A couple random thoughts I had...

[Traelin]

Over Thanksgiving I was playing PTW SP like a champ (and yeah, I wasted WAAAY too many hours doing so!) Here's a couple questions and thoughts I had:

1. When the AI build a radar tower, does the 2 square, 25% defense bonus they get cross over cultural borders? So if I'm attacking their tower from my territory, do they get the bonus?

2. Many many times I've mentioned in previous threads about how the diplomacy model really needs to be reworked. I wish I could say it just needs to be modified, but I think they really need to rework it. The reason I started thinking about this was because of the AI using my airspace to bomb enemy AIs' targets. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it, but it started to annoy me when the Germans were using MY airspace to attack an "ally" of mine, the Americans. I wasn't at war with the Germans, so why do they feel they can exploit my territory?

I wish I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, but again I'm going to state what needs to be done with diplomacy...

2. a. "Use my airspace" agreement. Very different than a right of passage agreement, in that the enemy planes never end up staying in your territory;

b. "Call off your attack against X third party";

c. AI needs to be reworked in how it handles trades. The human player should not be punished for trades that are broken by the AI. The way it stands right now, the human cannot recover from a tech/gpt, resource/gpt, etc. deal if it's broken by the AI's incompetence. We as the humans cannot always foresee what will happen 15 turns from the beginning of the deal, so how do we know an AI is going to be attacked by everyone and knocked down to one city/eliminated in the matter of 2-3 turns?;

d. The AI is not punished enough when it breaks RoP agreements, Military Alliances, and Trade Embargos. Many times I have seen other AIs immediately make deals with the offenders that they wouldn't otherwise make with an offending human;

e. "Let us coordinate our attack at position X." This should be relatively simple to do with the more advanced Civ3 AI;

f. "Stop using nukes." This could be reworked with a global, SMAC UN-style treaty, but oftentimes I find that one AI in particular is the offender. I don't know how to best work this one out, but I'd like to be able to ask an AI to stop using nukes altogether, or to stop using them against a certain AI. It's ludicrous how liberal they are with them.

g. "Units for gold/gpt deal." IMHO we as the humans should be able to sell units to the AI. Many wars in this day and age are fought with equipment that are bought and sold on the military market, but without the vendor becoming directly involved. I do not think the AI should be able to sell units to the human player, because that would be a huge exploit. But I should be able to arm a backwards Civ to the teeth if I want to.

h. I do not know if the human is punished for buying workers from an AI, but if they are, this should stop. If an AI is willing to sell slaves, then the buyer shouldn't be penalized either. There should be a counter that checks for bought/sold slaves.

i. "Stop stationing your troops along my roads." Again, we all know how the AI thinks it has a global RoP. Fine. But they need to at least respect my road/rail systems. I don't want to have to go to war with someone just because they were using the Union Pacific RR for goodness sake.

j. If I've obliterated an AI in war (like I'm doing to the Ottomans), they should in reality do just about anything to end it. OK, so they offer me a couple crappy cities for peace. As far as I'm concerned, I've taken 2/3 of their empire, including their capital and second-biggest producer. I want a little more, and I'll be damned if I care if you're (the Ottomans) are insulted by the deal I offer.

k. ATM we can informally create a "treaty organization" via triangular MPPs, etc. I'd like to see a bit more organization with this. For instance, say I have MPPs with America and Scandinavia, and they also have MPPs with each other. Couldn't we do something cool with this?

l. "Rules of War" agreement. Even in war, there should be certain rules. I personally don't disband any captured workers. That's the equivalent of ethnic cleansing. There should absolutely be some sort of agreement you can make with a warring AI, or perhaps have a global war crimes tribunal with the UN? I don't know, but it really annoys me that all my captured workers get disbanded, and actions like that IRL don't go unpunished.

m. "Modification to current deals". Let's say you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, and you are about to accidentally screw the AI out of its gpt for a resource or whatever. When the mathematics of the game determines this will happen, it would be nice to have a popup that asks if you wish to honor the agreement with future aid or something. It would result in a displeased AI, but not one that is so pissed that it won't do business with you again.

