by Cadellon
At first I thought that the solution was to rebalance good objectives but at this point the neutral-associated evil objectives are real easy to accomplish as you basically kill them during your early development while the good objectives probably require something like 12 influence each to be accomplished and a extremely specific starting strategy that will not benifit you in many ways (you cannot reallya attack your big neutrals until you have a ton of influence as you risk killing them or putting them in a place where someone else will kill them) but if you wait too much they will be dead so to try to accomplish it every early influence you get goes into it while others aee buying more useful stuff with it. . So it slows down your early development a lot to try to accomplish it and ends up being almost alwys discarded with the spring event. Other objectives are much easier and drawing it basically means that you are one dragon rune under other players as it is very obvious when you are trying to accomplish it and other players can easily prevent it (more easily than say, Powerful Kingdom or Influent leader). My problem is that diplo can be fine for retreating units but useless for recruiting, plus whatever you recruit can be lost by broken allegiances making it expensive and difficult to recruit them. The food ruling you propose would not solve the problem as it improves the neutrals power but not how you recruit them.I did try 2 cards for 1 influence but it did seem a bit unbalanced as it essentially allowed you to spend influence to take a areas way too easily so I ended ruling it as 2inf/3cards and it wokrs pretty well as you anyway never spend only 1 inf. It is less elegant but more balanced.
Another idea that I did not try out was to reduce the objectives to 1 dragon/giant needed and make influence already spent stay under the unit(s) on which you spent it and you draw during diplo extra cards according to the influence under the unit(s). It might seem a bit more elegant.