

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

I'm too lazy to load up the game again to take pics, but here's the save a turn before the win if you're curious.

i loaded that up and it definitely didnt look or feel like an Immortal game, more like Emperor except for the turn count. i know they wanted to encourage more late-game play but seeing a ~t350 immortal game is still weird to me. maybe 1 in 10 immortal games pre-BNW went to t300 for me.