The Diplomatic Victory - observations, notes and tips

[Dan Quale]

No wonder they didnt vote for me -27 you nuked us- 12 you nuked our friend along with all the other goodies, but at least their spaceship wasnt radiation proof.

 

[agray1444]

What are the benefits of selecting your leader's favorite civic?

 

[jkp1187]

Question: When are the votes tallied for a diplomatic victory (or, for that matter, ANY UN Vote.)

Example: The UN is built. Roosevelt and Mansa Musa are the election contenders. At end end of turn 1, Mansa has 150 votes, Roosevelt has 148 votes; 151 votes are requred to win the secretary general seat. At the beginning of turn 2, the pop-up for the election occurs. Mansa's votes at that time = 150, Roosevelt = 148. During turn 2, military action increases Roosevelt's vote total to 152. What result? Is it a tie, since neither candidate had 151 votes -- or does Roosevelt win?

 

[ori]

Question: When are the votes tallied for a diplomatic victory (or, for that matter, ANY UN Vote.)

In my experience its at the end of the turn - the votes given in the popup never match the votes cast (when playing with many opponents atleast) which usually is due to city growth during the turn or war actions... I can't back it up with code though.

 

[KMadCandy]

about the shared technology bonus
It has a lot to do with trading monoploy techs. If you trade a well known tech, you get no bonus. If you trade away a monopoly tech, the Ai will be honoured and give you this bonus.

i had the WEIRDEST case of this last night.

Spoiler :

i was running a pure-diplo-focus one-city-challenge game, hoping for no wars at all, just to finesse the whole thing. hand-pick civs for hopefully no wars (washington did declare on gandhi but no cities were lost, and only one worst enemy was made). so i had mansa, gandhi, asoka, washington, roosevelt, hatty, and freddy, standard/inland seas/normal speed/monarch. my goal was to just convince them to like me more than they like the other guy, no matter who the other guy is, inflencing population via health/luxuries is fine, decimating population by warfare is not, etc. that's the game i was looking for, OCCs are quick and they can be really suspenseful sometimes.

i'm trading with all of them, all the way through, to get good relations, to speed up my beelining since if i don't build the UN myself i'm hosed, etc. religions spread nicely, i got CoL first and it spread well enough for me to get good use out of OR and pacifism safely for a bit there, then at the end there was the buddhist set, the hindu set, and me off in free religion land.

check out this picture:

it looks weird to me, because the +1 shared technology is there but there's no "our trade relations have been fair and forthright". i'd never had the shared without the fair/forthright before. i hadn't realized that you could. i mean now that i think about it, it's not illogical. i just hadn't had it happen. i never got fair and forthright with this guy, altho i had been trading techs (and resources) with him all along. note that there's also a +2 for supplying resources, even tho i'm not any more, but i'd recently cut his off supply, he was voting for the wrong guy after all. even supplying him with luxuries forever tho hadn't done the fair/forthright thing. tech-wise, he was first to banking/econ that part of the line and stuff. any techs like that, which he had and might trade before i absolutely needed them, i'd wait on him to trade them rather than others, and i gave him good deals on stuff, obviously at least one monopoly, since i knew his trading limit was small. i handed out freebies. but i never got any progress at all on the bonus. i know some have stingier definitions of fair than others but he was driving me CRAZY. that +1 shared your tech bonus is there from the first save i have, at 780 AD so clearly i got that very early. i just freaking gave up on fair/forthright tho. i felt so close, he didn't really like mansa a lot, it was mostly the religion, but i couldn't crack his definition of fair.

everybody else i got to +4 fair/forthright eventually. some i had to monitor to keep at 4, and one of the americans was slow to get up there but they did all got to 4. freddy tho, no progress. he liked me almost as much as he did mansa, but i didn't want to risk a vote for free religion since the -s mansa was getting from the hindus were good for me in some ways. so, i figured i'd keep my side in happiness (had some spare engineers, build rock&roll and broadway for lack of anything better to do) and just hope we got big enough before too many space ship parts got built. i gave us biology and medicine, etc.

