Diplomacy Ideas Thread!

[Nyphur]

Hey guys,
We're developing the Diplomacy gameplay and I wanted to give everyone a brief overview of how it will work and give you the opportunity to have your say on it before we get stuck in to coding it.

How will Diplomacy work?:

The main influences in our Diplomacy system are the Civilization series and Master of Orion II. Once you meet another race, you'll be able to contact them and open up the diplomacy screen to propose a number of deals:

• Offer/Request Technology - Any technology they have that you don't can be requested. Old technologies will be valued quite low but the race's latest tech will be valued highly and difficult to get off them.
  
• Offer/Request Money - You can add money to either side of a deal, which can add value to a deal and make it more acceptable.
  
• Offer/Request Star Systems - This option isn't 100% confirmed yet as we haven't implemented the mechanics for it, but we'd like to make it so that you can offer any of your star systems in trade.
  
• Offer/Demand resources - The current design allows you to offer or demand Energy, Food or Metal, which we were thinking of delivering via freighters once those are implemented. This may be replaced by the Trade Pact idea below.
  
  
• Propose Research Agreement - Both you and the recipient of the treaty get bonus research points equal to 5% of the other party's RP/turn.
  
• Propose Non-Aggression Pact - This race's ships will no longer blockade your trade routes when in system with you. Attacking a race you have a Non-Aggression Pact with will incurr a diplomatic penalty with all races.
  
• Propose Military Alliance - You will be called on to declare war on an enemy of your ally, and the ally will also join your wars.
  
• Propose Open Borders - Allows your ships to use their sensor spheres and vice versa.
  
• Propose Trade Pact - Right now, the design for this is that it'll give you money/turn based on the size of the other race's economy. We have some ideas for an alternative system below that we'd love your feedback on.
  
  Continued...

[Nyphur]

... continued.

Trade Pact Idea for Feedback:

In MOO2 and many other 4X games, a trade agreement is just a diplomatic agreement that generates money each turn for both races involved. Since we now have Trade Routes, we've been thinking of extending this to work with the Trade Pact diplomacy option. We'd like to run these ideas by you for feedback before we discuss them in the office and commit to the design for our Diplomacy update. Please note that none of this is set in stone, we're at the point where we haven't decided on this feature and would like early feedback:

Trade Pacts & Trade Routes: The core idea is that having a Trade Pact with another race could allow you to make trade routes with their empire. Check out the video below for info on how the new Trade Route system works and you'll see just how powerful an option this would be. If we do this, we'd obviously need to limit the system so you can't just squeeze your trading partners for all their resources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iifcNtyDm8A

Continued...

[Nyphur]

...continued.

Limiting the Trade system

We could make it so that you're buying the resources from the other race at a cost of money/turn and your resources supplied to them will generate money/turn based on how badly they actually need the resource. This means you could use trade as a source of income or spend money to wage a kind of legal economic warfare by buying up all their metal and stalling growth of new planets.

Alternatively, we could just make it so that you're physically limited to a certain number of trade routes with that empire and/or a certain amount of each resource. This could be either a firm limit or something that can be negotiated once the Trade Pact is agreed on. In either case, we could come up with an AI routine that would detect unfair trade routes and threaten to cancel the agreement.

Thoughts?

What are your thoughts? Are there any other Diplomacy options you'd like to see? Would you prefer a simpler Trade Pact system or a more complex system with Trade Routes? And if we do go for a more complex system, how do you think we should balance it to stop people abusing AI empires?

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

[WarRaven]

I think it would be cool to add pirates into the mix with the trade routes. So lets say some routes are very fruitful, well that could be because those route have the more / agressive pirates. The omly issue from a balance perspective I see with this (of course there may be many more) is that the the lessor empires wouldn't have the assets to send as escorts as the more developed empires. Or maybe this is balanced? lessor empires need to use a great number of safer routes until they can aford the escorts? Anyway dynamic route pirating would add an additional dynamic to the trade systen.

[CypherLH]

I love the idea of allowing trade routes with other empire's if you have a trade agreement with them but you'd need to make sure the AI is fairly smart about it so that it only agree's to routes that make sense for it....and have the descision whether to allow a given route be tied to the current relations between the two races in addition to the raw cost/benefit.

[CypherLH]

Oh, also, what about being able to establish generic money generating trade routes between two planets? With the amount of money generated being tied to the size of the two planet's population/revenue and their distance from each other. Basically, its an abstraction of trade of things like consumer goods and whatnot. You'd probably need to have a limited number of these available for each player, perhaps tied to a tech branch, so that it can't be exploited to generate too much money.
This could tie into the diplomacy as well, two factions who have revenue generating trade routes linking them would have better relations.

