FreeOrion

I haven't played HOI, but IMHO Alpha Centari was also very successful in this area. Any Faction could make a treaty of any kind with any other... if the need was great enough. However, if their ideologies clashed, it was a likely that the treaty wouldn't last too long. Some ideology-pairs were natural allies while others were inevitable combatants. But this wasn't just based on a static ideology. Each ideology was basically favorable or unfavorable opinions towards certain kinds of actions you could take in the game. The Gaians for instance hated big industry.

This kind of approach removed a lot of the annoying arbitrariness from diplomacy.
I describe it in more detail in this section of my excessively long wikipage.


So i, of course agree with Kricktone here:

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Goodmorning all,

I previously posted a series of thoughts on Multi empire treaties and alliances, but it was a bit early. I've pasted below the link to my previous thread.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2005&hilit=

In short I was trying to envision a general approach for how alliances and the like could be handled.

A method I would like to see is to have varying types of treaties, and have them governed semi autonomously based on the level and type of treaty.

Since detail is to be avoided, i'll keep it short.

If you want to create a treaty, with anybody you would offer it, and include in the offer what you want, and what you are willing to give. From most important, or most dispensable to least. Then diplomats would take over and try to hash out an agreement, which you could then accept, or re-order your preferences/max/mins and try again.

In the user interface for accepting or rejecting an offer, would be all the information you might need to make the decision; What your people think about it (+ or - moral if signed) what other empires are going to think of you and their pops.
This could be handled as just a side bar with an empire symbol, and a number/arrow, and a pop symbol of the same colour number arrow for each empire.

If you read the previous post you'll see that i also hope to have AI's governing ships controlled under certain treaties. But that is slightly offtopic.

Oh, and i really like the composite clauses idea, when creating such a treaty, including in your lits of wants clauses you feel are important, from a mid length list.

Best wishes,

Robbie

I think that to make diplomacy as fun as possible, we need to let the player do as much as possible in as little time as possible. No small things that affect little empire things, just big, clear, easy to understand things that the player can do easily.

So in essence, I think we should have just a few general options in diplomacy that the player can set specifics to. I think that the MoO style trade and research treaties should be done away with. If players can exchange any of their resources and money for money or any of the other players resources, then the need for arbitrary "trade treaties" evaporates. I think the diplomacy options between two empires could be laid out in the following manner:

Trade: Exchange items with another empire. These items can include money, resources, technology, planets, ships, and intelligence in any combination. Trade can be a one-time transaction or a treaty that allows the exchange of X resources per turn for Y turns, and there can be combinations of both.

Alliance: Creates military and/or intelligence obligations to another player. Alliances should be fairly simple.

Basic Defensive Alliance: Someone attacks me and your ships are in the system, you have to help me out.
Advanced Defensive Alliance: If someone declares war on me, you have to declare war on him.
Full Military Alliance: If I declare war on someone, you have to declare war on him too.
Basic Intelligence Alliance: If you find out about espionage activity within my empire, you must inform me. (gives bonus to defensive spies if such info is passed on) No active agents in each others territory. Information gathering activities only.
Full Intelligence Alliance: All intelligence is shared between us. We are essentially one spynet.
Full Alliance: Combination of Full Military Alliance and Full Intelligence Alliance.

Naturally the vice versa of all the above statements would be true as well. It needs to be made obvious to the player EXACTLY what each alliance does. These could probably be added to a deal when making a trade agreement.

Demand/Gift:The same as a trade agreement, except one side doesn't give anything.

Threat/Declare War: Here, you can lay down the conditions for staying at peace with the empire in question. A threat is essentially a demand with the threat of war behind it. You can also simple declare war and state the conditions for peace. Essentially a demand with a battleship in front of it.

Surrender/Peace Treaty:Surrender basically means you give the other empire something nice in exchange for peace. Usually it would be the conditions he laid down when declaring war on you, but it might be different depending on the situation and whether or not you're the one who declared war. It's basically a gift with a white flag on top. Simply asking for a peace treaty means that neither side gives the other anything, but they make peace anyway. I don't think we need all kids of fancy peace agreements in the form of "you keep your ships X distance from my colonies". That seems unnecessary and very unKISS.

That's my vision of FO diplomacy. Simple, macro, easy to understand, but with lot's of versatility. I also wrote some thoughts on multi-governmental bodies in the thread that Robbie provided a link to.

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Earlier i wrote that the AI's goal should only be to win. I've thought a little more and i think i can make this a bit more concrete. This essentially describes the ultimate goal of diplomacy and playing, in general.

More specifically the AI's goal should be to end the game with the most points possible.
An empire naturally gets points for discovering tech, citizens, building his empire etc. The score should probably also be modified by such things as the length of time it took, and the size of the galaxy. But those points are highly modified by the empire's status at the end. For instance if an empire is free, and solo, it keeps all the points. If it finished in one of the following states its score is modified by a progressively harsher amount:

Strong Alliance (joint victory)
Vassal
Protectorate
Extinct

Thus an empire has an incentive to conditional surrender rather than be completely destroyed. Of course there is also the hope that a subordinate state may regain it's freedom, and come to rule the galaxy.

Thus if the AI is not simply programmed for all-or-nothing victory, it could make more realistic-feeling decisions about it's own survival.

Edit: typos

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But to do that the AI first as to determine which is the most feasible goal. If he is really good at techs, then he should go for a tech win. If he is really good at diplomacy, then a diplomacy win, etc.

