The Diplomatic Victory needs to be changed.

[MerchantCo]

Even with the Brave New World expansion, winning a Diplomatic Victory is uninteresting and unsatisfying. Hoarding gold until you can make alliances with all of the city states? No thanks, I'd rather send a manned spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, dominate the world with culture, or conquer the world with my armies. It isn't even diplomatic - you can win a "diplomatic" victory regardless of your global status. Attila the Hun winning a diplomatic victory when everyone despises him? Perhaps the Zulus, right after a conquering spree banished several civilizations off the map? How is this a "diplomatic" victory?

Instead, each civilization should vote for "the most beloved civilization". Civilizations cannot vote for themselves, of course. The civilization with the most votes wins. Simple as that. It's like voting for the Holy Roman Empire in Into The Renaissance. Get the most DoF's, don't irritate other civilizations, and keep everyone happy. Use diplomacy to acquire victory - now that's a diplomatic victory!

 

[VainoValkea]

I dislike all that "beloved" stuff. I wouldn't vote for any civ that was likely to win - and if possible, I wouldn't vote for anyone else than myself. Someone else winning means you lose. The AI already is handicapped significantly by not being a sentient supercomputer with unlimited time to complete its turns, at least let it play to win.

The current system is lame, yes, although I wonder why people still talk of it being the "gold" victory when ideologies outshine gold by far when it comes to making CS friends...

 

[Sabrina]

I kind of agree with the OP, still don't know how it could really work in the game. It is frustrating when you struggle in the beginning of the game to win quests and make CS alliances and when these things really start to pay off, someone else comes and snaps centuries of alliance with cash. It doesn't matter how much you helped those city-states, they wil give delegates to the player who pays better. The civs shouldn't be able to vote for themselves because this makes a diplomatic victory a simple matter of cash. Of course one can always use spies/diplomats to stage coups and buy votes, but I don't think votes for the world leader can be bought from civs and, on the CS front, when the election is announced, there is not enough time to move your spies and stage al the necessary coups.

 

[VainoValkea]

Votes for world leader can't be bought (except from City-States, if you weren't earning them from ideology tenets anyway). At least I haven't seen the AI ever agree to sell me world leader votes, which makes perfect sense, really - if the player wins, the AI loses, so they should only sell them if they were 100% certain the player wouldn't win using those extra votes.

The problem with AI "affection" towards the player is not just the balance gap of one party being allowed free thought and strategy while the others are forced to conform to a rigid set of rules. It wouldn't work in multiplayer at all. That's why I think they should instead concentrate on making the City-States be more interesting and the AI more aggressive when it comes to holding them.

Finally, I must ask about one pretty serious thing you've forgotten:

Civilizations cannot vote for themselves, of course

Do you realize what this implies? If you can't vote for yourself, having more delegates becomes downright detrimental. That would be far worse than the current system.

 

[MerchantCo]

@VainoValkea: Each civilization gets one vote each, how about that?

Of course, it couldn't work for multiplayer. Something else would have to be done.

 

[sw204me]

You all basically described exactly how real life politics work in the American govt....

 

[VainoValkea]

I think they should create one system that works for multiplayer and single player. It's the most sensible option. There's lot of options to work with. I would personally consider tying diplomatic victory to ideologies or something like that, to work with the Cold War blocks the game already tries to encourage.

 

[MerchantCo]

Good idea.

 

[Polisurgist]

If they were going to do something that could "force" a player's hand in a world leader vote, I could see it working as a magnified version of how ideology unhappiness already works. Like, your people will be unhappy following an ideology different from a civ they look up to, but maybe even if you follow the same ideology, they could become unhappy if you keep voting against the guy whose empire is clearly more well-run than their own. So you'd basically be winning diplomatically by proving that everyone else would be better off taking orders from you than from their actual leader.

...this is starting to sound like how the tourism victory already works, though.

 

[VainoValkea]

I was thinking of each ideology block having some leader, based on some criterion that's not tourism. A bit like America led Freedom, Germany led Autocracy and Soviet Russia led Order. Said leaders' power in diplomatic victory votes would depend on their amount of "followers" - others following the same ideology. However, that has a caveat: there could be another civ stronger than the leader tourism-wise, who would then influence other civs to flip to the same ideology, helping the ideology block's leader win diplomatically which is against the tourism-bully follower's interests. So maybe not...

 

[Polisurgist]

I was thinking of each ideology block having some leader, based on some criterion that's not tourism. A bit like America led Freedom, Germany led Autocracy and Soviet Russia led Order. Said leaders' power in diplomatic victory votes would depend on their amount of "followers" - others following the same ideology. However, that has a caveat: there could be another civ stronger than the leader tourism-wise, who would then influence other civs to flip to the same ideology, helping the ideology block's leader win diplomatically which is against the tourism-bully follower's interests. So maybe not...

Actually...what if the leader wasn't determined by a single vote, but if it were the aggregate effect of votes for that leader's proposals? Like, if half the world is voting for your proposals, they're more or less acting as if you were the world leader anyway. You could still influence it with money by buying votes, but the core of it would be about picking proposals that the rest of the world actually wants to follow and then getting them passed.

