Diplomatic Victory Frustrations

[NormB]

I've been cutting my teeth at the Warlord level. I've played about 6 games so far, although I'm a veteran Civ3 player. I've managed to be able to easily win every way except diplomatic. It seems a lot harder in Civ4. I'm wondering if anyone has any pointers about how to win this victory.

In Civ3, as long as you controlled the UN, had been reasonably fair, and sucked up close to the end, you could easily get other civs to vote for you. I found the diplomatic victory fairly easy, even at more difficult playing levels.

My experiences have been more frustrating with Civ4. I can easily get the UN and get other civs to elect me Secretary General (SG), and can easily get them to vote my way on most resolutions, I have never been able to muster enough votes to get the diplomatic victory (DV). Looking at the XML files, it looks like one needs 62% of the vote for DV and only 51% for the other resolutions.

I even had one game where I had no war whatsoever, treated everyone with absolute fairness, and sucked up in a major way, and I still couldn't get enough votes. It looks like being a nice guy alone won't do it.

In another game, I decided that since votes were based on the population of each civ, that I would amass a bunch of votes by simply conquering my continent. Unfortunately, I was on a continent with only 3 other civs, and despite playing as expansionistic, I couldn't get the necessary 62%. Again, despite fairness and sucking up to the civs on the other continent, and being a cultural giant, and being the point leader by far, I could only get one other civ to vote for me for a DV.

Last night, I started studying what the AI seems to be looking at in assigning a diplomatic score to calculate whether they are friendly ... furious at you. I suspect that this score in comparison to my DV competitor is used in whether or not they will vote for me.

So far I've noticed that You get assinged points on the following: years of peace with them, open borders, similarity of civics, trade relations, sharing resources and tech advances, military help your have given or refused to give, similarity of religions, whether or not you have been at war with them or one of their friends and whether you have brought in an ally against them, whether you have traded with their enemies, your refusal or agreement to give them tribute, or whether you have refused any other request made of you, whether you stopped trading with them as requested by another civ, and whether they caught one of your spies. There may be others, but these are the ones I've noticed so far.

I haven't tried to figure out exactly how the points are calculated yet. For example "you have fallen sway to heathen religions" has ranged from -4 to -1. If anyone has figured this out, I hope they could share it.

I read this somewhere else, and the above analysis and my own experiences confirm, YOU CAN'T BE ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE! Here is the strategy I will try next.

1) Get you own population high, either by war or focus on population building. I suspect that an expansionistic leader will help here. The more votes you have, the less you will need of the others.

2) The second largest civ is the one you will be competing against for the final DV vote. That may change as the game goes on, but it should be fairly stable toward the end. Pay attention to who are their enemies and friends and build your own alliances accordingly. Ignore those they are most friendly with, since it's probably a waste of time to try to win them over.

3) The thing you seem to get most points for seems to be similarity of religion, especially if they are spiritual. Convert to their religion.

4) Similarity of civics also seems important, but I don't know how you would know what theirs is except by keeping a running list as the announcements are made. A lot of the UN resolutions seem geared to achieving civic similarity, so possibly getting those passed before a DV vote may help. However, that alone hasn't helped me so far. Even having been SG consistently and having successfully gotten all the other resolutions passed had not helped me to win a DV.

5) Trading relationships and other sucking up activities seems to help, but not as much as the others.

6) They seem to hold on to perceived injustices for the whole game, so something you did 4000 years ago will be remembered. So try to pick your friends and stay consistent. That is hard to do since you are more likely to be competetive with those closest to you, and those on other continents don't appear until late in the game.

I'll let you know how it works. In the meantime, if others have cracked this victory, I'd appreciate thoughts and pointers.

[alva]

I did not read your whole post ( about to leave home)

treated everyone with absolute fairness,

This is more than likely your problem, in CIV4, you can't be good friends with everyone, pick your side!