some folks had built apollo, and the first few parts were rolling off the line. purely to make money to pay for sabotage i might need, i held a tech sale, and i hit freddy since he was the richest. he offered me all of his cash+world map for mass media (one, maybe two, other civs had it by then). i took world map out of the deal since i don't like the pause for the map to refresh itself. it's only monarch, so normally i'd not worry about them launching, but they're not gonna go to war, and they're pretty much the set of opponents that are most likely to get a tin can into space if they are left alone, so, i got my spies ready.

next turn, UN vote comes up again, i call diplo victory as usual since to see how much progress my side has made. and i hit enter, and ... i won? freddy voted for me?

turned out, selling him MM finally got me the +4 fair and forthright. that was what did it, and got me his vote. i checked the turn after the win to see what had happened since i'd forgotten about that trade! to me it wasn't even a trade, it was "getting money for spies." but that was all that had changed.

i've had a lot of games where i've been able to get someone up to +4 on the first turn that i met them. i've had games when i don't care if i get to +4 because i just want them to die. and i've had games (including this one) where i've had people get to +1 or +2 fairly quickly but then had to put in real effort to hit (or to stay at) the +4. i've never had a game where for the entire game i wanted so badly to get somebody to +4, but they stubbornly stayed at 0, and then zoomed to +4 in one move without me even noticing, lmao. and how very convenient, it won me the game. why didn't i think of gifting him radio or MM the turn i was going to finish the UN? i had just given up, i mean hubby had been laughing at me for centuries (in gamewise) talking to the screen going "what in the heck do you consider fair and forthright???" so then to have finally found the key when i wasn't looking just makes me feel utterly brilliant and completely stupid at the same time.

looking back, probably what i could have done to fix that early was doing one of the "ok, time to hand out a freebie to everybody, who gets it first?" rounds like i did with compass. those i tended to look at who i was overall lowest with in points, and then see who'd of the low-in-favor ones i get a big trade/shared boost with by giving them first dibs. i think maybe i was already fairly high in points with fred already, so he wasn't one of the first ones i looked at, and instead favored the lower ones, when i ought to have favored him once in a round of that for the +4 fair and forthright. would have won me the game so much earlier. neither asoka or gandhi liked me as much as freddy did at first when i built the UN, but they voted for me for diplo since they didn't like mansa. if i'd had freddy at +4 from that early on ... /sigh *giggle*

oh right ... i bumped this thread to ask a question. the first post in this thread says that supplying resources can contribute to the fair/forthright trade. does it sometimes? i think good old fred here proves it doesn't all the time. this was an OCC game, and he was the only one that had wheat to trade with me. wheat = +2 health with granary. i traded him my only gems for that wheat, even before i had hereditary rule. i saw he had it up in the trade resource window, and neither of us had currency. in OCC, health is everything, better more unhappy people now than future healthy people gone forever because guaranteed he'll trade it away to someone else. i later swapped who was getting which resources so that i could get the "supplied us with resources" from everybody, but trust me, i'd been supplying him with resources for a long time. we'd been doing resource trading all along, he'd only just gotten cut off since i'd done the "ok fine mansa, you and your little buddies please be unhealthy and unhappy ok?" pouty thing.

 

[cabert]

oh right ... i bumped this thread to ask a question. the first post in this thread says that supplying resources can contribute to the fair/forthright trade. does it sometimes?

only if you gift the resource!
you get the other item for lastin gresource deals (provided resource thing)

 

[KMadCandy]

only if you gift the resource!
you get the other item for lastin gresource deals (provided resource thing)

thanks. i did that some for him too! he was just in a mood until the very end i'm convinced! thanks tho

 

[SilverTab]

No wonder they didnt vote for me -27 you nuked us- 12 you nuked our friend along with all the other goodies, but at least their spaceship wasnt radiation proof.

