I've had a similar problem with the Diplo. It seems like the numbers are way out of whack. I was at "Warm" with Procipinee and the treaties were all about 1:150 or more based on value, so I couldn't get any treaties with them.

It was so bad I was stomping around on the Krax, decimated his forces, took three cities over, decided to pause. My army was way stronger than his on the power graph, called him up to see about peace. Value on my side? 32. Value on his side? 21,550. What the hell?!?

See, my problem is the opposite. In my games (tiny world, challenging difficulty across the board, me and one other Kingdom civ with 4 other empire civs) ...

...no one ever attacks me. I throw a couple of observers into each city, nothing huge, and send my sov merrily around the world, adventuring with his summonned creatures and beating the hell out of whatever he finds.

Eventually, one of the other civs will get in my way (box me in, be unlucky enough to have a quest target in their land and not want to open borders, or just generall annoy me) and I wipe them out.

So, yeah, I guess it does seem war oriented - but all the wars I've seen have been started by me.

Oh, one exception - last run, the yellow spider guys declared war on me. They were on the other side of the world, with no clear route to me, and I never saw a single offensive unit...  but they DID declare, so I guess there is one exception...

The best suggestion I can give is play those custom maps, as I've stated in the past, Froboy's "RealBigMap" is a pretty cool map as the majority of the time your left alone, in my current game, it took me over 150 turns actually find a faction, and that was only because they built in a area that I thought was blocked off by mountains (go figure, as I take a closer look, I noticed the tiles at the little side of the mountain, bah..)

And I actually discovered my 2nd race around turn 180 or so, so it's helped a lot. Anyway, you can easily find that map in the Mod Library section in-game, it's one of the highest downloads, so you can't miss it.

Also, haven't really fooled around with it yet, but it seems Arataag's maps (yes, mispronounced the name sorry), may be similiar as they are 14x14, and it seems most of the time I start with his maps, I seem to be alone as well.

I haven't tried to get diplomatic victories, but I did notice that the AI has a tendancy to DOW on you out of the blue.

I was in a 300+ turn game, and i finally explored the far western part of the map were i met the last of the 4 major factions in my game. We had "neutral" standing. So I keep exploring by boat (I wasn't in their influence or nothing), and after 3 or 4 turns, boom. I get a DOW from them. Thing is, they are extremely far, they are already at war with their neighboors. So I don't see the logic for the AI to DOW on me if they don't even have an opportunity to strike at me.

And like other people mentioned, I'm then stuck with a Peacy Treaty that would cost me thousands of gold coins. Feels a little off balance, or maybe I'm missing some part of the diplomacy game. The only nation I manage to keep was the one I married my level 6 daughter to, that pushed our relationship to friendly or something.

I think i've been neglecting 'diplomatic currency' is that the best way to improve relations with neighboors? other than matching their military might?

Thanks,

V.