[xxFlukexx]

4) Similarity of civics also seems important, but I don't know how you would know what theirs is except by keeping a running list as the announcements are made.

Whenever you talk to an AI, you can find tiny pictures of the civics they use in the upper right corner of the window. Hover over the pictures and it says what they are.

Best way to get a Diplo victory in my experience is to pick 1-3 allies based on religion and then go conquer as much as you can. Depending on how the religions split goes, you might have to conquer the vast majority of the votes you need to win. The worst thing is when your #1 ally becomes #2 in points below you and only votes for himself for dilpo victory, argh.

[NormB]

AAARGH!! So I tried the strategy I outlined above and again had to settle for a space victory.

I played on continents with everything else set to default. I found myself next to Roosevelt, Alexander and Mansa Mursa. Victoria was on the other side of Alexander. Isabella and Napoleon were on islands by themselves.

Roosevelt was way too close so I took him out by the 1500's. Unfortuantely he was friends with Victoria and Mansa Mursa so that poisoned our relationship. After that victory I had the most land and population. That was the only war I fought.

Early on, Alexandar was generally pleased or friendly to me. We had the same religion and that helped a great deal. I worked the whole game to keep him on my side. Isabella started out annoyed, mostly because of our different religions. I finally converted to hers and she liked me from then on. Napoleon showed up last but I immediatedly set up a massive trade deal and he was generally pleased from then on.

For most of the game, it looked like Mansa Mursa was going to be my DV competitor. He and Victoria were friendly from the get go so I pretty much blew them off to concentrate on the other three.

Unfortunately Alexander started a war with Isabella and I refused to take sides. So that cost me some "you traded with our worst enemy" negative points. I bribed Alexandar to stop the war after a few turns, but our relation never got back to friendly after that.

As the game progressed and my culture points began to amass, I started to encroach on Alexander's territory. That cost me some "our close borders cause tension" points. By the end of the game, he actually had become annoyed at me.

As the game is 80-90% along, it turns out that Napoleon got ahead in population, although he was 3rd after Mansa Mursa in points. So when the UN elections started, it turns out that Napoleon was my DV competitor. I tried to suck up to Mansa Mursa with some success (I got him from annoyed to pleased).

As usual, I could get elected SG. However, whenever I called for the DV vote, even those who voted for me as SG would not vote for me for DV. I suspect that the criteria they use are different.

So, foiled again!

[okblacke]

I've done it (at Warlord ) but it was an interesting matter of the 2nd runner up being a volatile position. One was the popular Alexander, the other was the loathed...uh...purple dude, possibly Qin.

When Qin was #2, Alex voted for me and I was just a small amount of ass-kissing away from victory. So, I kissed up, and swayed all of the minor players except Isabella.

But then Alex came in second and voted for himself. Everyone else voted for me, except Isabella, and I needed her paltry 78 votes to win. So I just kept giving (dunno if it helped, actually, it doesn't seem to modify relations if you give them something when they're not asking for it).

And Isabella kept flipping toward the end, she'd vote for me, then she wouldn't. I did finally win, but it seems to be a chancy game to play. Making friends with the powerful people is good, but it doesn't do you any good (for diplomatic victory) to be friends with the #2 guy, 'cause he's always going to vote for himself.

[Quillan]

I had a game last night where I my diplomatic status was either "pleased" or "friendly" to all but 2 of the other nations in the game (huge/terra, so I was on good terms with a lot of different folks). I built the UN, figuring I was a sure thing for a diplomatic victory. My best relationship was with the Malinese. I had nothing but diplomatic plusses with them. (Side note here: earlier in the game I had signed a defensive pact with them, which was later voided when Mansa declared war on Alexander. All the negatives I'd earned with Mansa's rivals went away when the defensive pact ended, but the plusses with Mansa stayed. I don't know if that's intentional or a bug.) So, when the elections came up, what should happen, but MANSA gets elected Secretary General. Apparently everyone else liked him better than me, and strangely enough a couple of those voting for him were people who really didn't seem to like him. He passed one resolution, failed another, and then the SG position came up for a vote again, which I won. But I wound up launching the spaceship, since I couldn't get the votes for a diplomatic victory.

