So I was hoping there would be some discussion about the first World Congress, specificylly the outcome of the World Religion vote.
View attachment 515262
It says that "World Religion" passed with Outcome A and the Elected Target "Eastern Orthodoxy".
Behind we see that Outcome A got 7 votes and Outcome B 3.
Now let's tally up the individual votes for the elected targets that are listed below:
Outcome B: 3 Votes for Elected Target "Protestantism" (Kristina)
Outcome A: 2 Votes for Elected Target "Protestantism" (Kupe, Harald)
Outcome A: 2 Votes for Elected Target "Eastern Orthodoxy" (Laurier, Peter)
Outcome A: 1 Vote for Elected Target "Islam" (Mansa Musa)
Outcome A: 1 Vote for Elected Target "Shinto" (Inca)
Outcome A: 1 Vote for Elected Target "Catholicism" (Hungary)
So the way I listed these, already reveals that I'm of the opinion that Outcome B should have won.
But it seems that first the Outcome votes are tallied up and then the Elected Targets are tallied up.
This changes the way you should vote significantly. Look at the Mercenary Example:
Outcome A: +100% cost for the Elected Target (Faith, Production, Money)
Outcome B: -50% cost for the Elected Target (Faith, Production, Money)
I know that my opponent has a lot of Faith and I want to prevent him from getting Outcome A (Faith).
In fact I want to hurt him with Outcome B: -50% (Faith). I pour 5 Votes into it costing me a lot of favour.
But the rest of the Congress votes for Outcome A: (Production) with 4 votes and my opponent votes Outcome A (Faith) with two votes. So even though I was hell bent on preventing it, my voting Outcome B had nothing to do with the failure of the proposal.
Even worse, imagine the AIs would have voted for Outcome A: (Production) with 3 votes and Outcome A: (Faith) with three votes and the tie would have gone to Outcome A: (Faith).
So if you want to prevent someone from getting Outcome A: (Faith) it makes more sense to vote Outcome A: (somehting else) to prevent him from getting it, than if you vote Outcome B.
Am I the only one that finds this counter-intuitive?
I like that they wanted to give us a lot of options with the World Congress, but I fear they might have overshot the target a little bit. With the religion thing alone there are 10 proposals, when you have 5 religions. That's often more possible proposals than civs, who are voting/proposing.
You are not really voting on issues, you are putting things forward, and whoever puts something forward the most, wins. Unless it's from a different sub-category (Outcome A or Outcome B) then you're out of luck. The system is just really messy and hard to understand. I like the World Congress, but I find the implementation to be needlessly confusing.
What are your oppinions on the voting mechanism?