Diplomacy thread v.2

[Mikael]

I thought Kull's diplomacy model was good to start with, but the problem was that in the following discussion many ideas, counter-ideas, problems, etc. were developed and the model itself was never updated.
So what I did here was to revamp the diplomacy model, and add to it the most important concepts that were thought out subsequently. I also put in a few ideas of my own. So consider this as a summary of the thinking that has gone into this model, and more importantly yet a starting point fo further discussion and refinement.

Additions are highligthed by ***.

Link to the coding thread: Coding thread
Link to the previous discussion thread:
Kull's diplomacy model thread v1.1v


Clash Diplomacy System v1.1 +summary of suggestions to date
Contents:

I. Assumptions

II. Diplomacy System Options
1) Interior
2) Foreign

III. Option Descriptions
1) Counterintelligence
2) Internal Operations
3) Create Civ
4) Tariffs
5) Treaties
6) Threats & Protests
7) Spying
8) Contact Methodology
9) Voluntary Disclosure

IV. State Relations

V. Era Limitations

VI. Government-Type Limitations

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I. Assumptions:

1) Diplomacy System Options will be affected primarily by the status of State Relations (as defined in section IV). Another important factor is Era. (Probably determined more by research advancements than a pre-determined year. I haven't seen this discussed yet, but I assume we'll do it.) Within each era, the range of available options will be further affected by the Government Type. Government types are determined by Hrafnkell's government model. The Diplomacy model assumes three eras: Ancient, Medieval, Modern.

2) Clash will not use individual "Spy" or "Diplomat" units. The Diplomacy model depends upon the existence of what I'll call "The Chancellery". The chancellery is a government organization, and contains two primary components. A "Foreign Office" and an "Interior Ministry". A sub-component of the Foreign ministry is "Intelligence". One could also look at the chancellery as the entire government and include ministers representing each of the key models: Economy, Military, Social, & Science. (But that's beyond the scope of this discussion!)

3)*** Effectiveness of the Chancellery should be related to luck, strength of the network, and immediate resources for overt ops. Putting more money into passive ops would give you more info on the civ, a likelihood of suddenly gaining a big piece of important info, and your spy network would become more powerful. Overt ops would require a certain amount of money, and a certain network strength depending exactly on the op, but there would also be a risk(luck) factor. For instance, assassination would require a lot of luck, a very powerful network, but not necessarily a lot of money. Briberies on the other hand would require more money but maybe less luck and strength, depending on the internal strength of the opposing civ. We thus have three factors:
-luck(depending on the op).
-money immediately available for a specific overt op.
-long time investments into the spy network, which combined to time(experience), gives you a stronger network.
Result of operations vary from total success to total failure.(here's a proposal for different levels of overt ops achievement:
-total success, they are even suspecting the ***ese!
-total success.
-success, but our civ is suspected. Expect further investigation into the matter from their part.
-success, but they know it's us. Expect a protest or retaliatory actions.
-failure, but they think it was the ***ese who did it!
-failure, but we remain unsuspected.
-failure, and they suspect us. Expect further investigation into the matter from their part.
-failure, and they know we did it. Expect a protest or retaliatory actions.
***

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II. Diplomacy System Options:

1) Interior = Counterintelligence, Internal Operations, Create Civ ***why create a new civ within your own borders??***

2) Foreign = Tariffs on Trade, Treaties, Threats & Protests, Spying, Contact Methodology, Voluntary Disclosure

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III. Option Descriptions:

1) Counterintelligence: Activities directed against foreign operatives within the boundaries of your civ. On an increasing scale of awareness, here's what you can learn and do:

a) Is your civilization an intelligence target?
b) Which countries are responsible? ***NB: if the other civ has a really strong spy network, they might make you believe it's an other civ that's spying on you.***
c) What are they trying to learn?
d) ***Has an overt op taken place? Who's responsible?***
The first two are very general levels of knowledge. The second two are specific enough that you can take actions of your own:
e) Issue a Protest.
f.)***Take retaliatory measures(this gives you a casus belli, more detail on that later.)***
f) Feed false information.

*** This would all work similarly to the passive ops in spying. Get a powerful intel network, and the more info you'll get. Feeding false info would involve risk, and would take a strong (experienced)network. But failure wouldn't have such big consequences, because you were only defending yourself from infiltration.

Issuing a protest: I think several kinds of protests should be in, very similar to threats. Specific options for protest consequences would be to ask the civ to disband their spy network, or to make it less strong.***

2) Internal Operations: These involve intelligence activities directed toward your own people.

a) Determine Happiness Levels: Clicking a button to determine exact happiness levels is not realistic. Using agents to see what people really think is the usual procedure.
b) Riot Prediction: Solid information on happiness. Ability to predict where riots will start, allowing you to appease the populace or squelch them with the military.
c) New Religion Identification. The earlier you learn that one has either sprung up inside your borders or spread from someplace else, the more options you have in dealing with it. Those specifics are contained in the Social Model.
d) Disseminate Propaganda: Ranges from crude hate mongering to sophisticated "spin doctoring".
e) Characters: Spy on your characters to determine their true capabilities and allegiance.