[Ratya]

Originally posted by xxFlukexx
4) Similarity of civics also seems important, but I don't know how you would know what theirs is except by keeping a running list as the announcements are made.

Whenever you talk to them, you can see their civics in the upper right hand corner right above their portraits.

[khearn]

If you look at a leader's Civilopedia entry (I think it's also in the manual), you can see the leader's favorite Civic. It's having that Civic that gets you brownie points with that leader. For example, Tokugawa likes Mercantilism (which fits in well with his general isolationist temperment - which is very historical, BTW).

[NormB]

Has anyone figured out the rules the AI uses to vote for DV? My guess is that it's based to some extent on your "likeability" score with a civ compared to that for your DV opponent. Probably some ratio or difference score with a threshold that decides who they will vote for or whether they will abstain. Just speculating. If anyone knows the XML where this info would be located, I'd like to know.

Nice pointer about the favorite civic khearn. I'll have to check that out.

[alpaca]

Well I think I more or less cracked the DV.

The setting:
Standard size, normal game speed, emperor difficulty, 6 AIs, continents, random sea height and climate.
I started with Louis because I tremendously like creative and I wanted to try and get the Pyramids for a GP strategy; the starting position didn't look too bad (I had some forest, two flood plains, silk to the south, wine to the northeast, gems to the southeast just beyond the border) so I took it.
After a few turns I met with Saladin and Mansa Musa, a little later with Washington and then with Caesar; the continent seemed a bit crowded but what the hell

After some more or less aggressive resource taking with neglection of Bronze and Iron working (I researched Alphabet to trade them in) I stood with an empire that was almost completely clad in jungle but nonetheless in an ok position with 4 dyes, 3 spices, sugar, silk, wine, rice, gems, horses, cows, fish, but, unfortunately, neither iron nor copper or stone/marble.
I was near to giving up but thought better of it (I wanted to try and get annihilated by the AI in fact).

Now, while I was slowly cutting away the jungle and developing my empire with cottages (ya they give you a lot of money later on), I realized that noone was attacking each other and really, there were only two wars in the whole game! One was between Saladin and Asoka who was on the second continent together with Montezuma and the second happened on the turn of my DV when Montezuma attacked me.
So, after realizing that everybody seemed to be a pacifist, I converted to Confucianism along with the whole continent which had been founded by Saladin, which, of course, strengthened our relationships.

As the game further developed, I changed my government to Free Religion, State Property and the Universal Suffrage/Free Spech/Emancipation combo which, together with a development over military doctrine put me finally in the lead (GPT, GNP, Pop) with a rather small empire of only 6 core cities and six cities divided into three colonies which were mainly founded because of resources and because I was the first to discover Astronomy and held it 25 turns or so.

After researching Mass Media some time in the 17th ct. I immediately built the UN in Paris (which had been buffed a little with water wheels and workshops) - by the time my relationships were:
Pleased
Caesar, Mansa Musa, Washington
Cautious
Saladin, Asoka
Annoyed
Montezuma

Because of my financial lead (and the fact that everybody was playing space race) I was able to pick up some unused techs and trade them to the only one who traded techs with me, Mansa Musa.

To cut a long story short, I was elected SG, and a few turns later I re-established Confucianism as my state religion (which put me to pleased/friendly with all 4 peoples on my continent), signed Defensive Pacts with them and dished out free techs until I was at Friendly with all 4 of them which put me in a position to trigger a DV election and - behold - I was crowned the winner with 435 of 380 or so votes (139 of which were those of my own people).

