How do you defeat the Apostolic Palace?

[Ankh]

My opinion is that AP is broken.

Having 1 religion in 1 city shouldn't be sufficient to screw a civ over with the various resolutions, never mind the diplomatic victory. At the very least the religion should be present in half the civ's cities before there is any effect from defying AP resolutions.

Only the cities with the AP religion in question suffers any penalties when you defy resolutions, the rest of your civ should be fine. Unless you have your most important cities converted you can defy the AP without suffering any serious damage.

 

[uberfish]

I thought it hit my entire civ last time, but I might have been mistaken which religion the AP was set to. I still think the religious victory condition is broken though.

 

[KMadCandy]

How are diplo victories easy... no one ever votes for me, they vote for themselves

they're not easy, that's what's fun! some of my most challenging games have been OCC diplo victory. my own votes count for diddly squat, if nobody votes for me i'm dead in the water. not to mention that if i don't build the UN i can't ever capture it, so there goes that plan. hell of a rush when it works tho

Also as someone already stated, run theology if your that afraid of the little palace, in order for a diplo victory to even be an option the religion has to be in every civilization in the world.. if it's not in any of your cities the option will never appear.

that's not a guarantee tho. spies can't spread religion directly. but they can influence civic changes. for example, in my current game i changed gilgamesh (who had the AP religion) to free religion with a spy, so that he was a voting member not a full member, and therefore i could hold votes to "assign his cities" to me, since he had a zillion troops in them. at 86% my culture they had no chance of revolt! that was driving me crazy, i wasn't in the mood for gunfire at that time, so i tried something different. it worked, he didn't defy the votes, i got 2 so far. ones i'd rather have razed and settled one tile over, but that just was not going to happen, so i took what i could get.

same game, hammurabi was in theocracy with no islamic (AP religion) cities. he'd had one, but i'd culture flipped it, so he'd changed from voting member to non-member and i lost the "assign city" vote for his holdings. almost all of his cities were safely buddhist, so i put him into OR by a spy and spread islam (my AP religion) to one city so that then he was then a non-voting member and i could vote to assign his cities. he veto'd that vote, but that meant i got to watch that city celebrate unhappiness because the world hated him, fun fun! my goal wasn't to enable the diplomatic victory option, i wanted the game to continue to see what would happen, but it would have given me the option to hold the vote.

i did not know before reading this thread that both the AP and the UN can be active at the same time, if the AP builder/holder doesn't know mass media. i suppose that does follow standard civ4 rules of "you discovering tech" obsoleting X rather than the old way of "mystery civ discovers tech and your life goes downhill", and i usually 100% prefer the civ4 way. but this case seems completely illogical. once i get over the frustration, i do actually enjoy seeing the computer beat me, if i knew i'd win all the time i'd get bored. but IMO the whole AP thing just isn't balanced atm it feels "cheap" to me, given my bias to favor diplo wins where you do need votes from others to win, and don't just have enough pop yourself. #1 definitely for all wins, i certainly do think that people should play games that are fun for them, and my biases don't matter one bit...your game, your free time, your rules, i have nothing to do with it since you play for yourself! just qualifying why my opinion on the whole AP victory under that "get that last civ one city so you can hold the vote and declare yourself da winnah" method to be cheap, rather than overpowered.

 

[MrFrodo]

The big thing to me here is that there needs to be a warning about what will happen when you conquer or flip a city that will allow the AP leader to call a Diplomatic Victory Election. The rules on the AP are not very clear, for a new player, or a pro new to BtS, or in the heat of the game you can make this game changing mistake too easily if you don't understand how the AP works.

 

[Florian]

When the religion spreads in your empire help to spread it to get votes, more hammers and to finally avoid losing to a vote.

Ankh, try to remember the context of this discussion. Sometimes you don't GET the AP religion until the Pope has already had it for 5000 years, and sometimes you're the last civ to get it. Good luck closing that 5000-year gap in a few turns.

This won't happen often, I'm sure. But once is too often. There are other unrealistic elements in the game, but most of them are conventions that make the game playable and more fun. The current AP victory mechanism doesn't solve a gameplay problem, doesn't make a shred of sense, and can't be ignored because it ENDS THE GAME.

If some stupid computer program told me that I had lost the game because some religion that accounts for only 20% the world's population, and maybe 1% of my own, had decided by 2/3 majority that I needed to take orders from a foreign monarch--regardless of the state of my army, my tech, or any of the things that actually matter in the game--I would want to erase that idiot from my hard drive. It's offensively stupid.

