Fun with World Congress

[EK834]

The feature is limited, but for a rich enough Civ (like Venice) with money to spare there are ways to use the WC in fun ways.

Here are my two favorites:

Become the "factor of discord".:

This one works if you want to harm the host or the other civ that put a proposal on the table. It works best after ideologies were chosen. If you can make a proposal yourself, you go with a popular one that will give you a diplo bonus with your new ideological enemies, like International Games. Then it's time for your diplomats to go to on a world tour. You buy the votes of all the friends of the host, so they'll vote Nay on his proposal.

Then there are two options: either you dent his relations with his friends by having his proposal defeated - he won't be pleased with them for this (but you abstained yourself, escaping any blame), or you and your friends get a diplo bonus by voting Yea and making sure it passes - he will be pleased with you.

It's not really an optimal use of gold, but it's fun to do on King.

But my favorite is really the "Great Diversion".

For Venice and it's two puppet CS it's time to get Freedom passed as World Ideology, but the world is very divided. You have most of the CS and two other Freedom civs you can count on, but Order has 5 civs and Autocracy has two (I've also pulled it off once with 1 Freedom, 8 Order, 3 unaligned). Few if any of those 7 will agree to vote for Freedom as WI, at any price. But the world needs Freedom, right?

You look at the second proposal, whatever it is, and get your devious Venetians diplomats on the road. First buy to the Freedom cause the 3 still unaligned Civs. Then it's time to spread the truth unearthed by Maria Theresa about the suffering of those poor, poor Truffles that seem to worry her enough to propose their banning. The world can't lose its time on mere trifles like World Ideology when there are truffles to save ("they're so abused they end up looking like boars" Ambassador Giovanni tells Maria Theresa who can only nod gravely and shed a tear to that).

And thus you buy the votes around the world to get those poor Truffles banned and make it the great Venetian-Austrian crusade. That's all votes than won't go against your World Ideology. Casimir that autocrat, capital-swallowing monster has truffles, mountains of boar-looking mushrooms, and he won't budge, or ask for too much to agree to a ban? No matter, your diplomat is crafty and can plead a huge misunderstanding and tell him that it's of course ludicrous to worry about the feelings of mushrooms and you're certainly not on any crusade to have them banned, on the contrary it's all a scheme to fool old Maria Theresa - and you simply give him a little gift to have his delegates vote Nay. Soon all the broadcast towers of the world will report about the Truffle Crisis of 1865, the biggest geopolitical issue dividing the world and that will nearly tear it apart during two more decades on Epic. On the day of the vote the world's population will be on the edge of their seat to learn the fate of the poor Truffles and in the next room the leaders will only send a few extras delegates and CS allies to vote against Freedom. Surely the honorable Venice with its 17 delegates will do the right thing for the poor things.

Just make sure fellow Presidents Maria I and Theodora remember to stay focused (by buying their votes for Freedom, just in case their soft hearts bleed too much over the poor mushrooms) and soon a few Civs might even join the rank of Freedom, the new World Ideology, starting with Maria Theresa, her whole nation apparently so inconsolable after the great Truffle debacle they no longer like Order.

One thing to remember if you have a wide, expensive vote buying strategy in the works: if the world switch era between the time you bought delegates and the vote, you will only get the (core) delegates the AI had at the time of the bribe. You won't get their new delegate automatically. As bought votes are calculated apart, the AI can put have the new delegate vote against its other ones, exactly as it can with its extra WW or CS delegates.... which can lead to a very expensive failure.

Other interesting WC strategy to share? Does Standing Army Tax work to force an Autocrat with a ridiculously huge army to scale it down, for instance?

 

[redwings1340]

I really like beelining radio and passing the world ideology before anyone else gets an ideology.

Otherwise, I play what I imagine is pretty standard in the world congress. I've found that proposing the army tax is a massive trap, as usually what happens is that the people with the biggest armies get angry at you... and then go to war with you. Banning nuclear weapons can be useful though, especially considering how terrible the AI is at air combat, and nukes are their only counter to my bombers. I've never seen the AI propose either of these though. Basically though, I also embargo civs I don't like, pass the world wonder bonus if I get a lot of those, pass scholars in residence if I'm behind in tech, and propose world projects whenever I can.

If I can't become the host, I often give my votes of hosting to my ally instead of just voting for myself, which is kind of cheating the game (as you're the only civ with this power), but is also really useful, and provides a nice diplo benefit if that player already liked you. If I know I can't block a proposal or know a proposal can't pass, I'll put up one vote for it for the diplo benefits.

 

[EK834]

I really like beelining radio and passing the world ideology before anyone else gets an ideology.

