​Hey all you wonderful people, I've been playing around with the early diplomatic cultures - specifically the Han and Bulgarians. However, I'm not able to get the gold diplomat star, in fact I struggle to get silver.

In my playthroughs I usually get a massive lead early off bantu or some other aggressive first culture and transition to Han, get the first embassy, and then max out diplomats. Along with the diplomats, I'll have great map sight/control through bantu's unit or scouts. I've tried setting everything to auto explore and taking the tedious route of controlling each unit methodically every turn. Along with that I prioritize the embassy Diplomatic Cooperation with any cultures I'm not actively taking a city from - this usually means setting up trade with other cultures to get that agreement.

Even with all those things prioritized, as I said above, I struggle to get the diplomat gold star before needing to ascend to the next culture.

Getting frustrated I've done a playthrough bumping the difficulty down to Civilization, and I'm finding myself maybe no even getting the bronze diplomat star on Bulgarians despite being about an era or half an era ahead of the next closest culture.

How should I be approaching these cultures' game play to get the most fame out of them?

[edit] Maybe it matters so I'll put it here, I tend to play normal map size, normal pace, 1 continent pangea. Player count varies between 6 to 10.

[edit 2] I realize I've provided lots of claims with no great examples to work off of.

Here's a link to a game I played today playing to the best of my ability so far. I've got 4 save files, but in short, Humankind difficulty, normal map size, normal speed, 6 players, pangea. I get an excellent start with Bantu, grab two early cities. I head into Han in a strong position on turn 37, but I am unable at turn 65 to get that gold diplomat star despite having a dominant position through Han's era.

There are 4 save files: Bantu turn 35 right before going into Han Han turn 36 for your convenience Han turn 60 normally where I'd go gold star in the tech tree and ascend Han turn 65 trying a few more moves to force that diplomatic gold star

https://www.file.io/CdCA/download/3T7SrgITmTKU

I also posted this question to the Humankind subreddit. There @The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales was kind enough to reply and add the clarification I was looking for.

In case anyone else in the future finds this thread b/c they are dealing with similar issues, here is what I learned:

• a diplomatic curiosity(ies?) spawn in the territory that a dispute is created
• resolving the dispute in the relations panel will despawn the diplomatic curiosity
• diplomatic curiosities have a random value between 5 - 10 => so collecting them is more valuable than resolving
• when playing a diplomatic culture all units are able to pick up diplomatic curiosities

Ah, sorry I missed your post here. But glad I could help. :)