Will I be awarded for being the superior player?

Doesn't the very fact that you failed in the prevention of the Diplomatic Victory of your enemy in fact prove that you are the inferior player, not the superior one? As you say, you may have been superior in other aspects of the game, but on a general scale, you failed.

The problem with a mod like that is that you've effectively neutered a number of ways of winning and turned it into a quest for points. Mostly in favour of the Conquest Victory condition(s), obviously - the Diplomatic Victory of your enemy was a way to win, since by your own statement: "Had I continued playing, I could have eventually mopped up the entire map".

The "optionals, optionals, optionals" arguments is a whole 'nother can of worms that we should probably address in another thread.

To the OP,

Do you mean "Rewarded" rather than "Awarded" (sic).?

I have to agree witih Luckmann, Civ4 is a multifaceted game where a top player has to manage and balance a lot of things.  I believe you can turn off different victory conditions in Civ4, so you might want to customize that in future games.

Yeah, just getting letting somebody else be secretary general isn't going to lose you the game unless you've truely lost in diplomatic, at which point I'd say you weren't the superior player.  Its easy to tech and arms race if you completely ignore keeping other people in love with you, I wouldn't say being ahead in military and economy really makes you the superior player off the bad.  

You should have immidiatly attacked and destroyed the secretary general if you were so far ahead.  There is a pretty big window of time from when the UN was finished to when the secretary general was annonced.  I do feel that there should be better options to tell others "you had better vote for me... or else!" however if you knew you might not win, you should have immidiatly gotten all your friends to declare war on your biggest compeditor.  If they are at war, they won't vote for their enemy, and if you don't have enough money/influence to get another nation to declare war then you likely should have lost when you did.

nothing stops diplomic victory like a world war.

Well sorry to brust your bubble, but, if someone beat you with an enabled victory condition, they beat you fair and square.  And by defeating you, they proved to be the superior player.  Because despite having a weaker army, despite having an overall weaker civilization as you say, he still managed to be victorious. And if that isnt the very definition of a superior player, then I dont know what is.  What it sounds like to me is that you're simply sore that you either didn't think to win the way he did, or couldn't figure out how to stop him from winning. Lose with some grace.

So, wipe your tears, learn the lesson, and maybe next time you can not only have the superior civilization but be the superior player.  Good luck.

I tend to agree with the other posters here that you lost fair and square and that should be an end to it (given that you're playing those victory conditions) BUT I do also think that the OP raises an interesting issue as to the legitimacy of a diplomatic victory in cases like this. I can totally see the point that.. treating the game world as logically consistent and persistant, how is it a win to have every civ bar one allied with you if the civ left out has a military bigger than everyone else combined and is over time going to wipe them all out? I mean they can have a nice group hug and say they've won.. but 10 years down the line they're all gonna be dead anyway so it seems kinda pyrrhic to me. I therefore think any diplomatic victory condition should be contingent on the allied powers having a combined military greater than any other exterior faction/alliance block left in the game to be considered legitimate

I tend to agree, but would this idea be 'off' somehow in a single-player game because it could only apply to an AI win?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean GW..  I'd envisage it being a general necessary condition for anyone to win diplomatically, whether that be an AI player or one of us regular humans. If there's some problem with that which I'm not seeing then I'd be delighted for you to point it out to me

In situations, such as in the OP's case, where this condition is not met then the game would playout until it either was met (eg the alliance builds up its military enough to dwarf the remaining rogue state's military) or another victory condition usurps it (eg the rogue state uses its vast military to conquer everybody else.. or someone achieves a tech victory while the two great armies fanny about not doing much ). This would be quite an interesting period of play as the rogue state would have to be very careful (assuming the alliance stays together) as losing military supremacy for even one turn would result in the game ending. That might sound a little skewed in favour of the alliance side.. but given that the alternative is for them to have won already I think that's pretty fair

I'm not crying that I lost, ok maybe a little bit    I realized I lost fair and square and that in "some ways" the AI was the superior player. I used my Civ4 game as an example only. That was like years and years ago.

I'm just trying to say I would like an option where the game bases the winner on more than just "what nation can obtain any victory condition first." I think there is more to being a winner than that. It would be nice to have it an accumlative score based on victory conditions and host of other things I cant comment on because of the lack of information about the game. As I said before though, this should only be an option. It would help with the longevity (sp?) of the game.

