Another way of doing it is to have risk like missions. Each mission gives points, the person at the end with the most points wins.

So missions could be like:

kill opponent 5/red/vasari

Create a trade route 10 planets long (including other player's/excluding other players)

have the greatest culture rating in the game

Hold Planet x for x amount of time

Have control of planet Y at the end of the game

Control 1 ice planet, 1 volcano and one dessert planet at the end of the game

The list could go on and on. Some missions will coincide with other players' missions, some will conflict with their missions.  

To make it more interesting, missions could be given all at the start, or distributed throughout the game changing the political makeup.

The points system would be beneficial because it would allow players to decide what missions they wish to accomplish. Example, if your mission is to kill player x, but player x can help you achieve all your other missions, you could win the game by not completing that mission.

This could then lead into interesting espionage abilities, where you are trying to find out what missions the other players have.

Maybe this idea deserves it's own thread.

Place your votes here for victory conditions and other improvements to Diplomacy.

Consolidated list of improvements

If I may quote from Darvin3 in the original post I made many months ago:

Words of wisdom.

I would guess the community at large assumes this is the way the game already works.

As an example consider this unlocked game I played recently:  I quicly offered alliances to everyone (why not?).  2 of the more resonable players* in the game quickly accepted my offer, making it a 3v1v1v1.

Towards the end one of my opponents began telling me that I would lose because my allies would betray me.  I explained that we would all 3 win together.  He then complained about the game being unfair and quit.  We won.

My point being that many of the community (who may not visit the forums) expect that this is the way the game already behaves.  They are supprised when this is not the case.

* I consider my allies reasonable because it was clear they never even thought of betraying the 3 player alliance we had formed.  We were feeding each other and everything.  I'm confident we would have taken a 4th into our alliance (making it a 4v1v1) if any of the others had been smart enough to accept our offers.

I haven't visited this thread yet?  Well:

/signed

I think the person who quoted me summed my position up nicely.  As far as I'm concerned, I will not play unlocked teams until this is implemented.  As far as I'm concerned, all the new mission systems are a wasted effort if this doesn't make it in.  This should be priority #1 for Ironclad right now.

I fully agree with this suggestion, just in case I have not said so before. I don't think I even saw very many unlocked games in my online times. which is a pity, because it is or could be a very interesting a nice game mode. you know, all the trickery, the stealth, real life diplomacy, alliances. but it tends to get skewed and with this it would be a bit more in balance again.