***This is also similar to passive ops. Here there is no "opposition", you are only investigating matters within your own civ. Notice though that internal ops' success varies depending on your control of your civ. Sying on characters also, if the character notices it, could affect their relationship with you. They might get disgruntled and sell their services to another civ, or just retire.***

3) Create a new Civ: As described in Mark's Model

Civilizations with sufficient power in a controlled area can unilaterally create another civ. The created civ has whatever properties the creating civ desires. However, if the foundation of this state is unrealistic it will quickly change radically from the form in which it was created.

***I don't see the use of creating a new civ? Can somebody explain? It would be against the interests of the player to lose territory, woudn't it?***

4) Tariffs on Trade: As described in Mark's Model (with some mods)

The player has control over taxes on trade, and can essentially move trade from a free-trade basis to a trade embargo by changing tariffs. In my opinion in would be way too messy to let the player handle tariff levels for every special commodity with every civ. So instead, I propose to let the player just raise or lower the overall tariff level with respect to each other civ. Trade status in the economic model would simply be handled by adding a number to the average tariffs between 0% and, say, 999% to get the tariffs for a given commodity with respect to a particular country. A quick example. I have instituted tariffs of 20% on steel, and 50% on textiles. So a most-favored nation (a + 0% modifier) would get these same numbers. A country I'm having a trade war with (+ 50% modifier) would suffer tariffs of 70% on steel, and 100% on textiles. (Edited 6/16 Note: Non-penalty trade & tariff adjustments are handled in the Economic Model, thus the ability to have different tariffs for each commodity.)

5) Treaties: As described in Mark's Model (with some mods)

a) Treaty Description - Treaties can be formed between any number of states. To keep things simple, treaties that involve more than two states must handle all members of the treaty on equal footing. So, for instance, five civs can participate equally in a mutual-defense pact against another civ, or another alliance. Three civs could participate in a most-favored-nation trade pact. Each treaty can include an unlimited number of clauses (drawn from an as-yet-to-be-determined list).

b) Treaty components (possible clauses) include:
1. Change of basic diplomatic status (peace, war, cold-war etc. A change in status that makes the diplomatic state between two parties more hostile can be undertaken by either party if they have the internal power within their civ to do so. A change in status that is less hostile requires agreement of all parties.) The diplomatic state can be collateralized
2. Cash (either in lump-sum or in an installment plan) or loans
3. Territory transfer (either now, or at some future date)
4. Technology (although, as discussed in the tech model, trade of a technology does not necessarily result in the acquiring civ immediately having that technology available.)
5. Ceding control of military units (usually temporary)
6. Trade status (from most-favored-nation up to embargo)
7. Internal matters, such as treatment of religious or ethnic minorities (this one will be tough)
8. Demilitarized zones
9. Arms reduction treaty elements (FE: "My army will grow to at most 20% more powerful than yours.")
10. Dynastic Marriage (Added 6/16)
***11. Right of passage.
***12. Mutual tech development.
***13. Mutual investments(roads, pollution control...)
***14. Approvisionment in a specific resource?

c) Treaty Duration - Treaties do not last forever in the real world, nor should they in Clash. The following rules will govern treaty duration. (Added 6/16 - Thanks for reminding me about this, Harun!)

1. Treaties always come up for review whenever there's a change in government type.
2. Non-representative governments experience a "treaty review" every "X" number of turns.
This periodic review represents "Ruler Lifespan", historically the biggest factor behind changes in diplomatic status.(Note: The determining factor for "X" should be entertaining game play, not realism.)
3. A variety of factors will be used to determine the result of the treaty review process. A treaty could be extended, canceled, downgraded, or upgraded. One mechanism would be to "weigh" the interactions between the two states during the life of the treaty. Negative factors would include spying, threats, assassinations, and protests. Positive factors would be gifts, military aid, similar culture & religion, etc.
*** A change in reputation of one of the civs might also trigger a chage in treaties.***
4. Surpassing an as-yet-undetermined level of Negative or Positive "points" will cause a treaty to automatically come up for review.
5. Unilateral cancellations are always an option, but carry their own set of risks such as reputation "hits", risking other treaty relationships, etc.

6) Threats & Protests: As described in Mark's Model (with some mods)

Threats in Clash need to be every bit as nuanced as treaties. The player should be able to make a threat using all the components above. Protests are similar to Threats, except they are based upon actions which the other civ has taken against you. Subjects for Protest include: Treaty violations, military provocations, and Intelligence activities.

