Suggestions for improving diplomatic victory.

[Dinner]

Right now Diplomatic Victory is pretty much broken as all you have to do is buy the support of enough city states in order to win. Does anyone have suggestions on how this victory option might be improved? Personally, I'd like to see some sort of weighted average introduced so that large civs get more of a vote then small civs while both get more of a vote then city states. Of course, this would still leave the problem of Civs never, ever voting for you but it would at least be a step up from the current situation.

[Dinner]

Another interesting option would be making everyone vote for someone other then themselves. I'm not sure how the abstain option from Civ4 would work though because then all the AI civs would just abstain.

[Boracks]

I think they would have to get diplomacy really working before this would work.

Best diplomacy I played with was in SMAC, although there were only 7 civs with fairly set agendas.

[Kekkonen]

Right now Diplomatic Victory is pretty much broken as all you have to do is buy the support of enough city states in order to win.

I agree. As it stands now, Diplo-victory is really an economic victory, and getting it is far too straightforward -- get tons of money, make a beeline for Globalization, build the UN, done.

[rah]

It's always funny when an AI builds the UN when you own every CS. Gee that was bright.

[Boracks]

It's always funny when an AI builds the UN when you own every CS. Gee that was bright.

A part of me actually enjoyed it in Civ4 when a vassal built the UN so I could win. Such lovely support from a vassal.

The problem is giving the CS a vote equal to a major power, and trying to balance that against a chance to win when you know (under the current setup) that no one else will vote for you.

[Dinner]

These points aren't specific to diplomatic victories but they do have to do with diplomacy. Am I the only one who is unhappy that the game tells you so little about the other civs? Yes, the one patch they've released did give us a little more information wrt diplomacy (you can now see if civs are hostile or happy and you can see some of the modifiers) but how come you can never learn which social policies the other civs have? What about who has built which wonders in what cities? How about telling me which techs other civs have or at least let me know if I'm ahead or behind them?

The whole diplomacy system is pretty frustrating in it's incompleteness and that's a shame because all this extra side information helps to flesh out the other civs in the game thus helping to keep the player engaged in the game.