Diplomacy gripe

[Hobelhouse]

The worst Diplo gripe I have is that while the AI can red out stuff they'll never give away, YOU CAN'T. They'll come up asking for, say, fission, and when you refuse you get a MINUS. You don't even get the option with the AI!

The player ought to be able to project attitudes t the AI, just like the AI does to us. I mean, does the AI consider attitude in Ai-to-Ai relations?

[TheHateMale]

No, but feel free to invade the AI out of spite (which is what the relations kind of model).

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Hobelhouse
The worst Diplo gripe I have is that while the AI can red out stuff they'll never give away, YOU CAN'T. They'll come up asking for, say, fission, and when you refuse you get a MINUS. You don't even get the option with the AI!

The player ought to be able to project attitudes t the AI, just like the AI does to us. I mean, does the AI consider attitude in Ai-to-Ai relations?

I think it's fair to say that the AI doesn't care what we think about them.

I expect that 'projecting' attitudes at the AI, theraputic as it might feel, would be subject to abuses, and wouldn't really work. I know what you mean, though.

[xxFlukexx]

Originally posted by Hobelhouse
The worst Diplo gripe I have is that while the AI can red out stuff they'll never give away, YOU CAN'T. They'll come up asking for, say, fission, and when you refuse you get a MINUS. You don't even get the option with the AI!

The player ought to be able to project attitudes t the AI, just like the AI does to us. I mean, does the AI consider attitude in Ai-to-Ai relations?

Errr, so you want to demand something from the AI that they will always refuse and then no change in relations happen. Ummm, sounds like a waste of clicking to me.

Your feeling towards the AI is never shown, it's in your head the entire time. So you can open up the diplomacy advisor, see that they won't trade with you and get mad at them and eventually attack them. It's actually a huge bonus to the player, you get to see exactly how much the AI likes/dislikes you, the AI never gets to see how much you like him.

If you want to "project" an attitude (dunno what that means exactly) you can just demand gold and resources and gold per turn from them constantly, they will get the hint pretty fast, but why you would give the AI a heads up that you are going to attack them is beyond me.

The AI won't give in to any demand unless they are severely beaten up, so techs are 'redded' out to save you wasted time from making demands on them. Now they do make demands on the player so you have the option of appeasing the AI or risk open war. The AI "doesn't negotiate with terrorists" so you can't make demands on an AI that hates you, good strategy and good programming imo.

[Hauptman]

It wouldnt actually be very hard to add me "agree or war" proposals... All the ai needs to do is do a power check and compare the difference to what the demand actually is.

Now we keep cities and "goto war with so and so" red still but make all resources, techs and agreements white. So i can tell an AI, "cancel deals with tokagawa, or I will invade you myself." The AI then checks your power compared to his (give the human a huge bonus btw, since we use units better) then look at how important his deals are at present to himself. If power is too high and deals are weak, then he cancels... even if he reall doesnt want to. If you apear as too weak to do anything and he gets his only iron or oil from tokagawa then he declines and YOU declare war. I'm sure somone with some modding exp could figure this out easy enough.

Obviosly it isnt fair to force war between him or me. And if your demand is a city, well then just take it forcably... But often enough a neighbor who I DO NOT HAVE OPEN BORDERS WITH will let his ally attack me and i can do nothing about it without declaring on my neighbor. this would at least give the AI the option to not get dragged into the war.

Oh and as far as "beat the ai down to 1 city and they will give in to your demands" i found this to be completely untrue. The AI's just dont have a sense of self preservation at all... I could have 3 modern armor stacks surrounding his 2 infrantry city, demand a tech for peace, and he will always say "no"

[MightyTiny]

Originally posted by xxFlukexx


Errr, so you want to demand something from the AI that they will always refuse and then no change in relations happen. Ummm, sounds like a waste of clicking to me.

I think the point would be that you could issue ULTIMATUMS, not just requests or demands. Ultimatums meaning clear "If you refuse, there WILL be war as an immediate consequence".

I think that would (or at least should!) change things from the AI's point of view, when compared to a simple demand with no clearly spelt, concrete, 100% certain consequences for refusing.

I think it's immensely silly that a civilization that's pleased with me is letting my enemy attack me through his territory, using his cities as bases, and won't even consider closing their borders with my enemy. I should be able to threaten war, if the borders weren't closed.

