Please do not add a diplomatic victory condition

[Underseer]

I admit that I am a wuss. I play at the easiest difficulty level. And you know what? Even at the easy difficulty level, even with carefully avoiding wars, even negotiating trade deals that are unfair to me, almost everyone hates me all the time.

On a huge map, I might have one civ who likes me, two who are neutral, and everyone else hates my guts.

Screw this. Leave diplomatic victory out of the game entirely. I don't even want to know what it would take to get the other civilizations to like me. I'd rather not deal with it at all.

 

[Uberfrog]

I'd like to think that issues with the AI agendas can be ironed out before any such victory condition will even be considered to be added. I'd be interested to see what they could possibly do with it, so long as it didn't retread the vending machine diplomacy of Civ V. I already prefer how city-states operate.

 

[bbbt]

I don't think a theoretical diplomacy victory would depend on other players (Civ 5's didn't) - it would pretty much make it impossible in multiplayer.

 

[Amrunril]

I don't think a theoretical diplomacy victory would depend on other players (Civ 5's didn't) - it would pretty much make it impossible in multiplayer.

Right, it wouldn't make sense for multiplayer, or for single player if you expect the AI to act like a competitor that's actually trying to win the game. Civ V got around this by making diplomatic victory dependent primarily on city states, which would have worked well if it wasn't so easy to monopolize city states just by throwing cash at them. The Civ VI system, on the other hand makes it impossible to get that level of CS control by any means, which probably improves overall gameplay but would make a Civ V style diplomatic victory virtually impossible.

One tool that might be useful for making diplomatic victory work might be things like World Religion and World Ideology in Civ V, things that move you incrementally towards diplomatic victory but that other civs might have their own reasons to support. I don't think an expanded version of this would work on its own, but if you combined it with some city state diplomacy and perhaps other factors such as liberating conquered players, you could probably put together a satisfying victory condition.