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.tzlaine wrote: 3) This is may be a bit controversial. We may want to include some sort of alignment system, a la HOI, so that two arbitrary empires cannot just team up with/against each other....
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:
Kricktone wrote:And I think that is the key to making realistic diplomacy...
The Players are "GameWin Driven" their Populations are "GamePlay Driven" [with some realpolitic present in the population... peace with the powerful hated person will cause less unhappiness than peace with the weak hated person] For the player to achieve their "Game Win" they should choose to shape their population (through initial race picks and social manipulation) to fit their game style.