These are all my rants for now.

[Andrew1999]

I HATE having other civs' units wandering all over my territory. My last game I went to war with 5 civs to stop them from putting settlers and their escorts over my borders. This ties in with the AI's willingness to put a city anywhere there are a few open spaces, regardless of the local physical or political geography. I ended up having to put a couple of cities down in worthless antarctic wastelands to stop the AI's colonization frenzy. When I don't put a city in down in the middle of the Sahara, Tibet, or Greenland, there's probably a good reason for it.

New treaty suggestion: Environment Pact. If one of your cities is producing more than a certain amount of pollution, production is reduced until you meet the requirements (using the pollution formula in reverse.) There should probably be compensation for losing shields this way--maybe you lose 5 shields of production but 10 shields' worth of pollution.

[Dida]

Enviromental Pact is needed. AI civs are often the biggest polluter, and I'm sick of having my grassland turned into desert dispite the fact that I built recycling centers and mass transit all over my country.
There needs to me multi-party mutual protection. Much like NATO.
We should be able to trade military units, as well as workers.
The UN should be more than just a place to vote for leader of the world. It should be a forum where more than 2 nations can disucss matters of great importance.
AI should not be so keen in trading cities, but they should have at least great interests in taking/buying back their own cities, which they lost to me in a war. Like I took London from the British, and then I offer it back to them for peace + 2 techs, and they refused to take the deal. (Their military was crushed by the point, so they had little chance of gaining it back by force). I was puzzled. Why would they not want their old capital back?

[FNBrown]

Great suggestions, Traelin... I just wonder if anyone who can do anything about it is watching... ;-)

[Traelin]

Originally posted by Andrew1999
New treaty suggestion: Environment Pact. If one of your cities is producing more than a certain amount of pollution, production is reduced until you meet the requirements (using the pollution formula in reverse.) There should probably be compensation for losing shields this way--maybe you lose 5 shields of production but 10 shields' worth of pollution.

I agree with you that something needs to be done about pollution and how the AI is very bad about creating environmental improvements. Their liberal use of nukes kinda falls into this category, too. But I almost think this kind of pact would better be implemented via the U.N. A global type of treaty, if you will. Although the nuke problem could also be solved via 1-on-1 diplomacy.

Man, if only I had the diplomacy system I've been thinking about since Civ 3's release, it would be an absolutely, ridiculously addictive game. IMHO it would be the perfect game with better diplomacy.

[Traelin]

Originally posted by FNBrown
Great suggestions, Traelin... I just wonder if anyone who can do anything about it is watching... ;-)

Thanks. I sure hope they're listening. I could write a thesis on diplomacy and the U.N. for Civ 3 if they asked me to. That's how much I love this game. All they have to do is ask.

[tonyhaug]

Traelin, I like all of your suggestions. However, they probably don't conform to the simple diplomacy model of the Civ series. For a game that should include a lot of the stuff you want, try

http://www.supremeruler2010.com/index.html

Supreme Ruler 2010 looks like a really complicated version of Civilization with a lot more bells and whistles. BTW, this is not a pitch for SupremeRuler2012. But I have been following their development for about a year now and I'm very impressed and looking forward to playing it.

[CrONoS]

tonyhaug
Supreme Ruler 2010 look nice, did you ever played SuperPower,
if, yes, is it good?

tanx

[Andrew1999]

Most of these things could be handled bilaterally. I wonder if the AI could handle multilateral agreements like SMAC? They would all have to be yes/no votes, but the person calling for the vote would need to choose who is being invited to participate. So to create NATO you'd select "Global Alliance", check that you (America) wanted to invite France, Germany, and England, and then there would be a SMAC Council vote but only with the invited parties.