7) Spying: Intelligence operations aimed at other civs. There are two types, passive and overt. As a general rule, each civ expects the others to conduct passive spying, so there's little downside. Overt acts carry more severe penalties should one be caught. Penalties include reputation loss (of varying severity), change in treaty status, even internal unrest.

a) Passive:
- Society Details (Potentially all info contained in another civs Social Model)
- Government Details (Potentially all info contained in another civs Governance Model)
- Economic Details (Potentially all info contained in another civs Economic Model)
- Military Details (Awareness, but NOT theft, of another civs Military unit info)
- Research Details (Awareness, but NOT theft, of another civs Research Model info)
b) Overt:
- Theft of non-Military Research info
- Theft of Military Research info (harder and more dangerous)
- Bribery of Cities (Added 6/16)
- Bribery of Units/Armies (Added 6/16)
- Bribery of Characters (risky)
- Assassination (VERY risky)
- Moles (Intelligence Agency penetration)
-***Make another civ look responsible.***

***c) Dismantle the spy network: similar to what happened worldwide after 1989, or might be a consequence of another nation asking you to do it. Some cash may be generated.***

8) Contact Methodology: Civilizations cannot perform any diplomatic activity unless and until they achieve contact. Until such time as permanent embassies are allowed, each government contact will require the dispatch of an official representative.

a) Emissaries: Permanent embassies are a fairly recent phenomenon (since @1700 AD). Until that time, governments dispatched personal representatives who would visit the court of the foreign ruler and present gifts, demands, treaty options, etc. The clash diplomacy system will rely heavily upon this mechanism until modern times, with an obvious impact on the quality and timeliness of the information it produces. As a ruler, you must make extensive use of emissaries in order to have any idea what is going on around you, and that will cost $$.

b) Embassies: Physical structures located in the capital city of an opposing civ. Requires $$ to open and maintain. Existence of an embassy provides automatic low level intel on happenings in enemy capital (attitudes, troop movements there, anything you could glean from a newspaper) .

c) Consulates: Physical structures located in the provinces of an opposing civ. Requires $$ to open and maintain. Requires approval of civ to open these. Usually a sign of good relations. Improves reliability and quantity of low level intel.

9) Voluntary Disclosure: The same information which intelligence seeks to obtain illegally will have to be provided voluntarily by the partners in every State Relationship beginning with Peace. The level of disclosure should not be subject to negotiation, but rather be treated as an integral part of the treaty. More details are required, but here's an example of military disclosure based on treaty relations (see section IV).

a) Peace: I know exactly how many units he has and vice versa, but no details.
b) Co-Agression: Same as above. If we are at war with the same enemy, we share unit info on those which are in the "War Zone" with that enemy. This zone could be defined as "X" number of squares from the "front".
c) Cooperation: We share numbers and locations and generic types. Also sharing of "War Zone" unit info (as defined above)
d) Defensive Alliance: Same as Cooperation but includes detailed unit specs for those stationed on a mutual border. (ie between the allies).
e) Offensive Alliance: I have complete details on his military and he on mine, except injury and preparedness data.
f) Same Ruler: I know everything about his military, he just gets total numbers on mine.

[Mikael]

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IV. State Relations (More detail to be included later)

Here's a sample list of diplomatic states available between civs. These are not necessarily well thought out. The values associated with each name are modifiers on a -10 to +10 scale that Mark has used in the existing code on the diplomatic system. The numbers generally indicate the "strength" of the relationship between the powers.

Diplomatic State Constants

Vendetta = -10; State Seeks To Annihilate Opponent, And Its People
Total War = -9; Seeks To Destroy Opposing State, But Not People
War = -7;
Limited War = -5; War Whose Aims Are Restricted In Some Way
Cease Fire = -3;
Cold War = -2;
Contact = -1;
Peace = 0;
Co-Agression = 1; States Cooperate To Attack A Third, But With No Other Alliance
Cooperation = 2; A Deep, Peaceful Relationship, With A Long History
Def Alliance = 4; Defensive Alliance
Off Alliance = 8; Very Strong Offensive/Defensive Alliance
Same Ruler = 10; Case Where One Civ Is Completely Ruled By Another

Any diplomatic state that is agreed-upon between two or more parties can be collateralized for any mutually-agreed-upon period of time. For instance, a peace treaty between states might be guaranteed by both to the tune of 1000C over a period of the next 20 turns. Any party that unilaterally breaks the peace gives up the collateral. Whether the collateral becomes the possession of the offended party, or simply disappears is also determined in negotiations. Collateralization is meant to symbolize things like hostage-holding, marriage alliances, and other ways to guarantee treaties where the game does not have sufficient depth to include the particular factor. I think collateral could become standard for treaties, since it ensures that each party will take the treaty seriously. This feature seems to work better in the ancient and medieval world, than in the modern. We'll have to address it as a play balance and realism issue at some point.

