Is it even possible?



Tried a couple of times it seems fairly out of reach. I make sure I have at least 5-6-7 regions, about as many regions as the other AIs (including one uber region stolen from cultists), fairly quick research and growth, very fast peace with eveyone, followed by fast alliance with everyone. And ofc research and economic agreements asap also.



Yet I get the message "AI X has 2-3 techs for science victory" around 40-50% of my diplomacy victory progress.



(This on normal speed and normal default settings, nothing tweaked, and ofc with Drakken.)



Is there a trick to it other than attacking any AIs that's about to win?

43 views no answer. I take that as a confirmation that it is impossible.

I think if you spam compliments, it will help you get the diplomatic victory. Compliments give a slight boost to your diplomatic score and you can use several in a single turn (assuming you have enough influence).

Questions :



- Is diplomacy victory similar to endless space, where it is easier to achieve with a smaller empire?

- Does an alliance give a fixed amount of points per turn, or is it a bit of a curve where it gives more the longer it lasts? (are there other factors? Such as size of the ally and his score?)

- Do trade routes actually give diplomacy points or not?

- Spamming compliments the same turn works or not?

- If a player is eliminated, do the victory point requirements go down?

- If WE eliminate a player, do we get a diplomacy malus?

The questions remains, but forget what I said about diplomacy being hard on endless, I won on normal speed / endless difficulty / turn 120 and it was pretty easy in fact once you understand a couple of things.



The main trick is forget what the manual says about alliances, forging alliances is actually pretty useless and if you count on that the AI will have time to win 4 times over before you get there. Forget also about maximizing trade and good relations and keeping everyone alive to have maximum alliance partners and whatnot, all of those factors give such tiny amounts of diplo points that it's useless. What should be the focus is generating influence and spending it. That's it!



To win you need 3000 diplomacy points, which from observation turns out to be 30,000 influence points because 10% of influence spent is converted to diplomatic points. Once you understand that, you can pretty mush skip peace / alliance / trade route techs and focus on beelining influence buildings. That's all you need, in fact I only understood this fact about 100 turns in, so I am pretty much sure a sub turn 80-100 is fairly possible.

I'll answer my own questions, someone might find this useful.



Q : //- Is diplomacy victory similar to endless space, where it is easier to achieve with a smaller empire?//



a: Nope, the inverse. The required diplomatic points are a fixed amount and don't scale with number of cities, so the more regions you have the easier it will be to win. The only possible increased difficulty will come from higher luxury cost for the 50% influence boost.



Q : //- Does an alliance give a fixed amount of points per turn, or is it a bit of a curve where it gives more the longer it lasts? (are there other factors? Such as size of the ally and his score?)//



a: Size of ally and score doesn't seem to count. Points from alliance seem small, I might do another diplo game and keep a closer eye on how many points alliances give exactly.



Q : //- Do trade routes actually give diplomacy points or not?//



a: I think not. At least it must be so small that I didn't notice it.



Q : //- Spamming compliments the same turn works or not?//



a: Yes it works. Don't worry about how you spend your influence, just spend it. Hell you can even keep force allying someone then going back and forth into cold war just to spend it.



Q : //- If a player is eliminated, do the victory point requirements go down?//



a: No, the required diplo points are a fixed sum that doesn't change or scale no matter what you do.



Q: //- If WE eliminate a player, do we get a diplomacy malus?//



a: No.