Is the Diplomatic Victory the thoughtest way to win?

[serban_spirescu]

For me no... This type of victory was my first win . Any way most says that this is the toughtest. For me the toughtest is the cultural achievement. What do u think?

[Blake]

Diplomatic I find is the easiest (or most lazy, anyway).
But there are two types of diplomatic, firstly is the true diplomatic - that's where you befriend everyone and they willingly vote for you.

Then there is the back door domination victory which is recorded as a diplomatic victory. This is a diplo victory where you have more than 40% of the population, this means that even if all the other civs unite against you, they still can't win a diplo victory.

True diplo victory essentially involves ramming religion down everyone's throats, it doesn't matter if they have a holy city, most AI's, except the likes of Isabella, do not spread their religion, so if you ram religion into their cities they will switch to your religion. As for the likes of Isabella, you then use them as a scape goat, bribe everyone to declare war on them and build up mutual military struggle (war also greatly reduces the AI missionary training rate, so keep those with holy cities in a permament state of war).
Finally you build the UN and hope everyone votes for you. Sometimes it's possible to manipulate an "Isabella" into being the competitor which makes it dead easy. More often it's dumb luck, you have this "One big happy family" and just have to keep retrying the diplo vote until enough vote for you rather than the almost equally liked competitor.

This kind of true diplo victory is actually pretty easy to win, even for OCC and stuff, I've never lost a diplomatic OCC, ramming religion down throats and wracking up Mutual Military Struggle never fails (the reason it works well as OCC is that your one city can already pump out missionaries at maximum rate (due to 3 missionary limit)... having extra cities doesn't really help much).

Back Door Domination is simple, you conquer half the world, and then, not having the heart to turn on your war-allies, you get them to vote for you. It's not a true diplo victory because you took most of the votes by force.

[Quillan]

There's also the "diplomatic victory through global thermonuclear war" method, where you just nuke everyone else down to the point where you have enough of the world's population that your vote alone is enough to win. Cheap, cheesy, and lots of nukes required, but it will work.

[Diadem]

I think the hardest win is either conquest or culture.

Culture is often hard because it requires a huge investment that can not be spent elsewhere. This is the same for spaceship, but you have to start planning and preparing for a culture victory much earlier. For example you have to gear great people generation towards artists, which means you can't do other useful thing with your great people.

And conquest is just hard because... Well, because you have to conquer the entire world

[MikeH]

It's much easier with Warlords, you can just make the whole world your vassals.

[Diadem]

If you do that you'll most likely score a domination victory before a conquest one. For a conquest victory you usually need to raze a lot. Or disable domination, of course.

Vassals can be useful for diplomatic victories as well, by the way.

[MikeH]

I've got a conquest victory with everyone else being my vassals. When I made the last one my vassal it tipped me over to having domination victory conditions too, but gave me the conquest win.

[Tattila the Hun]

Originally posted by Quillan
There's also the "diplomatic victory through global thermonuclear war" method, where you just nuke everyone else down to the point where you have enough of the world's population that your vote alone is enough to win. Cheap, cheesy, and lots of nukes required, but it will work.

Tried that, gave me Domination instead. (Well, allready had the land area, just needed more population... Or less of theirs.)