AI, diplomacy and options

[Athena]

Hey, I just have a small suggestion.

Firstly, I am not sure how relevant this may be, as the game seems to rely heavily on multiplayer.

I did not wish to play multiplayer yet, as I wanted to understand game mechanics and simply enjoy myself. This meant that I played as America and attacked Central America to capture some key cities to improve my position.

This was extremely easy, as I allocated my points to gain an advantage with some bio research and better fighters.

However, after taking the region around Mexico City, I noticed some flaws in the AI. Firstly, it seems to me that the AI never conducts naval invasions or air invasions.

As a result, the Central American nation that lost a significant portion of its GDP—and that I did not fully eliminate—held a grudge against me and continued to attack me at a small chokepoint. It formed an alliance, and so did I with South America, but the AI would never attack each other. For example, South America would not target Central America even though it would have been easy, and Central America kept trying to attack a well-defended chokepoint.

This led to continuous wars until the end of the game, when I had enough and destroyed everything south of me.

China was their ally, and Russia often got involved when I escalated the situation with nukes, but their response was entirely ICBM-based, usually with only one or two missiles.

Since I was not prepared for that when it first began (as they started the nuclear escalation), I thought I would lose. However, the AI never invades with conventional troops or ships; it only attacks some cities and possibly military sites.

There are two main issues:


The AI never takes full advantage of the support they could provide their allies or acts aggressively enough with conventional troops.

Central America, which kept attacking me repeatedly, did so knowing it would never win.

It would be nice to have a few diplomatic options here to ensure you do not need to fully conquer a country to stop it from being a nuisance after you've guaranteed that any resistance is futile. This could be implemented by providing the player with a demilitarization zone option, where the AI must not have troops or facilities within a larger part of the border.

It could also be interesting to have a puppet government action, where the government could become a puppet, but this may make the game too easy.

Lastly, regarding occupation zones: when you take a zone, the old nation may still hold military facilities in the new territory you acquire.

If you fail to destroy them before a ceasefire, the AI can teleport units behind you, or the airbase can become the starting point for another pointless confrontation.

It would be nice to have a peace option with a treaty system that allows you to enforce longer peace times and also expel the AI from your newly acquired territory, or even force all units (except special ops units) out of the country. I have also noticed a bug where the AI may sometimes invade you during your ceasefire or could drive tanks into your country without a war starting or a ceasefire concluding.

I do really like this game, so these are just some points I hope can be improved or looked into. However, I also totally get the main fun is supposed to come from playing with larger groups of real players.

[perl]

Good points.

[Athena]

Originally posted by perl:

Good points.

Thanks, I have seen the Devs be very active on the forum, and i definetly see this game as even having the potential to be a really good strategy game to emulate a modern conflict, so I do hope we get a better flushed out diplomacy system.

Also including more options and potentially a better UI to see what nations are at war with what nations.

It would also be cool to see that alliances do not have military access by default, so this would have to be a seperate tready in the alliance