I used to do that but at the moment on King post-patch, on some maps anyway, I still need to re adjust my strategy to get that far ahead of the leading civs. With Venice + 2 puppets I'm rarely ahead by more than 4-5 techs in the Modern Era, so ideologies come into play more in my games (which is good, I only had that on Emperor before and I prefer to play more casual games on King). Casimir had coal (while not a single CS had it, so I did not either) and got Autocracy very early. I could have taken Order first but decided on Freedom for the challenge. It was really fun to turn the tide and slowly rebuild my pre ideology friendships afterward (diplomacy was a real mess in that game, with Order civs still having DoF and deals with civs that since switched to Freedom)

For the standing army tax I've managed to make it work only once so far, in that same game. I had the second biggest army (again as Venice) but "Casimir the Terrible" had 6x the average,(and 38 cities) and controlled 5 capitals, with 2 more in his grasp. I was rich and while a human player could easily have taken me out I was basically impregnable to the AI at my location because of its weaknesses in using its units. I got DoWed by Casimir for it, but 30 turns after the measure came into effect and his gold reserves ran out half his army had been disbanded, and he began razing the cities he took. It stalled the frightening growth of his tourism, and I finally managed to get a small edge (not enough to hope to win Culturally). Casimir did conquer the last two weaker civs on the continent and razed all but their capitals, but now left the others alone, suddenly going for a science victory to which I beat him by the ability to buy spaceship parts, after "cheating" by abstaining to avoid winning diplomatically. It was my most entertaining game in a long while (I love the slightly harder King level so far, though it could be buffed even a bit more). So maybe the combination of SAT + CS embargo was what stopped him in his track to Domination, but hard to be sure (aside from me he would have had to bring war to the other continent to finish it, the AI is fairly bad at that). With my other attempts to use SAT to harm the warmongers didn't seem to have any effect even though they ended up running huge deficits.

I like to ban nukes, especially when few or only myself have them . I also do vote Yea to a measure for the diplo bonus, and when I have no hope to be host, I carefully pick the civ I will vote for, either a friend or the civ from which I stand to gain the most diplomatically by doing this. I just really wished they bothered to program the AI properly to do the same so it didn't feel like cheating so much... When they have no chance to win and a friend (DoF) has an edge over them (from FP, CS, World Religion etc.) they should really vote for that civ. They should all be negotiable for the next host election too, if they have a DoF with you. Just that would really spice things up diplomatically.

I wished we had a few more cool options to play with in the WC, like emergency sessions taking place 5 turns after a war is declared, where the host, if he has the guts for it, could pick a response from a series of possibilities like:

- Global denunciation: all Civs voting Yea denounce the attacker. 66% of the diplomatic effects of those denunciations are removed when peace is signed. Civs that vote Nay keep their relationship to the attacker but suffer a hit with all Civs and CS that voted Yea.
- Embargo of the attacker by all civs and CS. Can be defied by any civ (and their CS allies), with a diplo hit with all the Yea civs. Stays in effect until a peace treaty is signed.
- War compensations. The attacker if he complies and end the war immediately is forced to give back his conquests and pay gpt to its victim (the compensations could be a percentage of the price of the units he killed, divided by 30 or 45 turns).
- Punitive war. All civs who vote Yay join a WC coalition that declares war on the attacker (without DoW). No warmongering penalties apply (except a big diplo hit from the attacker toward the coalition civs), but when the attacker makes peace with his victim all his conquests and their conquests are returned to their owners.
- Status Quo: the world chooses to look the other way for 5 more turns. Those who vote yea to this suffer a diplo hit with the victim and his CS allies.

The warmonger can comply with the decision of the WC. It ends his war immediately and he suffers only 25% of the normal warmongering penalties. If he defies the resolution, he immediately suffers a +50% of warmongering penalties with everyone who voted Yea, with a 25% extra every five turn he keeps defying new resolutions.

This shouldn't be available until fairly late (Atomic Era at the earliest) as a challenge for warmongers that do not achieve Domination early enough.

I would also change the WL vote so only the three civs with the most delegates are eligible in a first turn, and if there's no majority ten turns later only the two contenders who got the most votes are eligible. Civs would give all their votes for a best Friend (DoF), and one vote at Friendly, with a second one if they are friendly to one but hostile to the other contender. Otherwise they'd abstain.

 

[Forkandles]

hehehe good stuff on the truffles tactic

 

[redwings1340]

I used to do that but at the moment on King post-patch, on some maps anyway, I still need to re adjust my strategy to get that far ahead of the leading civs. With Venice + 2 puppets I'm rarely ahead by more than 4-5 techs in the Modern Era, so ideologies come into play more in my games (which is good, I only had that on Emperor before and I prefer to play more casual games on King).

I managed to do this once on Deity pre-patch (with Poland though), and Emperor a lot pre-patch, but I haven't played post-patch yet. If you get almost the bare minimums for radio, and save Oxford for that tech, you can get to the modern era really quickly, even if you aren't hugely ahead in tech. You'll need to spend your money on city states to pass the ideology, but radio doesn't have many prereqs, and gives you a ton of awesome benefits. It synnergizes with city states too, because the city state bonuses will go up when you reach the modern era, so that's awesome.