[CypherLH]

Another thing, are there plans to have strategic/special resources in the game beyond the current 4 base resources? If so that opens your standard trade of strategic/special resources as another diplomacy option, like you see in many modern 4x games.

[dolfjn]

Are always the same options in all 4x game. I invite you to think about something new and different. Anyway, the point is the AI. I believe that until now no one has ever developed a good IA on diplomacy.

[Avendt]

Trade and Diplomacy have always been tied with each other, in RL and in games...Having a Trade agreement/Trade route with another Empire is a de-facto non-agression pact which is made purely for the benefit of both parties, be it profit or need for resources. In some 4X games the trade routes are an actual shipping line with ships that travel between planets, and some are nothing more than an abstract idea where you do not see any trading ships/freighters moving but just a line that connect the planets that are trading...Each of these have pluses and minuses...Do you specify an amount of resources to trade each turn? Do you just set to trade whatever the surplus is? Do you have an option to barter (exchange resources) ? Will there be strategic resources which have specific affect on ships engine/weapons/hulls? If only the current res are to be traded, will their price be affected by supply/demand? There are so many questions to be answered in order to be able to have any real input into this discussion. Call me nit-picking person but I just like to have all the info...

[birnohar]

Pirates are a great idea, but on a solar scale not in deep space.Pirates would have to operate nearby planets to have any chance at finding comercial ships and for resources to maintain there vessels. So pirates would operate independant of any trade routes bettween empires. But wouldbe a local threat, not a threat to long range routes.

[Face]

Heres an idea Military pacts...

not an alliance, but a pact that 2+ players make against another or more races, to combat secretly, this would be sort of liek the ribbentrop pact that germany and russia did in ww2 against poland, and military pacts would be secret actions which is from the other races not involved...

unlike a alliance which is known to all races, this could be used for embargos, espionage, military actions, etc...

would add flavour to diplomacy rather then the usual stuff most games have, but also make diplomacy interesting as you can deal under the table to races while doing other things ont he table...

[csatrad]

Originally posted by Nyphur:

Hey guys,
We're developing the Diplomacy gameplay and I wanted to give everyone a brief overview of how it will work and give you the opportunity to have your say on it before we get stuck in to coding it.

How will Diplomacy work?:

The main influences in our Diplomacy system are the Civilization series and Master of Orion II. Once you meet another race, you'll be able to contact them and open up the diplomacy screen to propose a number of deals:

• Offer/Request Technology - Any technology they have that you don't can be requested. Old technologies will be valued quite low but the race's latest tech will be valued highly and difficult to get off them.

How did your race learned about theire technology? You don't even need spies? As soon as you just saw a random scout you instantly know eveything they have to offer? :D hahaha I can write countless lines how big of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is.

Offer/Request Money - You can add money to either side of a deal, which can add value to a deal and make it more acceptable.

[/quote]
If you would put something like that in, why not just slap a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ button there to fill up the remaining "acceptable value" to 1 credite above needed. Would save you an extra textbox or slider, but don't forget to put a picture of a vending machine, or price tag next to the techs. Heck you can even do a weekly discount hahaahahahaha.

Offer/Request Star Systems - This option isn't 100% confirmed yet as we haven't implemented the mechanics for it, but we'd like to make it so that you can offer any of your star systems in trade.

[/quote]
Oh yes, i can already see it. As soon as you just notice a completly new race you instantly learn all theire planets (and probably theire location) beacuse ♥♥♥♥♥ it, if you pay extra you can even chose the color of the bulls-eye where your army needs to go to make the most damage. Exploration? Why? This isn't a 4x... OH WAIT!

Offer/Demand resources - The current design allows you to offer or demand Energy, Food or Metal, which we were thinking of delivering via freighters once those are implemented. This may be replaced by the Trade Pact idea below.

[/quote]
I was trying to imagine a situation where this would make sense. I guess guess if you ran out of coins for the vending machine you might aswell stuff anything in the hole that you found around you. Altho this might be less stupid then the money thing, at least they might be able to use these stuff, while I doubt they can use your race's currency hahahaha.

Propose Research Agreement - Both you and the recipient of the treaty get bonus research points equal to 5% of the other party's RP/turn.

[/quote]
This actually make sense, but should have a HUGE resource draw increase to host the combined research. But I would put this option to full alliance, beacuse it is basicly you let them infilirate your secrets not to mention your techlevel, and knowledge is power.