 

[Florian]

Only the cities with the AP religion in question suffers any penalties when you defy resolutions, the rest of your civ should be fine.

See now, that part is very well designed.

Maybe the AP victory condition just needs an option added to defy the decision. If you defy it, you get social unrest (as long as the AP still works) in cities that have the religion in question--serious unrest for cities where that religion is really big. Maybe some of them actually defect from your empire and join a "faithful" neighbor.

Or maybe when you get the majority vote to be Holy Universal Emperor, all the civs that voted for you should become a permanent alliance block in a state of perpetual holy war against all the civs that voted against you. That way, the strat where you hog the religion to yourself and then BANG spread it rapidly to one city in every other land would actually become suicidal. All the other civs would say, like they SHOULD, "Um... that joker over there is demanding that we bow down to him because his religion is superior to ours. Let's go kick his Buddhist butt."

Or maybe--and this is probably my best suggestion--you could have a worldwide vote where everyone participates regardless of whether the religion has spread to them or not--but the vote happens strictly along religious lines. All nations where the AP religion is the State Religion or the majority religion automatically vote for the Officeholder, and all nations with other State Religions or majority religions say, "What are you trying to pull?" and vote against him.

 

[Ankh]

Ankh, try to remember the context of this discussion. Sometimes you don't GET the AP religion until the Pope has already had it for 5000 years, and sometimes you're the last civ to get it. Good luck closing that 5000-year gap in a few turns.

This won't happen often, I'm sure. But once is too often. There are other unrealistic elements in the game, but most of them are conventions that make the game playable and more fun. The current AP victory mechanism doesn't solve a gameplay problem, doesn't make a shred of sense, and can't be ignored because it ENDS THE GAME.

Well said and I mostly agree with you. Alot of work can be done on the AP but as it stands now I feel it's good enough to be in the game. It enhances your game experience and often you can play around it but games like you mention above will happen and it sucks.

The diplomatic victory mechanism needs alot of work (actually I think they all do even the SS race) iv'e lost games to the UN when a random civ across the world manage to get enough votes for a win somehow and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Extremly boring, so I even played without diplomatic win enabled for a while. I had the option to disable it to to make the game enjoyable for me and I used it but then it was all about warfare so that got kinda boring but in the end I was fine with it. There needs to be a balance.

But understand before BtS when ppl were playing warlords players wrote and said that all they could do was vage war, civ4 was all about warfare, build fight, build fight. I can't win peacefully without waging war and the UN comes far to late for me (i'm a warmonger so this dosn't apeal to me but i understand their pov). Now with the introduction of the AP in BtS the builders can win the game long before the UN and that without a single shot being fired I think the AP win is mostly aimed for those players. Sure it's not for everyone, sure you or other may think it's poorly implemented and rightly so that's why we can disable it but as it stands now I think its good enough.

It may look horridious broken at first, sometimes when spreading religion for easy early wins but when you actually try it out you'll find that its pretty balanced to use and win with and woe it can even be fun. Also when you lose against it you can look back upon your game and often find a way to play around it like mentioned earlier as spreading the religion or using theocracy or by simply not waging war against the AP (something to draw the game away from all the war), not always but mostly.

Finally I think some can easy missunderstand how the AP actually works in the game (its fairly complicateed and poorly documented so I understand it) and draw wrong conclusions.

 

[Percy]

The diplomatic victory mechanism needs alot of work
[...]
Extremly boring,
[...]
There needs to be a balance.

All these pages when you, in fact, agreed with what i said

 

[ratrangerm]

After reading this thread, I think there is a very simple solution to the AP: When the UN is built by anybody, the AP becomes obsolete.

I agree with what Ankh wrote that the AP is there to offer an alternative to warfare as a way to get a victory in the early-to-mid-game, but with that being said, if the AP is there for an early-to-mid-game victory possibility, then it shouldn't come into play in the late game and the UN should take over as far as the diplomatic victory goes. So, therefore, when somebody build the UN, a diplomatic victory through the AP is no longer available (essentially, building the UN always obsoletes the AP, regardless of who builds what or who researches what).

I say make the UN, in some manner, obsolete the AP, because the other alternative is what happened in the previous three Civs, in which a wonder became obsolete when anybody discovered the tech that made it obsolete, even if the wonder's owner didn't have the tech.