So why not just attack my neighbour, forget about ultimatums, and get it over with? Because perhaps I really don't WANT a war with him; perhaps I realize that fighting two opponents will result in me having to expend more resources than I'm readily willing to expend to win, and slow my tech progression. In such a case an ultimatum would be invaluable; it would make the consequences clear to the AI, and I would have a chance of averting a war that could hurt me economically.

And in a situation where your "friend" is letting someone use their territory to attack you, I'd expect them to at least have the sense to act appologetically towards you, perhaps try to appease you with gifts. Maybe explain that they fear the other guy more than you, no offence ment.

My gripe is that the AI acts in most situations as if it's completely unaware or disregarding the circumstances and current events, that in real life would bear CRITICALLY on the attitude and content of diplomatic actions. Of course, it appears clear that the AI IS disregarding all considerations beyond those small set of plusses and minuses, and this I'd like to see changed.

Another thing; in my recent game I needed to get a land route to the Americans to help them out against the Japanese; the problem was that I had to go through both Chinese AND French territories in order to reach the US and Japan. And the French hated me, and I didn't have open borders with them.

So I piled up significant amount of troops on the Chinese side of the border, and when in diplomacy, the "open borders" option was redded out, I had no other alternative than to declare war, take a few French cities to serve as bases, and then walk through the French territory to the US.

Now in real life, seeing that my army was about three times as large, and technologically more advanced than the French, PLUS I had piles of troops waiting at the French border, wouldn't the French have been likely to yield to a demand of open borders if the alternative was a clearly spelt out consequence of total war?

Shouldn't I be given at least a chance to make that clear ultimatum? I had no desire to go to war with the French, despite being able to wipe them out fairly easily, simply because war is expensive. I didn't want a war, but was ready to start a war if it was the only way to achieve my larger goals (Mainly cripling the Japanese civ that was getting too powerful, and would have become a serious threat if they conquered the US). And I'm SURE Louis XIV didn't want a war with me, despite being annoyed with me. So simply because of a lack of a very reasonable diplomacy option, a war that neither party wanted was the only way forward.

[MasterDave]

I would like to say that Multiplayer diplomacy in Civ4 is more "realistic" than diplomacy with the AI's, but when it comes down to it, people usually do not handle diplomacy in a realistic or consistent manner either. Their only goal in diplomacy is to win, whether it means ganging up on the strongest person, or allying with the strongest person to buy time. Even in the so-called real world, international diplomacy, such as decisions by the UN, rarely makes sense to me. Even the definition of what is sensible in international relations or even what is logical is tinged with whatever political bias or world view of each individual beholder.

Trying to hold the game's AI to a standard of being realistic or making decisions that make sense to us as individuals is not terribly realistic. I think that the feedback we get under Civ 4 (the plusses and minuses) and the way the AI is influenced by factors such as religion, relations with third parties, tributes, etc. makes it the best diplomacy model I have seen to date under a turn based 4X game (and I have played the majority of such games that have been available). Of course it is not "perfect", but perfection really is in the eye of the beholder, as everyone has a somewhat different interpretation of what is realistic or what makes sense in international relations.

[Cort Haus]

Good points, MasterDave.

[Ekmek]

Originally posted by MightyTiny


I think the point would be that you could issue ULTIMATUMS, not just requests or demands. Ultimatums meaning clear "If you refuse, there WILL be war as an immediate consequence".

CTP2 has that feauture and it then affects your negativity. Other than that ctp2 diplomacy was weak. I guess on the bright side if the SDK comes out we can see in the ctp2 source code how it was handle and mimic it.

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other than that your "gripe" about foriegn relations sounds realistic to me. An ungrateul neighbor that lets you get bogged down by another neighbor attacking through while they sit back and conserve their military. thats not too bad of a strategy.

Of course my first game I was screwed by the Russians attacking through Rome (the sole superpower in that game) and Rome NOT giving me open borders.
Rome was massive and separated me and Russia completely. To make matters worse the Russians had naval superiority and sunk any galleon that i let out of port. so I just had to sit back and take it.

Oddly the Russians eventually granted peace after I prevented them from taking cities, in the end Rome tired of my presence and i gained roman citizenship at the point of the sword.