Hehe, this reminds me of a genocidal war I had against Monty once. I razed every city that I came across, then vassalized him because I didn't feel like searching for his last city. He had a -27 You razed our city! but since he was my b**** he still had to vote for me. That made me laugh pretty hard.

 

[carl corey]

-27? That's nothing.

The beauty of fighting on another continent: 3 wars (-9) & didn't even keep the holy city.

 

[UK_Brad]

I went for a diplo victory on a long-winded Warlord game. I conquered my continent, then built up good report with my vassals. It didn't work out and I found myself giving away expensive techs trying to get to 'Pleased' with the other continent.

I gave up and won via space race. I questioned whether I should (upon winning the United Nations bid) always go for the "Diplomatic Victory" choice to increase probability I would get voted, or one of the other choices -- could picking the right things to vote on curry enough favor to get another vote
?

 

[dylanmeditates]

UK Brad- if you have a chance to win diplo, go for it (you should b able to make a fair guess about this possibility based on relations). If you don't have a chance, don't even try- just use the other choices to somehow sway the game in your direction (for instance getting everyone to go into the civics/trade economy that works best for your empire)

 

[Seraiel]

I went for a diplo victory on a long-winded Warlord game. I conquered my continent, then built up good report with my vassals. It didn't work out and I found myself giving away expensive techs trying to get to 'Pleased' with the other continent.

I gave up and won via space race. I questioned whether I should (upon winning the United Nations bid) always go for the "Diplomatic Victory" choice to increase probability I would get voted, or one of the other choices -- could picking the right things to vote on curry enough favor to get another vote
?

I believe you misunderstand how a diplomatic vicrory works.

1. You don't need your Vassals on pleased, they are forced to vote for you.

2. If you have Vassals, you get combined diplomatic stance from the others. This is not shown in the game! If you have someone on friwndly but he's cautious to your Vassal, conbined diplo means that the AI will act to you like you were cautious.

3. To win a diplomatic victory, you need the vast majority of votes. You need at least +8 with someone to make him vote for you. Hidden modifiers also count in this matter!

Hth.

 

[misterfilmgeek]

I searched for the following tips (here and in other threads) and didn't see either, so I'll add them to this thread.

To find out who's going to win a diplomatic victory, select the Enhanced Victory Screen in BUFFY (F8) and look at the Members tab. If you've researched Mass Media, you'll be able to see the Diplomatic Victory screen and you'll see a breakdown of each civs relation to you and your rival, plus exactly how many votes each civ has and who they will vote for.

I was able to use this and another trick to my advantage in a recent tightly contested election. My main rival and I were both Buddhist, as was the vast majority of the 13 civs, and we were both +12 to +20 with all of them. I had most of the votes, but not 75% of the total. I needed to switch at least two of the three civs that wanted to vote for my rival. Since pluses for sharing religion decay slowly when not in that religion, I switched to Free Religion just before the first vote following the election. I had two turns of anarchy (you can shave this closer being Spi or being in a GA and possibly win on the first vote). On the first turn that I could switch civics again (crucially, less than five turns before the next vote), I used the Spy mission Influence Civics on my rival to switch him to FR, then I immediately switched back to being religious. All three switched their allegiance over to me and I handily won the election. Note that you could also bribe your rival with gold and/or techs to switch civics. And of course it doesn't have to be religion. It can work if you just need to switch one civ's vote and your rival is getting the shared civic bonus.

 

[Unmnemonic]

2. If you have Vassals, you get combined diplomatic stance from the others. This is not shown in the game! If you have someone on friwndly but he's cautious to your Vassal, conbined diplo means that the AI will act to you like you were cautious.

I just failed in an Emperor BtS Diplom win. I could never establish Defensive Pacts with my allies though they were +15 or better. I had left Ragnar’s one city as a Vassal. I wonder if the hidden Vassal attitude adjustment caused this?

BTW my failure wasn’t caused by no DPs. Victory required 62% and I didn’t have the votes as my allies didn’t grow as hoped in the late game.