I will say it again, it should only be an option. I think winning the game after obtaining one victory condition is completly valid and I would play that way too. But I would be more inclined to do it on smaller maps when I wanted a shorter game.

Thanks for the comments

I see a major problem with that. Games tend to be pretty horrible at judging military power. And they're especially bad in games that allow you to customize your forces. For example in GC2, I could utterly annihilate opponents with much higher military ratings. There are just way too many factors that enter into the equation: mobilization, mobility, tactical strategy, types of units, etc.

Yeah you have a point, I dunno how hard it would be to programme a game that could actually have a good go at rating militaries effectively... I imagine pretty hard .. but yeah obviously my idea would rely on this.

Well, in most modern games (like Civ 4, and I thought Gal Civ 2) they still respect you as military might if you have a stronger economy.  You are not ranked high on the military chart, but you shouldn't be unless you have forces ready on the field.  Things that apply to military factions, shouldn't apply to a faction that has no men at arms even though they have the ability to make the biggest guns in the galaxy.  AI will still respect you if you can obviously over power them based on economy and the ability to produce units.

I liked the way Master of Orion 2 handled things:

IIRC, if someone was elected ruler of the galaxy in the council you could choose to defy the ruling. (you could actually defy your own election as victor!) This would result in everybody else forming an unbreakable alliance with eachother and declaring a final war on you. (to the finish, no peace possible)

I've always seen that as fair, you could get out of the "we all agree to let the other guy win" situation, but you'd have to deal with the consequences of pissing off everybody else at the same time. (usually if you're strong enough to beat the final alliance, you'd also have a majority of votes, or be such a hated warmonger that you'd probably be at war with everyone anyway)

But when the enemy weights relative strength, it really needs to take economics into consideration. It shouldn't be two seperate scales to define seperate things. What's worth more is of course up for consideration, but -damn- that tended to piss me off.

"Get over here and I'll beat you to death with my wallet, plebe!"

Sorry if I came off harsh, I just have no sympathy when it comes to poor losers. But moving on to other things, I do agree that the way the game tends to rate statistics are often a bit clunky.

I've had instances in GC2 where I could field 15 ships for about 10 turns consecutively, ships that are straight up the most powerful ships in the galaxy, and have several fleets worth in play and the AI still is trying to get me to pay them tributes and being hostile to me for my "weak" military.  Yet I could wipe the floor with them, or even am in the process of kicking their faces in.

Kill:Death ratios for ships, or Damage done vs Damage taken, or something needs to be takin into consideration.  For instance, I once was playing GC2 where all opponents were using missiles.  So I loaded my ships with tons of missile defense, and loaded up with mass driver weapons since no one else was using them.  What resulted were fleets of 3, able to wipe out fleet after fleet of my enemies.  I'd take 0 to 10 damage and deal 200 to 500 damage every combat, and still I was considered to have a weak military because I only had a hand full of such fleets in play.

Overall the ratings need to look at more then the obvious quantities.  Number of units, overall power of the unit, relative power of units compared to the average opponents units, damage done, kills, deaths, unit experience, etc.  Its obviously an extensive list, but all of its very important, ratings need to look at active data to be determined correctly.

It would be a huge exercise to incorporate all of that into a reliable rating.

It would be an interesting task for that type of organic/learning artificial intelligence: let it gather all kinds of statistics on all armies and see what the outcome is of each war. Based on that it could come up with some statistical relation between those parameters and the real army's effectiveness. Of course this would have to be done with identical AI's fighting, otherwise the player tactics would influence the outcome maybe just as much as the parameters.

well diplomatic victory should also require you to defeat all opponents that does not agree with you. Otherwise it is a pretty hollow victory to be a gameender.

The rest of the civs join the union and fight off the opponents that does not agree with you. That way diplomatic victory would be harder. It might not allways be the strongest team that wins a diplomatic victory. It is usually just the biggest.

I played some game (one of the early Civs?) where when a Supreme Leader was selected you could either accept it or reject it. If you rejected it ALL of the other civs attacked you. If you could beat them all then you still won the game. If not, you lost. That seems like a reasonable way of dealing with it.

Seems a little harsh though, it would be nice to add the option that first everyone casts his vote. Then when at least 1 player or AI rejects the supreme leader, others still get the chance to join him.

Otherwise being up against all AI's at once might be very tough, just because some guy started the election to become supreme leader :p