I appreciate you making this thread, it makes a lot of sense to gather the discussion on this subject in one place. I think the poll would have been more useful if it had options like 'nerfed a little' or 'nerfed a lot' though. I would support one but not the other.
(Often without the player able to find anyone to partner with.)
My view is this tends to only be the case when a player neglects diplomacy in favour of other things. If nobody wants to be friends with you there's usually a reason for that. E.g. you're building all the wonders, allied all the city-states, claimed a lot of territory or been aggressive towards towards other civs. In some cases (e.g. Deity difficulty) you may not have the luxury of being able to win by playing nice, but I would argue that's a feature of picking the hardest setting to play on.
Of course, it's not always obvious how to work that part of the system to get it to work in your favour. One option to help make this the case is what
@kawyua said: make the expiration time of Defensive Pacts visible. This certainly weakens them and tbh I feel it makes part of the function a lot less useful. If I'm trying to protect a small nation with many enemies it's a bit cheap if they just wait on the borders for our treaty to run out, and hope I forget to visit Vienna to renew their lifeline. On the other hand, it's a lot less effort for the AI to check if a treaty is still valid every turn than it is for a player, and I would prefer this to more radical changes.
Limiting the number of defensive pacts a civ is able to make has been talked about a lot. I think a hard limit of 1 under most circumstances is too severe, and while it will make starting wars easier it will also devalue investment in diplomatic relations. Perhaps more importantly, I think it will have the unintended consequence or making it harder for players to get defensive pacts than it is already. If part of the criticism of DPs is that the players rarely benefits from them; I don't see reducing how the number of DPs available is going to fix that.
I agree that a civ being allied with everyone except you is silly; that's no fun for anyone. But one half of the world against the other, 2 against 3 or even 2 against 4 doesn't seem unrealistic. One DP at a time would make those kind of dynamics much rarer. Particularly for larger maps where the standard competition is 8 or 12 civs, it reduces the potential nuances in diplomatic play. Something that might reduce the extremes but keep the richness in the middle-ground would be a higher limit like 2, or 3. That still has little impact on smaller maps though - where 3 civs might be the entire rest of the world. So I would say that ideally the number of defensive pacts should scale with map size the way religions do. E.g 1 on smaller maps, 2 on standard, and 3 or 4 on larger maps.
It has been said that there is very little counter-play available, which makes the option feel overpowered.
People seem to forget there
are counter-plays for DPs. You can join an existing war, bribe someone to declare war against your target first, or agree to a joint war that a common enemy has offered you. In some cases you can just wait for the DP to expire - you don't need to check every turn, every 4 or 5 turns will do. If the civ you are targeting is doing something like conquering cities or building all the wonders, their good relations are going to break down over time. Plus, if the person you hate also hates you, they may declare war on you first. Sometimes they even give you opportunities to provoke them into doing so. Things won't always happen on your terms, but that's the nature of diplomacy.
I'm not a stranger to the frustration of trying to attack someone who has lots of DPs and feeling that if you were in their position (i.e. winning) that would never be possible because it requires you to do things that upsets people (i.e. beat them at stuff). That's the nature of playing against an AI with numerical/yield advantages - they are going to win unless you do something to even the odds. The higher the difficult the harsher this contrast is going to be. IMO diplomatic relations are just a resource like any other though - each decision you make (should I settle here or there?) is a toss-up between different factors. Just like good city management, good troop management, and good economic management, if you want to win on the highest difficulty you have to excel at managing relationships. And like building a water mill so that your city can grow, building relationships with things like trade deals, careful use of denouncements and, yes, defensive pacts can be used to your advantage instead of your rival's.
If you don't want to do that, adjust your settings so that you don't have to: a bigger map or fewer civs/city-states reduces border conflict, fewer civs means less disparity between wonders, more city-states relative to players means less fierce competition over them. Or simply try playing on a lower difficulty. I'm thinking about doing that myself for an entirely different reason at the moment (religion). I think there's a certain amount unwillingness to accept defeat in all of us. But the AI is always getting smarter, and what might have been manageable for players in the past is sometimes a struggle. That's OK. It can mean there's an inbalance, but it can also means that we are succeeding in our jobs at pushing the AI (and the mods) to constantly improve . And that's something to be proud of
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