The conclusions I draw from this are:
- You should only aim at a DV if you have non-agressive factions near to you (I only bordered on Saladin, Mansa Musa and Roosevelt)
- You must not under any circumstances start a war (not even to gain an important resource)
- You should end any war that is inflicted on you ASAP
- You have to pay tribute to the factions that you want to support you later, no matter what they want, with one possible exception: Technologies you need for a special plan (like Mass Media or Astronomy)
- Try to convert everybody to a certain religion (even if that means taking their religion for some time to get an open borders agreement)
- Civics are not excessively important to gain the support of a civilization but it may help to convert when they ask you to
- Don't harm anybody and they'll probably not harm you either (the core is: don't harm anybody - if you show aggressiveness they are more likely to attack you)
- You need some luck

This is it for now, I attached two savegames (before and after my victory) if you'd like to review it.
The game took 3h33m and it dates to 1862 when victory was triggered.

//edit: Oops, forgot to attach. Find the savegames here (about 550K): http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php?...vegames-DV.zip

[NormB]

Well, I finally managed a DV, although I'd hardly call it that. It was more like diplomacy at the end of a gun!

I played as Saladin with a standard sized map, continents and everything else set to default. Roosevelt was to my Northeast, Tokugawa to my Northwest. Julius Caesar was North of Japan. Victoria and Bismark shared a continent divided by an isthmus. Napoleon was on a large island continent. Very early on I got the point lead and was ahead in almost everything.

The civs on the other continent didn't appear until the late 1600's. Until then, JC & Roosevelt were generally pleased or friendly with me and each other. Tokugawa was totally isolationist. Even after millennia, he wouldn't trade open borders or even bananas. The only war on our continent until late in the game was when Togugawa attacked Roosevelt. I stayed neutral.

In 1740, shortly after the other civs appeared, I started keeping a matrix of the net diplomacy scores, keeping track of who liked/disliked whom. It was clear early on that Victoria was going to be my DV competitor, and that remained constant throughout the game. I started trying to build my alliances with Bismark and Napoleon. I successfully won over Bismark so by the end of the game he was friendly with me and consistently voted for/with me. I got him to switch to my state religion and that seems to have been the key.

JC stayed with me consistently throughout the game.

I had less success with Napoleon who generally either sided with Victoria (earlier) or abstained (later). He was very difficult to trade anything with. Most things were off the table so it was difficult to impossible to do anything diplomatic with him. Giving him things was clearly not enough to totally win him over. For the longest time, he wouldn't even allow open borders, so I couldn't even send missionaries to convert him.

The most frustrating thing of all was that Roosevelt turned away from me and toward Victoria so that by late in the game he was consitently siding with her. I gave him all sorts of things. I stayed neutral in a war between him and Tokugawa and later when Bismark attacked him. He held -4 (you traded with our worst enemy) against me right to the end! The only other negative factor was that my cultural borders encroarched on his constantly and he even lost New York to me. However, he only held a -1 (our close borders cause tension) against me despite that! After his war with Tokugawa, I offered him and JC a defensive pact which they both accepted. I don't know what more I could have done to help him short of immediately starting a war with Tokugawa when Tokugawa attacked him. The weirdest thing was that my diplomacy points with him kept getting increasingly positive. The points he gave Victoria were also netting in the positive and only slightly less than mine (7 vs 6 right before I took him out). You would think he would abstain if he liked us about equally, but he consistenly voted for Victoria. Tell me that makes any sense!

Tokugawa maintained his isolationist position to the end. He abstained in every DV & SG vote.

By the mid 1950's, it was clear that I was not going to win anybody over. I had built all the space parts and was one turn away from a space victory which I decided to park. I figured, what the heck, the only way to get this to change was for me to conquer the points I needed.

I took out Roosevelt rather quickly and started on Tokugawa. I got Napoleon to declare war on Tokugawa hoping that I would get points from him for the alliance.

