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.

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.

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'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 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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.