 

[TyBoy]

I like that idea a lot. The diplomatic victory would get triggered when you've accumulated a certain number of yeas for proposals that you sponsored. Having a large number of personal votes would still be useful, but you could set the number high enough that it would be a relatively slow victory. Economy would still play a major role, you'd just be paying other civs instead of CSs.

It would inspire a certain amount of leading from behind, picking proposals that were likely to get a lot of votes rather than ones you might actually want. That's probably what a lot of international diplomacy is though.


While it would be good and logical for ideology to play an important role in the diplomatic victory it's heavily intertwined with the culture victory currently, as you said. One small thing that could be tweaked is that you could have the intel on likely votes show up when you're picking proposals, so sharing an ideology would help pick popular proposals. Also, the AI could factor how much they like the sponsor into their voting.

Anything that depends on forcing ideology switches is not going to scale well into higher difficulties the way the game currently plays.

 

[tiger12348]

Play on a huge map, so there are more CIVs more CSs, more votes required to win, so you cant buy them all, then you will have to rely on ideology benifits like gunboat diplomacy from autocracy, even this will requires you to be relatively close to most of the CSs. Or just tick it off out of sight out of mind.

 

[Fish Man]

How about we make it so that MULTIPLE leaders of the SAME ideology could win the game, but only up to 2-3? I'm sure there's a way to work somehow, but at the present moment it seems like a good system since it actually encourages meaningful relationships between civs.

 

[newarkinvaders]

Play on a huge map, so there are more CIVs more CSs, more votes required to win, so you cant buy them all, then you will have to rely on ideology benifits like gunboat diplomacy from autocracy, even this will requires you to be relatively close to most of the CSs. Or just tick it off out of sight out of mind.

I find that no matter how many city states you have you can still easily buy them all . Buying them each in turn will snowball . Once you are getting enough of a spread of them you will be able to flog all your luxuries to raise money to buy more , you can stop producing units and develop your infrastructure , your citys will all grow to a large size , especially your capital . There usually comes a time when you are earning silly amounts and then its just a matter of time .

 

[DemonMaster]

The problem isn't the voting system (edit: with BNW I mean, G&K is crap), the problem is that money is easier to come around again (if you want it).

Two possible solutions:
* One solution could be that you can only give 250 gold and also only once per turn. The cash Quest in this case won't increase influence for that money (as it does now) but instead unlocks the 500 gold and 1000 gold gifts for as long as the quest lasts.
* Another solution could be that you can only give money once per 10 turns (or so).

Both of these forces you to rely on quests mostly for the CS influence.

Also, they should force anyone that DoW a CS to be at war for 10 turns, so at least it would be a little annoying for those players that do the "free worker" tactics.

 

[VainoValkea]

The problem is with the CS system, not just the fact that you can buy influence. Arsenal of Democracy, Treaty Organization and Gunboat Diplomacy yield far more influence than gold can reasonably counter, forming essentially permanent CS alliances.

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

Just an idea, how to make it more comlex.
I think CS's should have their prefered ideology. That would create a real "cold war" between blocks in a game. If you pick f.e. order, graining influence in Kiev, Hanoi, or Almaty (let say they prefer order) will look just like now, or maybe even slighty easier. But Brussels will prefer f.e. freedom, and they will not like you so much. And your here mission is to balance this negative factor. How?
1. By propaganda. Maybe using tourism mechanic, or maybe with a new UU/GP/Spy "The propagandist"
2. By force conquering CS, but this will cause more negative factors in freedom CS's and Civilizations
3. By revolution (Spies)
4. By fulfilling a special quests
Anything but... not money. There are many options.

 

[DemonMaster]

The problem is with the CS system, not just the fact that you can buy influence. Arsenal of Democracy, Treaty Organization and Gunboat Diplomacy yield far more influence than gold can reasonably counter, forming essentially permanent CS alliances.

Those things are quite high rank tenants and also they do cost commitment in order to get the influence and also time. With an income of several hundreds of gold each turn (even more sometimes) is worth much more regarding influence and are also more direct and doesn't need commitment of units and or trade routes.

I am not against bribing, but it is very easy (humanwise anyway) to just bribe and yawn anything up.
So even if for example you offer a trade route to get influence, you have spent a tenant in order to do so, besides the loss of money (much worse trade route) and also the influence is earned by the turn, not by "surprise". The other variants of this also cost a tenant and also units, either to be parked nearby or given.
So, personally, influence by quest or tenant, I think is ok, since they are earned through commitment (yeah, I know that some quests are "cashed in" by luck) and over time, not just to spend 4000 gold the turn before vote.

 

[VainoValkea]

Those things are quite high rank tenants and also they do cost commitment in order to get the influence and also time. With an income of several hundreds of gold each turn (even more sometimes) is worth much more regarding influence and are also more direct and doesn't need commitment of units and or trade routes.

Arsenal of Democracy is a second-level tenet and is very powerful in itself. So if you are first to unlock Freedom, it's the next policy. Not much commitment needed.

Also, they're "tenets", not "tenants".