Propose Non-Aggression Pact - This race's ships will no longer blockade your trade routes when in system with you. Attacking a race you have a Non-Aggression Pact with will incurr a diplomatic penalty with all races.

[/quote]
I think the last part is useless. Attacks as such supposed to be secret, yo. Else why would you do it in the first place? I think a better penality is that the race will go war with you and can only offer peace itself, if it wants, but you are banned from any form of diplomacy to them until they do.

Propose Military Alliance - You will be called on to declare war on an enemy of your ally, and the ally will also join your wars.

[/quote]
Seems legit, but it should only affect offered military units or sectors, not the whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ race.

Propose Open Borders - Allows your ships to use their sensor spheres and vice versa.

[/quote]
Again I would put this really deep, at least on the same level of alliance as being an alternative one, or it could work on a lower level but would only affect attached units or sectors. (not like ahhhh yeah if you want to move your entire fleet to my home planet you do so i dont mind at all!)

Propose Trade Pact - Right now, the design for this is that it'll give you money/turn based on the size of the other race's economy. We have some ideas for an alternative system below that we'd love your feedback on.

[/quote]
This should be the ground level really. Like before non-agression pact. You know it would only affect unarmed heavellly overwatched individuals continously tracked.


Continued... [/quote]

[Nyphur]

Hey guys,

I'm starting to implement this now, so I'd like to take a moment to reply to some of the feedback:

Originally posted by Face_OF_Insanity:

Heres an idea Military pacts...
not an alliance, but a pact that 2+ players make against another or more races, to combat secretly, this would be sort of liek the ribbentrop pact that germany and russia did in ww2 against poland, and military pacts would be secret actions which is from the other races not involved...

We could do this in a similar way to MOO2, where you can demand that one race declares war on another. You wouldn't need to be in an alliance, just make a good enough offer to make them agree, and nobody would know it was you pulling the strings in the background.

Originally posted by birnohar:

Pirates are a great idea, but on a solar scale not in deep space.Pirates would have to operate nearby planets to have any chance at finding comercial ships and for resources to maintain there vessels. So pirates would operate independant of any trade routes bettween empires. But wouldbe a local threat, not a threat to long range routes.

Agreed! Pirates would have to be a random event that happens in a star system and you'd have to send your ships there and destroy them to get rid of them. They could disrupt trade routes in a star system by blockading the system entirely or just by stealing a percentage of the trade route resources each turn, and they wouldn't leave the star system.

Originally posted by Avendt:

Do you specify an amount of resources to trade each turn? Do you just set to trade whatever the surplus is? Do you have an option to barter (exchange resources) ? Will there be strategic resources which have specific affect on ships engine/weapons/hulls? If only the current res are to be traded, will their price be affected by supply/demand?

These are all up for debate, actually. My current thinking is that you should be able to set up a trade route with another race just like you can with your own empire and then choose to send any resources you like there or request any resources you need. There are a few ways we could do this:
1) You're given money/turn for the resources, and the prices fluctuate with demand on the planet. For example, if the planet has excess food then they won't pay much for more. You could also import excess resources from the planet at the cost of money per turn.
2) You have a trade meter with that race, which goes up when you send them resources and down when you import resources from them. If the meter ever reaches 0, the trade agreement is broken. This is similar to option 1 but it's a zero sum game and doesn't get money involved. When your trade points are getting low, the AI's points will be high and they might set up their own trade routes to spend them.
3) For each trade route you set up that exports resources to a planet, you can set one up to import them. You can only import as much as you export. This is a much simpler system, but carries the problem that each resource has a different value. Population is difficult to grow, food is produced in large quantities, and the value of energy and metal varies by planet.

Originally posted by CypherLH:

Another thing, are there plans to have strategic/special resources in the game beyond the current 4 base resources? If so that opens your standard trade of strategic/special resources as another diplomacy option, like you see in many modern 4x games.

Yep! The plan is to add very rare strategic resources that give global bonuses to whoever owns them, like Adamantine ore deposits that give bonus armour hitpoints to ships or warp plasma gas deposits that improve FTL speed of all ships by 1 ly/turn. We could offer access to these resources as another diplomacy option. The question is whether you can share the strategic resource or if granting the other race access means you no longer have it. I'm leaning toward the former option, while keeping the deposit extremely rare, as in there should be only one of each strategic resource on a medium sized map.

Originally posted by CypherLH:

Oh, also, what about being able to establish generic money generating trade routes between two planets? With the amount of money generated being tied to the size of the two planet's population/revenue and their distance from each other. Basically, its an abstraction of trade of things like consumer goods and whatnot. You'd probably need to have a limited number of these available for each player, perhaps tied to a tech branch, so that it can't be exploited to generate too much money.
This could tie into the diplomacy as well, two factions who have revenue generating trade routes linking them would have better relations.