It wasn't until I finally got enough of the population that I amassed enough votes for the DV. In the final winning vote, Ding Dong Tokugawa still abstained even though I was at war with him. Napoleon also abstained despite the alliance. JC and Bismark voted for me, leaving Victoria alone to vote for herself.

So although this was technically a DV, I would be hard pressed to consider it as such. I would think that diplomacy would be more about talking and trading and alliances of mutual interest.

I couple of things I noticed:
The vote for DV doesn't always match the vote for SG and you would think that it would. For example, Napoleon consistently vote for me as SG but always abstained for DV. The AI clearly has different criteria for each vote.

Trading and giving things away doesn't seem to do very much to turn others for you.

Khearn's comments about the favorite civic giving you the "you chose your civics wisely" point, I'm not sure of. It took a while for that to appear after I consciously changed to Representation which was the favorite of several of the civs I was courting. When I finally got it, I had two civics matching. I didn't get the point when there was only one. I'm not sure if there's a pattern here.

It's easy to be in a lose-lose situation with two civs you're trying to cosy up with if they both go to war together. If you stay neutral, you get the whopping -4 (you traded with our worst enemy) if you merely keep trading and do nothing else (Roosevelt didn't even ask me to stop trading with Bismark). You never get forgiven for that! It may be better to immediately pick a side and stop trading with the other. That forces you to pick sides early and stay with your choice and leaves little room to stay neutral so you can court an alliance later. Allienating Bismark while trying to hold on to Roosevelt would not have helped much here. Weird!

You might think that getting consistently voted as SG and successfully passing all the other resolutions would gain you some respect. It seems to have absolutely no effect. Even after the resolutions are passed that led to everyone having the same civics, it only takes away the "heathen religion" penalty.

I tried to figure out the rules by which the other civs decided whether they are friendly ... furious toward you. Although there seems to be a general trend whereby the net diplomacy points correlate with how much they like you, I couldn't come up with a good rule. E.g. sometimes the same net points would lead to "cautious", other times "annoyed". Even when I was at war with Roosevelt and Tokugawa, they were still only annoyed with me. The difference in net diplomacy points they give me vs my DV opponent seems to be related to whether they vote for me, the other, or just abstain.

Similarity of religion seems to help a great deal in winning them over early on. Civic similarity seems to have less effect.

Only some aspects of alpaca's strategy resembled mine. I of course was stuck with jerko Tokugawa as my neighbor. Starting a war was the only way I could win. Paying tribute only helped slightly. I tend to agree about converting others to your religion but that only works if they'll put open borders on the table so you can send in missionaries or if they are willing to convert, or if you're close enough for it to spread naturally. I agree that civic similarity doesn't give you much. The nice guy strategy doesn't get you much. I had diligently avoided war until the very end and it got me no where. I think luck has a great deal to do with it.

I'd be interesting in hearing other people's experiences and thoughts about how to win a DV and the whole diplomacy system in general.

[The keeper]

I recently won a Diplomatic victory on noble.

I was alexander. To my east was Victoria. South was Louis, SW was Egypt, West was Washington. China was on the other side of the world as well as Mansa.


Victoria and I shared the same religion, were far enough away so our borders didn't touch, so I cutivated that relationship. I had 16 +s with victoria before she declared no state religion.

France and I had been fighting off and on with cuture wars as well as one true war, and I weakened him down pretty good. Egypt and Victoria didn't like Louis either.

I gave lots of resources away to everyone EXCEPT france and China. I left China out because they were #2 AND wern't liked by mansa or victoria.

This caused a natural division between 2 sets of powers. China and France vs America, Mali, England, Egypt, and Greece. I stopped trading with China at the request of Mali, and China stopped talking with me. There was no war yet, but they refused to talk. A few turns later, China declared war on me. I then asked all my allies to join me in the war, and they all did.

Things were working out great. My UN was about to be finished, and I had 4 allies in a war against my #2 competition. Much to my dismay, in the course of this short war, I took a city, and that promoted Washington to #2, and he became my competition.

