I posted last week about the inevitability of a diplomatic win when you lock in an early council lead and get all the bonus votes available by being the only player in the game going patronage. But I didn't know how the number of votes needed to win was actually calculated. This is a problem because there's a big difference between an inevitable win at 22 votes needed and one at 34 votes needed. From the comments to that post I pieced a little more together, like how the patch notes from the last big patch mentioned an increase in the number of votes needed to win and the increase was based on the size of the map. The implication is certainly that the base number of votes was also from the size of the map. Snuggles suggested I play a single player game emulating the circumstances of my multiplayer game and see what happened as players/city states were eliminated. I found some time last night to do just that.
First of all I decided to run some tests to determine the initial number of votes needed to win. I tried varying all kinds of different things, looking at the victory screen, and then starting a new game. I changed game speed, difficulty level, number of players, and number of city states. Not all of those actually change things up. Can you guess which will alter the number of votes needed? The list is after the jump!
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 12 city states - 35 votes needed
6 player map - 6 players - quick - 12 city states - 35 votes needed
6 player map - 6 players - quick - 0 city states - 9 votes needed
6 player map - 6 players - quick - 41 city states - 52 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 41 city states - 53 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - standard - 12 city states - 35 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 13 city states - 36 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 11 city states - 33 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 10 city states - 32 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 9 city states - 30 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 8 city states - 28 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 7 city states - 26 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 6 city states - 23 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 5 city states - 21 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 4 city states - 17 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 3 city states - 12 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 2 city states - 9 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 1 city states - 9 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - prince - quick - 12 city states - 35 votes needed
It looks like a basic 6 player map will take 35 votes to win. Lowering the number of players in the game does not change that value. Changing the game speed or the difficulty level (all but the last were on king) does nothing to the number of votes needed. The city states have a very obvious relationship to the number of votes needed to win. Note that in one case (41 city states) the number of players did change the number of votes. My guess for why that happened is there simply isn't enough room for 41 city states on a small map so it put in as many as it could and called it a day. Two few players meant more room for city states, so more got to spawn in that game. I didn't play those games out to meet all the city states but I'd guess it was more like 30 and 31 city states and not 41 in each. I don't know the actual formula for how many votes is added/subtracted for each additional city state. Some city states are worth 0. Others were worth 5.
Ok, so that's a thing... But what about my current game? What will happen if I start taking over all of Dave's city states? I played a bit of a game as The Huns so I could get some early kills. (Aside: WOW The Huns are awesome.) I also played on king difficulty to make it more likely for my early attacks to work. I'm going to finish the game out to get some achievements I think, but here's what I found out as I killed things off...
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 12 city states - 35 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 11 city states - 34 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 10 city states - 33 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 9 city states - 32 votes needed
6 player map - 4 players - quick - 8 city states - 32 votes needed
6 player map - 3 players - quick - 8 city states - 31 votes needed
The interesting things for me are that eliminating a city state is less of a reduction in votes needed than not spawning them in the first place, but eliminating a player reduces the votes needed while not spawning those in the first place doesn't change the numbers at all.
It sure looks like conquering a city state is a pretty reasonable thing to do. It looks like it'll subtract off less than 1 vote needed to win while denying 2 votes from Dave. As Lino pointed out on Skype if I really need the city state to exist I can probably use the trade interface to just give it to Matt instead of needing him to conquer it, but as things currently stand I won't need to do either for quite some time. We advanced to the next time period and now Dave doesn't have more than twice as many votes as Matt and I combined, so if we guess right at the council we can get one of the votes to go our way. (At least this time around both proposals have Matt and I on the same side since we both want cheaper techs and neither of us want Dave to have the world religion.)
Plus I get another city without needing to build a settler, and I get a new luxury good, and I deny Dave a lot of free food and all kinds of other benefits since he's full patronage. And I can cost him a vote or two depending on age. And I keep that city from pillaging my mines again. Yeah, killing off city states is probably a good plan assuming frigates are strong enough to do it.
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