Also, simply from a logic standpoint, I think it's silly that somebody can win a diplomatic victory with Free Religion as their civic. To me, somebody trying to unite religious folk under the AP should be adopting the religion in question as his/her state religion. So I'd also deactivate the diplomatic win through AP if you adopt Free Religion, or have no state religion adopted to begin with.

And I don't say that because the original poster in question lost to somebody who adopted Free Religion... replace Darius with, for example, Saladin and FR wouldn't be in the equation because Saladin will keep Theocracy as his religious civic because it's his favorite civic.

I would argue, though, that diplomatic victories are tough to achieve either way, although the UN seems to make it more on a grander scale, given that you have to, in practical purposes, get "all the votes" fomr a civ rather than get "the votes of a segment of the population" from that civ.

 

[SickCycle]

I enjoy the apostle palace, I think it is very powerful and I also think that no matter what there is always going to be a game feature that is above the rest, nothing will ever be perfectly balanced.

With that said, I think they need to just remove the diplomatic victory option from the apostle palace in general or seriously tweak it so that it has to do with converting everyone to your religion possibly, or alternatively, you should have to have a large portion of the world under the influence of your religion, say 75-85% of every civ must be your religion.

I think they also need to change how the AI deals with voting, I think if the AI only has two or three small cities out of there entire empire and your doing a vote that would effect them negatively they should defy, period, or if they are friends or have lucrative trade routes with a civ they are trying to declare war on/break trade routes, they should defy end of story. I also think defying resolutions should earn you a negative diplomacy against all civs that didn't defy and a larger negative against civs that voted yes.

In addition I don't think defying a resolution should make it fail, I think only that civ should not have to comply and then the voting goes as normal if it passes without that civ it passes if not it goes through, with the addition of the negative modifiers for defying, this would make more sense to me. You could also make people lose there voting power if they defy a resolution, or possibly the apostle palace religion could be removed from that persons civ without a chance to return for a certain amount of time.

I also think that the way unhappiness is given to cities with the religion should not only be scaled by population but by the percentage of people that follow the faith within that city, I don't believe there is a mechanism in the game for this right now so instead of making a whole new mechanism which wont happen, I think that if there is only the apostle palace religion in the city it should give full negative effects and if there is say one other religion we just assume it's 50/50, basically just divide it by the number of religions in that city.

Last but not least, free religion should remove you from the voting process and keep the apostle palace from effecting you at all, also I think that when you run theology it should remove all other religions from your civ and by such protect you from the palace.

In fact I don't think you should be able to have multiple religions in your city at a time until free religion, this would also remove a lot of the power the apostle palace has.

Actually, it could be done so that you are allowed to have more then one religion in a city but if it's a religion not of your state religion before free religion it adds a unhappines,s then add a mechanism/unit that is able to remove the religion with some sort of negative effect but it should remove it permanently as long as your state religion stays the same. However, if your running theocracy it should elimate all outside religions from your cities in addition to keeping people from spreading theres in your civ.

All that would of course add some negative effects to the game that people would then just whine about instead but I like that system better.

They should also take more of the apostle palace features and apply them to the united nations as well as some of the suggestions such as negative modifiers for defying a resoltion.

 

[Percy]

An idea i had reading the new ALC installment.

I think it would make sense if, when building the AP or the UN, the city it is built in was revealed to all those who get to vote. Not necessarily what the city is building and all, but its location, size, and fat cross. After all, if you vote for the leader of the AP/UN, you know where it is.
The point is, of course, to not make it always advantageous to build it, and to spread the religion to people who hate you in the sole objective of electing yourself leader of the world. It would make it easier for those who wish to do so to come and raze the city, forcing you to protect it.

Another potentially interesting idea (if i do say so myself) is to mimick the real-life AP even closer: the city where you build it becomes a "colony". It is benevolent towards you, but if you piss them off, they won't like you. And you can always try to conquer them to get your city back, but by doing so you would get a massive negative modifier in the cities who have the religion of the AP, and with the civs that share this religion.

What do you think of these ideas? It most certainly needs balance and thought, but what do you think of detailing the diplomatic/religious model a bit more?