[WarpStorm]

The problem with a lot of your ideas are that the faults you find with the AI describe my prefered playstyle.

I pollute liberally until I get the techs to stop. Production it too important to stop.

I nuke liberally if I feel someone deserves it.

I station troops along allies' roads (and neutral civs' till they make me leave).

I regularly ignore the other civs borders if there is someplace I want to go.

I wouldn't sign one of these pacts and if someone doesn't like my behavior they'll have to make me stop by force of arms.

[ruby_maser]

since we are wishing...

I would like to see some kind of system set up up so that you could have a true border and some kind of border claim system.

Perhaps this could play into diplomacy; if you can convince a certain percentage of the civs to recognize your claim, another civ colonizing their is tantamount to a declaration of war.

Obviously, the more ridiculous your claim is, the more difficult it would be to convince a certain percentage of the civs that it is your backyard, but if it was something reasonable like a small as-yet-unexpanded area in a backwater or what-have-you, then convincing them would allow that hypothetical border to become part of your true borders.

This could create interesting scenarios of overlapping claims between to neighbor nations.

[FNBrown]

Originally posted by ruby_maser
since we are wishing...

I would like to see some kind of system set up up so that you could have a true border and some kind of border claim system.

Perhaps this could play into diplomacy; if you can convince a certain percentage of the civs to recognize your claim, another civ colonizing their is tantamount to a declaration of war.

Obviously, the more ridiculous your claim is, the more difficult it would be to convince a certain percentage of the civs that it is your backyard, but if it was something reasonable like a small as-yet-unexpanded area in a backwater or what-have-you, then convincing them would allow that hypothetical border to become part of your true borders.

This could create interesting scenarios of overlapping claims between to neighbor nations.

I like the idea of player-determined borders - not just culturally created ones. You should be able to draw borders on the map and, whether the AI (or other players) recognize them or not, be able to ask them to leave once they cross them.

I hate being on a hard-fought continent of my own, and having some rogue AI galley fart out a settler on the three remaining squares that aren't covered by my cultural border and leave a useless city there.

[Ben Williams]

A lot of the AI colonizing problems could be solved by making the game itself more realistic. The fact that the AI will always try to place cities in statigic (even if otherwise useless) spots doesn't bother me, that makes sense. What bothers me is when they send their dinky little boat to EXACTLY the right spot. In short, the AI is given to much current information about the map. They shouldn't know where all my cities are or where my troops are located any more then I should know that stuff for them.

Also, I would like to actually haggle with the AI, rather then just be told how little I have to trade for them to accept it by some guy in the upper-right corner of the screen.

[FNBrown]

Originally posted by Ben Williams
A lot of the AI colonizing problems could be solved by making the game itself more realistic. The fact that the AI will always try to place cities in statigic (even if otherwise useless) spots doesn't bother me, that makes sense. What bothers me is when they send their dinky little boat to EXACTLY the right spot. In short, the AI is given to much current information about the map. They shouldn't know where all my cities are or where my troops are located any more then I should know that stuff for them.

Also, I would like to actually haggle with the AI, rather then just be told how little I have to trade for them to accept it by some guy in the upper-right corner of the screen.

This is a well-known cheat that the AI uses to remain competitive. It knows the map (including resources that haven't been revealed yet) and the location of all of your troops at all times.

[mullenstephen]

Originally posted by WarpStorm
The problem with a lot of your ideas are that the faults you find with the AI describe my prefered playstyle.

I pollute liberally until I get the techs to stop. Production it too important to stop.

I nuke liberally if I feel someone deserves it.

I station troops along allies' roads (and neutral civs' till they make me leave).

I regularly ignore the other civs borders if there is someplace I want to go.

I wouldn't sign one of these pacts and if someone doesn't like my behavior they'll have to make me stop by force of arms.

i love this post!!! the only thing that stops me from using too many nukes is when the turns take 10 minutes to cycle through all the global warmings. you know, when the sun is deep red!