Bigjoe5, I think that a simplistic model like that is far to limited, you've cleanly divided trade and alliances into two separate things, why? Why shouldn't I trade a "full defensive alliance" for 100 gold and 50 production points in the same treaty, essentially paying a bigger empire to protect me? Sure humans could use the ingame chat to talk to each other and then make two deals, one for defence one for tribute, but its a clunky work around a limitation of the game and couldn't be used with the AI.

Besides, the simplistic model of alliances you used would be far to constraining for my tastes. One of my greatest annoyances is when another empire colonises something in my territory, I like nice clear borders, to the point that unless my hand is forced I'd want to have a rule of no colonising my backyard with every peace treaty I sign, and I would like to have it as part of my peace treaty rather than hope the AI manages to understand two separate treaties are linked. But on the other hand there are probobly enough situations where people wouldn't want that clause (for example, they plan to do the colonising) to make it worth having the option of allowing aggressive colonisation despite a peace treaty.

Its not so much as what you can and can't make a treaty about, the important think is the links, you should be able to customly build treaties so that the AI knows that no aggressive colonising is tied to the peace treaty, or the tribute is tied to the defence pact.

That said when it comes to the amount of options, I believe the more the better, no superweapon treaties, limitation of ship movement treaties, fleet size limitation treaties. Throw it in, let the players discover what is useful.

eleazar, that's some fine points you make about score vs win.

Goodmorning all,

I would agree with Tanaick here,

all the political going-ons between two empires should be linked to one another. A trade treaty can include a clause that both parties supply 1 or 2 ships(or resources to build ships) to patrol the routes used in trade, to keep piracy down. Since we probably don't want to have to actually manually select ships and move them on patrol missions, A Treaty AI would be invoked which would only have the ships given to it, or the ships made by it, and use those to patrol.
You would then have the opportunity later on, if you needed the ships to ask for additional clauses, or invoke clauses which allow you to remove some of those ships temporally from patrol and use them elsewhere.

This is just one example, but in general, most of the treaties should be fluidly morph-able into other forms, with the exception of merged empires.

Keep up the good work all,

Robbie

Ships that automatically do stuff like this has already been considered and rejected, in other contexts. Since nothing happens in the space between stars, there's no point in "patrolling" anyway. if you want to protect a system, you put a ship in it.

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I'm not sure bigjoe is making that point. There's a distinction between "having just a few general options" (which i more or less support) and being able to bundle those options together in a single treaty.

In theory, i like the idea of being able to bundle things together in a single treaty ("yes, i'll sign the peace treaty if you declare war on my enemy.") However, in practice it can be troubling.

FreeCiv (last time i played) has diplomacy like this. They have a reasonable number of diplomatic options, but when you combine them all together, there's a virtually infinite number of combinations. I know that will instantly appeal to some of you, but think....

In MoO2 if you want a particular treaty with someone, you can find out in seconds if they are will or not. On the down side, there's not much you can do about it. On the plus side, you can't waste much time reshaping a treaty that will ultimately be rejected.
With FreeCiv you can spend a very long time refining the treaty, trying to avoid giving too much away, but still trying to get that shared vision, or maps, or whatever. You can never get an absolute "No," but can spend a long time trying to get close.

It might be possible to make a diplomatic interface that has proposals and counter-proposals to quickly refine a treaty down to something that could be acceptable to both parties, but i haven't every seen such an interface, i don't know how exactly that could be done.

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I think we could just put that under threats and give the option of attaching a threat to a particular treaty, for instance "remove your ships from my system or the peace treaty is history". That way, you could deal with problems as they arise. I think what you propose might be too troublesome for the AI, but if players can send customized messages through diplomacy, you can make it very clear what it will take to make you break the treaty to a human player.

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One useful thing there is in CIv 4 is the speed with which you can determine what will be needed for a treaty with an AI.

The ability to say.. I want X what do you want for it OR what will you give me for X is very useful

Admitedly it used money as the "filler" but that is quite possibly useful

Yes, the option to bundle things together, especially if the AI also understands the connections between the treaties and also makes you complicated counter offers as well sounds very tempting. And the reason for this is that this kind of a system could bring a lot more colour to the diplomacy and so it could make players more interested in the diplomatic part of the game. And I at least would want to be more interested in diplomacy in games like these, but because the diplomatic systems in the games that I have played are either confusing, mainly because there isn`t enough information available for the player, or very limited with just a few options this hasn`t really been possible.

However you are of course right that this might be difficult to achieve. Now what comes to the endless reshaping problem we would probably need some indication text or a meter that would tell the player roughly what are the changes that the treaty that he/she is proposing is accepted by the other empire. (This information probably shouldn`t always be correct so that the out come of the negotiations would usually be a small mystery.) If I can remember right such an indication system already exists at least in Medieval II Total War. But then there is of course the problem of making the AI understand these complicated deals. And at least to my non programmer mind this would seem like a really though problem, since the AIs that I have faced in games aren`t usually that intelligent.

So all in all it would be great to have the kind of a treaty builder that Tortanick proposed, as these complicated treaties could really make diplomacy more interesting. However if this isn`t possible I hope that we can still have enough important diplomatic treaties and options to keep the diplomatic part of the game fun and interesting.

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What exactly is the priority? make something that works great when playing against humans, then try to make the AI understand it, or is easy on AI's more imporant than multilayer?

IMO, that would be the kind of thing that would make diplomacy frustrating and hard to understand. Regardless of realism, I think that the players should know EXACTLY what a treaty is going to do before they sign it. Diplomacy is an important part of the game, and any vague descriptions of what you're getting into wouldn't be as helpful or fun, IMO, as getting the precise details.

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