This is the known and desired outcome of the model I propose. The idea is that over the course of the game, an empire's alignments will gradually polarize towards one side or the other unless explicit effort is made to keep them around the middle, for a particularly diplomatic empire, for example. This is desirable because as the game progresses, each empire will inevitably develop its own distinctive character, which is one of the goals of this system to begin with. In addition, as I've mentioned, if over many turns, a large, difficult-to-reverse shift in alignment is observed, this makes the decision of whether or not to start down that path at all even more significant.RonaldX wrote:I don't really see a need for a growth value, all of the things you have set as factors in growth could simply be set as factors in an integer target value, but I understand what you're getting at. The reason I don't like growth is because it doesn't work asymptotically.. If you act very slightly bloodthirsty for a long time, then a hugely bloodthirsty race will eventually come to love you for it because you slowly but surely grow in that direction, even though you aren't acting in a particularily bloodthirsty manner.
Geoff seems to agree with you, but I do not. However, I can see the benefit of not having diplomatic statuses such as treaties and wars affect allegiance in this way. Instead, a race will either like a certain type of treaty or not, and that will affect the growth of alignment in a certain way, regardless of that species allegiance to the empire in question.I don't see any reason why I should get a bonus to my allegiance if another empire treats a race badly, or vice versa. I believe that is an overcomplication. I have enough to worry about designing ships, producing fleets, fighting battles, conducting diplomacy, defending myself from espionnage, etc. etc. to have to worry about how my planets are going to react if my opponent starts enslaving his people. I agree with the factors regarding ennobling/enslaving my own people, or killing billions of a given race, or destroying their homeworld, but the things that affect allegiance to MY empire should be MY actions, not my opponents'.
However, in terms of one-time trade negotiations (trading resources, ships, tech, etc.) I believe it would be useful if the one-time shift in current alignment was based on the species' allegiance towards both the empires in question. This would give an incentive to give good treatment to empires towards whom your species have high allegiance, which will greatly enhance the political/diplomatic aspect of the game, since if your opponents have higher allegiance towards you than towards him, he'll be more likely to give you presents to try to curry favour with his people. This helps to make being the diplomatic empire an interesting and viable way to play.
That means that each allegiance altering event would need to have both a magnitude, and a "rate of diminuation", which is more complicated than a single event just altering the alignment scale once. In addition, this means that the "growth" of allegiance will essentially be dependent on how many distinct factors are contributing to it, which is kind of weird, and would lead to predictable, but weird fluctuations in allegiance growth.Not necessarily. Only the things that happened that still have an effect need to be displayed. In my example, bombarding an enemy planet and killing 15 billion of a race causes a 15 point drop in the target allegiance of that race to your empire. Each turn, they forget 1 billion of those deaths (a defined property of the "killed lots of the race" factor). After 15 turns, as long as you havn't killed anyone else, they completely forgive you and this factor disappears from the list of effects on target allegiance.
They are, however, still mixed in with current object-effects, which is still awkward and potentially confusing, as well as easily avoided by using alignments.As long as you define certain factors as diminishing, there is no reason to keep track of them beyond the period where they are relevant.
The fact that it's tied into the factors themselves just makes the idea of allegiance even more complicated. Suppose the initial hit of 100, for example, occurred when the allegiance of that species was only 50. You would see everything that adds up to 50, and you would see Destroyed Homeworld: -100 (+1), whereas the player's actual rate of allegiance growth will be 0, due to the fact that that +1 only applies to the diminishing factor of that specific allegiance factor (i.e. the penalty will be -99 next turn, which still puts the player below 0). That's what happens when you try to combine diminishing factors and current factors and historical factors into the same set of values - weird things happen that can be avoided very easily by using only alignments as I have proposed.The rate of growth or decay can simply be tied to the factors themselves. They have a rate at which they accumulate (blockading a planet causes target happiness to drop by x per turn) or decay (a race suffers a -100 initial hit to target allegiance if you destroy their homeworld, but it climbs back up 1 per turn for 100 turns, at which point you are forgiven). In this way the factors themselves are the only determinants of target allegiance AND target happiness, both values can be easily calculated at any time. A player can quickly see which factors are affecting his allegiance, or on a planet, happiness, which are the most important, and how long they are going to stick around for.
As long as there are many ways to alter the alignment values over the course of the game, including continual growth towards one extreme or the other, I don't see a problem with this, since it's still possible to max out the scale even if you did something horrific in the early game; you just need enough time to get them to like you again, which I think is fine. This "diminishing" of the effects of certain events is essentially built right into the system this way, since after a long while, you'll get to a point where it won't matter what you did in the early game, you'll still either be at 0 or 100.Krikkitone wrote:Also, as for affects to allegience Never fading away? are you serious, no actions that affect allegiance only for a while? If I kill some population with collateral damage in the first 100 turns It will be remembered till the end of the game?
This is essentially the only thing I would object to. As I've mentioned before, a direct exchange of resources should affect allegiance (via alignment) based on relative allegiance to the two empires. For example, if Blue has 20 more allegiance than Green from the Egassem, Green would get a bonus to Egassem allegiance for giving Blue a present of technology or ships or minerals or whatever. If Blue gave Green a present, and Green accepted, that would be a penalty to Egassem allegiance for Green for taking something from an empire they liked (it doesn't matter who initiated the deal, whether it was Blue giving something to Green, or Green demanding it from Blue). I'm not entirely sure at this point if there should be any impact on Egassem allegiance to Blue in these situations.Geoff the Medio wrote:Allegiance of a species to an empire does not depend on the allegiance of the species to other empires, or what diplomatic relationships the empire has with other empires
Edit:
This is also somewhat questionable... This is essentially what you just said allegiance shouldn't depend on. Why is it better for happiness to be affected directly in this way?Geoff the Medio wrote:* Target happiness of a planet can depend on the foreign relations of the empire that owns the planet, and the species on the planet's allegiance to other empires
Edit2:
This could potentially be used in specific campaign scenarios, where the races are predefined and uncustomizable, and there may be specific rules which are slightly different from standard mode, to make the prescribed path to victory more interesting.Geoff the Medio wrote:Perhaps it would be "nitpicky" to have one race's allegiance to an empire depend on the actions of that empire towards another race. But, if each empire's actions towards each race are tracked and rated like any other "alignment" scale (eg. values like pacifism, expansionism, environmentalism, etc.) then this inter-species sympathy or hatred can be added to species-empire relations essentially for free. It doesn't necessarily need to be used, but could be made easily modifiable with content files.RonaldX wrote:This sounds like it's getting overcomplicated and nitpicky. It could be relatively easily implemented as a modifier to allegiance like, "Race X gets a bonus to allegiance for every 1 billion of Race Y that you vaporize," but this has the negative connotation that it is by design better for certain races to be selected as opponents than others. While not as in-depth, the level of pacifism or bloodthirst of a race could produce similar modifiers without the added complexity level of inter-race compatibility.Most species would be indifferent or mildly opposed to bad things being done to most other species, but particularly friendly or hateful species could have "ethos" that strongly likes or dislikes empires for doing good or bad things to specific other species.