Krikkitone wrote:A way I could see it working.
"allying" with a native species should have a certain influence cost.
I'm coming back from a long absence so while I've looked over the influence discussion I don't really understand the idea of how the mechanic would work yet, or even know if that's been settled. That being said I do think this would fit nicely into the idea of an influence mechanic. Perhaps the diplomatic shuttle could cost a certain amount influence to build then "spend" that influence when it goes to a planet to try to "ally" the planet. Perhaps further techs could increase the influence the shuttle carries.
Krikkitone wrote:Possibly something like
Presence of "diplomatic shuttle" part allows you to work on the "native assimiliation" project
...it would have a cost and number of turns that would depend on
-the characteristics of the natives compared to characteristics of your empire.
-your empires overall happiness
and
-investment by others...every time one empire invested, it also either reduces the investment by other empire OR increases the cost of their project.
If the diplomatic shuttle leaves/is destroyed you can't advance the project.
So if you have a native you want options are
-invade
-send your shuttle and kill any other empire's shuttles
-send+defend your shuttle and be happy+compatible with the natives+have a lot of influence to invest
Ok, this I will say is a mechanic that doesn't look very appealing to me. Mostly I do not like the idea of diplomatic shuttles somehow "fight" or "kill", as I'd like diplomatically/peacefully acquiring planets to
not just be another form of combat. That's actually my biggest dislikes for the civilization stage of Spore (if you wind up a "peaceful" religious civ).
That's why I don't want the player to be able to "spam" a planet with them. You shouldn't be able to just overwhelm them and you should have to wait to try again if it didn't work. I want it to have a different feel to it than invading.
Mind you I'm mostly thinking of the early game, when you're not yet competing with another empire for new planets, or a galaxy with lots of stars between empires (how I like to play). So establishing how competing empires
both interested in acquiring the same planet peacefully might be more important than I am thinking. However I will say that the first available version of the part probably shouldn't allow you to "steal" planets from other empires, and that might be something for an
advanced diplomatic shuttle or a
diplomatic transport part, or maybe even reserved exclusively for an espionage mechanic and not more "polite" diplomacy.
I will also say I greatly prefer a "consumes ship" mechanic for several reasons.
- It prevents you form taking over the galaxy with a single ship (or more realistically a small fleet)
- You don't have to keep track of the ship after you tell it to try to convert the natives
Geoff the Medio wrote:My idea for taking over planets by influence would be to introduce "leaders" or similar, which can, amongst other things, act as diplomats, and would be required to do certain influence projects, probably including some that would be effective at gaining control of neutral / other empires' planets "voluntarily". This would probably involve putting them on a ship to fly them to the target planet, and might be similar in some ways to the proposals here.
I've thought about the idea of leaders, but I don't know how making them work as diplomats would work. Mind you I'm presuming they would be something like a planetary governor.
MatGB wrote:We discussed doing something along these lines for translinguistics about 18 months ago very briefly (
Post) and it was basically decided to leave doing similar until Diplomacy could be specced up and implemented more fully.
But we're now at the stage where we're actually talking about Diplomacy as something we're ready to start working on, with Influence being 0.5.0 and then possibly a basic level diplomacy/species relations could be introduced for 0.5.1 (I have zero clue as most of it would be backend code that's beyond me).
Suffice to say I'm very much in favour and like the basic ideas outlined above. We would need Influence to be playable first though as I think how good you are at peaceful persuasion should be linked to how good you are at influencing populations generally.
I agree with that sentiment. I would like to keep the ideas of telepaths getting some kind of bonus and xenophobes getting some kind of malus for the part, outside of however that affects their influence (unless I'm greatly misunderstanding it), as you might be say a Chato empire employing telepathic Dertheans (IE: building the ships with the diplomatic part from your Derthean planet) for ambassadors, so the Dertheans telepathic bonus would be relevant.
Vezzra wrote:These plans are definitely still in place. However, the approach we'll choose once we get there might be very different from what you suggest here. The basis for mechanics like that will be the new "Influence" resource, which is currently planned to get introduced in 0.5.0 (as Mat already mentioned). Taking over a planet peacefully/by diplomatic means would then be an "influence project" (very similar to the already existing research projects or production items, most likely queued on a "Diplomacy Screen" similar to the Production and Research Screens).
I mean I don't know that I like the purely "influence project" approach, namely I'd like to be able to do something "more direct" and even if there are influence projects, I'm assuming you can't actually do those on planets outside of your "reach" (which I'm assuming is or will be the same as supply) and something like this, like the colony ship currently, would be good if you wanted to grab up natives at the far end of your galaxy for whatever reason.
Also I don't know that a like the idea of peaceful acquisition of non-aligned planets to work something like a research or construction project. I suppose how I would like to see that kind of diplomacy work is a lower cost but higher risk than invading the planet kind of trade off. I don't want it to be a case of you acquire the planet because you have (or spend) 500 influence and that just "overpowers" them. Largely for the same reasons I wouldn't want to be able to just spam a planet with diplomats and get it. I think something like diplomacy/peaceful acquisition should have a large random element, and not be something that just having large numbers of something, weather it be ships or influence, can give you guarantee of success on.
Although if planets are going to be obtainable thought these influence projects, I do think that the "tech specials" should have a large effect on that. My inclination is to say that moderate and high tech natives should be more susceptible to influence IE: advanced enough to detect/communicate with you, while the rest should be less so if not immune to that kind of use.
One idea I've had in the back of my head is that a diplomatic shuttle might have a random chance of placing one of the tech specials on a planet on an unsuccessful attempt IE: symbolizing the natives getting tech from the attempt somehow.
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