In the first election (before the war had ended) Egypt abstained because they didn't join the war. In the second election, Washington was a candidate instead of China. I had the tough job of convincing my alllies that I was more worthy than Washington. Mansa was the one that wasn't willing.

Another vote came, I had all my allies now, but lacked 4! votes from winning. China and France of course didn't like either of us so they abstained. Washington of course voted for himself.

I decided to delare war on the weak French. I knew something had to happen soon, because Victoria was 2 SS pieces from launching. I invaded france, then recruited Egpyt and England (both sharing borders with France) to help. Got Mali involved too. If I could just take a little land from France, it would be enough to get the extra votes.

Then Victoria completed another SS piece. The SG vote came back up, and I won again (5th time). I put all my modern armors onto mainland France (what was left after the second war) and began to wack away. I conquered the first city rather easily. It was close to the border, and France was WAY behind on tech.

The second city was a bit tougher. I flew gunships over the terrain to kill the units in the cities, I knew I didn't have enough time to get my armors over there. The gunships and bombers hammered away at the city while 1 armor rode over in a transport.

I took the city 2 turns before the election came up again.
This time, I won by 10 votes. It was close.



I won by cultivating the relationships I had, and having a unified group for war. I had Egypt, Mali, and England with a friendly relationship by the time I won. I think that was 13 net +s for a friendly relationship. I decided to go for diplomacy around 1000AD. That is when I looked to see who was in second and third, and who had the best chance to stay there. Then worked everone from there. Made sure France was everyone's worst enemy, so they didn't care that I whipped them around. And made sure that Victoria was my bestest friend. She even gifted me a tech once when I asked for it (yes, it can happen).

I opened world builder after it was over to see when Victoria would have won by SS . . . 3 turns away.

[Stuie]

I just finished my first diplomatic victory.

Settings:
Prince
Large World
Pangea
10 Civs
Random Civ - got Egypt.

Key was getting a religion, and then converting as many people as possible to my religion, and finally fighting a lot of common wars against the non-believers. Generous trades and some gifting on my part didn't hurt either. Once I built Rock n' Roll, Broadway, and Hollywood, I just gave the "resources" away to my allies.

The early chariots also helped - I did my first ever chariot rush (I'm usually a builder early in the game) and took out Isabella, grabbing the Hindu holy city in the process. Hinduism then became the tool of choice for my foreign policy - I picked it as my state religion (despite having only two Hindu cities out of about ten) and then I pumped out missionaries and sent them to every foreign civ I could get to. I went back and converted mine later.

All in all, it was a most enjoyable game. Won it and got the August Caesar rating.

[Silver14]

On the turn of the vote try nukeing the snot out of your contender....just a thought.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=144843

[Hauptman]

I actually won a diplomatic victory with 1 city (not OCC, so at a seriouse disadvantage) and it was quite easy.


I was China. Neighbors on the main continent with Persia, America, and France. Greece was on the other side of Persia. Japan and Egypt each had there own sub continent.


If you plan for it the whole game it should come easily.

France is too agressive, so siding with him will make everyone else angry, yet you got to keep him happy enough to not attack you. Persia ended up with the most land, so I knew he would be the rival. Greece was tiny so would have few votes and Japan is always Isolationist and you can only hope his population stays small enough to not waste too many votes. that left Egypt and America as the deciders. I then cultivated my relationship with those 2 and tried to make them dislike Persia. I defended America in it war with Japan, Instant brownie points, and gave alot of techs and money to Egypt. Even towards the end France joined my flock once he settled down on the warmongering.

Built the UN, and for the first vote (for secretary general) noticed I had everyone but Japan, Greece (he was at war with me, saw me as an easy target) and Egypt sided with Persia.

So i kissed Egypts butt with a couple techs and BLAMMO DV for me with my single city*!

* I started with 1 city but an American city had flipped.