If we do add Trade Goods, I like the idea of tying this to a technology. It'd be limited to one route and could generate maybe 1BC/turn per 1000 population on both planets. I think this will have to wait until we put in the rest of the diplomacy and trade mechanics so we can see how it all interacts and how we can implement Trade Goods without making the game really complicated, but it's definitely a good idea.

Originally posted by WarRaven:

I think it would be cool to add pirates into the mix with the trade routes. So lets say some routes are very fruitful, well that could be because those route have the more / agressive pirates. The omly issue from a balance perspective I see with this (of course there may be many more) is that the the lessor empires wouldn't have the assets to send as escorts as the more developed empires. Or maybe this is balanced? lessor empires need to use a great number of safer routes until they can aford the escorts? Anyway dynamic route pirating would add an additional dynamic to the trade systen.

We probably won't have explicit escort ships for trade routes. Instead, pirates would pop up in a star system and you'd have to battle them to get rid of them. We could make it so that having even a single combat ship in the system will let them escort trade ships and counteract the pirates, just like how blockades work currently. So you could ignore the pirates and just station one escort ship in the system, but you'd need to kill the pirates if you wanted to move the ship out of the system.

Originally posted by csatrad:

hahaha I can write countless lines how big of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is.

csatrad, I understand that you have strong opinions about 4X game design but your post is an abusive rant that is not constructive and contains no useful feedback. I put this thread up to get feedback on our current ideas and allow our backers and supporters to contribute their own ideas. If you have any ideas on how you would like diplomacy to work, you are welcome to post them in a constructive manner. If you write another abusive rant on this forum, you will be banned from posting on it.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Sgt. Killstreak]

It's awesome that you guys are asking the community what they;d like to see, Diplomacy is typically one of the last things they seem to care about in 4x games.
The biggest thing I'd like to see a way to assert your superiority over a given faction without destroying it (ie making them pay tribute) but i'd also like to see a by-race pact, like 'we hate this dude more than you, lets kill them together' or 'Even the two of us can't fight these guys. Let's have a truce and raid their trade lines.' You know, things that don't mean a long term alliance.

EDIT B/c i forgot:
I like the idea of pirates being centered around trade locations. I don't know how you guys want pirates to work in the overall picture, but what if you could provide 'incentives' for pirates to raid enemy trade lines?

[Happiers1989]

This is a bit belated, but I only just found this game so I hope no one minds if I add my two cents on diplomacy, trade and piracy.

On Diplomacy, no matter what else the diplomacy system has, in my view the most important factor is that the AI be willing to actually use the system. I'm sure we've all played the games where the AI's response to 'Hey, can I trade Faster Laser Recharging in exchange for your Faster Missile Reloading tech?' is "Arglabargle No you stupid savage you have to give us all your monies and techs if you want Faster Missile Reloading Tech, no matter that you can research it in a mere five turns and this is a fair deal that just saves us both a bit of time'.

...Maybe I'm overstating it a bit, but you get the idea. Beyond what any diplomacy system can theoretically do, for it to matter at all the AI has to be willing to both use it, and willing to respect what is agreed from it and not respond to a non-aggression pact by trying to flood your land with settlers.

On trade, I'd like to point out that as long as their is profit to be made I'm sure some people will be willing to do some smuggling no matter if there's a trade pact set up or not. That could be an interesting random event!

On piracy, will it be possible to hire/fund/bribe pirates to go harass your enemy's trade lanes?

[outlawcarl]

Some interesting ideas here.
An idea I’ve been playing in my mind is some kind of inter-planet diplomacy, perhaps you could have different races having different levels of influence or something opening up markets? say a % of a planet surplus your able to trade is = to your influence or something like that (just an idea could go more in depth but something even low like that might be nice).

For the trade I do like the idea of doing economic warfare, should be some way to counter it, or maybe you should just have to state what your trade policy is with each race. Like it’s on free trade at first then you can set for example race A will be tariffed trade (they have to pay a certain amount per some amount) while you have set race B with embargo. Could also set this by planet and make a kind of trade planet like Canton or Nagasaki for RL examples.

So a gunship (Matthew Perry anyone?) open free trade with me for planet X diplomacy action would be nice.

And of course all trade with everyone should be by them freighters so if you are to do that economic warfare you would need the merchant fleet to do it with (which could then be raided etc). Also consider escorts.