When would I want to be somebody's friend? [duplicate]

If you make a Declaration of Friendship, there are many bad points:

1. Your friend will regularly ask you for money or Resources.
2. It will negatively affect your relationship with your friend's enemies
3. You cannot Denounce your friend or Declare War on him or her without incurring diplomatic penalties with all other Civilizations.
4. If you do anything to annoy your friend, e.g. not agreeing to his/her regular demands for money, then he/she will usually Denounce you and this will negatively affect your relationship with all other Civilizations ("Your Friends found reason to Denounce you!")

There don't seem to be many good points: 1) it will positively affect your relationship with your friend's friends

So, is it worth publicly Declaring Friendship at all?

Solution 1:

Friends can be useful in two situations:

(1) If your friend is powerful, it may deter one of your close neighbours from attacking you, both if they're your friend's friend, and if your friend is stronger than them. In a similar vein, if you made an enemy, and can DOF with someone who lives more closely to said enemy, the enemy is more likely to butcher your new-found friend first (and the demanded resources allow you to somewhat fight a proxy war).

(2) If you want others to declare war on you so that they may bleed themselves dry on that citadel you built on a choke point, or because you don't want to look like a warmonger to everyone, a DOF with their sworn enemy helps pushing them over the edge.

Solution 2:

A declaration of friendship is needed to make a research agreement with a civ, so if you are pursuing a tech victory, they can be worth it, too.

The Gods and Kings expansion, if you have it, added positive modifiers when you befriend two civs that are friends with each other, which of course also is a welcome extra bonus.

Solution 3:

No. Diplomacy as a whole is 100% worthless in Civ V. Everything you do will piss off the AI (whether you realize it or not; there are "hidden" modifiers that you don't see), and going out of your way to become allies will only result in you crippling yourself prior to a backstab. Here's the only way to play the diplomacy game:

• At the start of the game, simply try to reamin neutral with everyone. You'll get a few friendly AI out of this regardless, and you can manipulate them in trade deals.
• Once you build up your army enough to withstand the AI's pitiful excuse for war (Firaxis really didn't think this whole one unit per tile thing out and the AI sucks at war worse than all the previous games), just ignore the AI completely.
• Once you have the tech lead, start to kill them. They will hate you regardless (it's programed into the game that when you get close to winning, they will all dogpile you), so might as well start removing them one by one.