 

[CivScientist]

Another potentially interesting idea (if i do say so myself) is to mimick the real-life AP even closer: the city where you build it becomes a "colony". It is benevolent towards you, but if you piss them off, they won't like you. And you can always try to conquer them to get your city back, but by doing so you would get a massive negative modifier in the cities who have the religion of the AP, and with the civs that share this religion.

I like this idea a lot. It's a shame it will probably never be done, though.

 

[Percy]

In the official game? Probably not, but you never know. In a mod? Depends if the idea is interesting or not

 

[Florian]

Who would build a wonder that made them lose the city that built that wonder? You can't construct something like the AP in some little border town; it will be one of your best production centers.

Anyway, in real life the whole city of ROME isn't independent, just the few blocks where the Vatican is.

 

[SickCycle]

An idea i had reading the new ALC installment.

I think it would make sense if, when building the AP or the UN, the city it is built in was revealed to all those who get to vote. Not necessarily what the city is building and all, but its location, size, and fat cross. After all, if you vote for the leader of the AP/UN, you know where it is.
The point is, of course, to not make it always advantageous to build it, and to spread the religion to people who hate you in the sole objective of electing yourself leader of the world. It would make it easier for those who wish to do so to come and raze the city, forcing you to protect it.

Another potentially interesting idea (if i do say so myself) is to mimick the real-life AP even closer: the city where you build it becomes a "colony". It is benevolent towards you, but if you piss them off, they won't like you. And you can always try to conquer them to get your city back, but by doing so you would get a massive negative modifier in the cities who have the religion of the AP, and with the civs that share this religion.

What do you think of these ideas? It most certainly needs balance and thought, but what do you think of detailing the diplomatic/religious model a bit more?

even though we obviously don't get along ... i think those are great ideas

 

[axident]

For UN or AP, they should have a Final War option a la Master of Orion: you can accept the voting of someone else as the Diplomatic Victor, or you can defy it and all the other civs go into a big Permanent Alliance and it's Always War, no diplomacy allowed, after that.

 

[Percy]

Who would build a wonder that made them lose the city that built that wonder?

The same persons who establish 4-6 cities on a different landmass and later grant them colony status. The people who want to have a strong ally, always readily willing to trade resources and techs. Of course, if you did build the AP, and even though it would become independent, you would have a strong advantage. The mechanism of "head of the Palace" could remain, except that it would be your straw-man... That is, unless you piss them off =)

You can't construct something like the AP in some little border town; it will be one of your best production centers.

You're mentioning restrictions due to the current AP when talking about a project of a revamped AP. Maybe the cost should be lowered. Or maybe the advantages it gives should be much more substantial to your civs than they already are so that it is enough motivation for you to "sacrifice" a city. I dunno, that's only ideas i'm throwing around, and you're free to dislike them =)

Anyway, in real life the whole city of ROME isn't independent, just the few blocks where the Vatican is.

Yeah, but the Vatican is an independent state, recognized as sovereign by the UN. And you cannot really have two cities at the same place in CIV

 

[mudphud]

With that said, I think they need to just remove the diplomatic victory option from the apostle palace in general or seriously tweak it so that it has to do with converting everyone to your religion possibly, or alternatively, you should have to have a large portion of the world under the influence of your religion, say 75-85% of every civ must be your religion.

I think they also need to change how the AI deals with voting, I think if the AI only has two or three small cities out of there entire empire and your doing a vote that would effect them negatively they should defy, period, or if they are friends or have lucrative trade routes with a civ they are trying to declare war on/break trade routes, they should defy end of story. I also think defying resolutions should earn you a negative diplomacy against all civs that didn't defy and a larger negative against civs that voted yes.

I agree that the AP victory should have a required level of the religion spread to the world (not one city in each civ). I would put it at 50-60% of the world's population follows it. Your suggestion of 75% of every civ seems way too high - that is never going to happen.

The AI definately should definately defy more often. Give away a city just because I got one of your borders cities to follow my faith? That city is so small the unhappiness would hardly matter.

 

[Phrederick]

I just tried winning an AP diplo victory, and it was much easier than I expected. I conquered one civ early, at which point there were three others; two weak and one strong, each with their own religion. I didn't have an opportunity to found my own, so I adopted the nearest weak neighbor's religion, built the AP, conquered him, then spread it to the last two AIs, and won in the 1200s.

So yeah, it probably should be tweaked a little.

 

[tucnymaster]

Run state property should remove the effects of apostolic palace but will destroy your very effective coporations