***Reputation: any civ, throughout its diplomatic history, will be "rated" by other civs in four different categories:

-Trustworthiness: whether or not you keep your word.
-Aggression: your tendency to initiate wars.
-Competence: how is your civ faring from an economic, social, governmental, and military standpoint? How good a ruler are you?
-Tyranny: your tendency to do immoral acts, like genocides, etc. Tyrannic states will be frowned upon by more civilized states.

NB: in both the reputation and the aggression ratings, wars initiated with a valid casus belli will not be treated the same as wars initiated for no apparent reason. Some casus belli that come to mind: slaughter of people from your ethnicity in their civ, provocations, different religion, liberation of a province or city that had once belonged to your civ, etc. As the civs develop intellectually and morally, the number of casus belli available will shrink.

The way they perceive you will modify their tendency (or not) to sign a specific treaty with you. For instance, if you have been known to lose all your wars(incompetence), they will be less likely to sign a coagression or def/off alliance with you, and will in fact be even more tempted to wage war against you. Or if you have been known to violate all trade treaties, they will likely not sign one with you.

Mark Everson's idea to concretely model this: "First we need a scale to establish how much a diplomatic or military action affects the reputation. For right now I'll just deal with the trustworthiness aspect. The first thing we need is a " trustworthiness scale". For purposes of demonstration I'll assume a scale where a level of 100 represents complete trustworthiness (at least as far as we know so far) and zero represents a pretty much completely untrustworthy civ. Our trustworthiness number should be some sort of weighted average of actions that have happened in the past. I say weighted, because eventually, given a long enough period of peaceful coexistence, past sins will be forgiven. So on any turn that one behaves in a perfectly trustworthy fashion your "instantaneous" trustworthiness is 100 (this will be true for most turns, since there's only so many shafts there are opportunities for). Now, I don't want to lay out the whole scale here so I'll just pick one sort of diplomatic action. How about a complete and utter shaft of a nominal ally? How many points should this be? For the moment I'll use the following logic: another civ, if it's your ally, if it were to shaft you on average once every ten turns, would be a Worthless ally. It should be approximately a zero on the treachery scale (completely treacherous). So in this simple way we can describe the complete shaft of an ally to earn the perpetrator about -900 points (so on average they are near zero). Using this crudely defined scale, now I can introduce how I want to handle the treachery of a civ over time, depending upon their particular diplomatic actions.
I was thinking of using a straightforward technique called the exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA) to simply handle the way that civilizations and cultures might eventually discount events in the past. The idea is relatively simple. When computing a new value for the EWMA, say due to a significant diplomatic action, you just take a certain percent (X) of the old value, and percentage (100 - X) of the new information, and combine them. Depending on the value you pick for X, this method "forgets" past information either faster or slower. But the Really important bit about EWMA, is that you don't need to keep track of All the past information, all you need is what the value was on the previous turn, and what is new on this turn, to figure the new value. So although we will have all this glorious history, that the player can potentially tap, we only need to do one calculation to update the trustworthiness each turn."
***

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V. Era Limitations (Much more detail needs to be added)

Ancient Era Synopsis: Intelligence info comes from emissaries, traders, and armies in the field. Passive info is limited, and overt acts are restricted to bribery, assasination, ***and theft of info**. Treaties are based upon marriages and hostages. **Why only?***

Medieval Era Synopsis: Intelligence info comes from emissaries, traders, and armies in the field. Passive info is "medium". All overt actions are available except moles. Treaties continue to be based upon marriages and hostages. ***Again, why only marriages and hostages? I feel this is a useless restriction***.

Modern Era Synopsis: Intelligence info comes from embassies, consulates, spies, traders, and armies in the field. Passive info is unlimited. All overt actions are available. Treaties are based upon modern factors. ***You reputation will suffer more if you wage war: in modern times negociation is the prefered course of action.***

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VI. Government-Type Limitations (Much more detail needs to be added)

"Strong Man" Govt Synopsis(monarchies, dictatureships, despotism):*** It really depends here on the government. A stable, happy, peaceful monarchy would be much closer to a representative government than an ancient civ ruled by a tyran who acts immorally. The important thing for any government is the amount of control you have on your provinces. If you're too centralized, it would be easier for the enemy to conduct spying on some of the more remote provinces. Also, cultural cohesion of your civ is an important factor when resisiting to enemy infiltration. If your government is disliked by your people, briberies and other ops would become much easier for the enemy.***

Representative Govt Synopsis: Certain actions are very dangerous for a representative government to undertake, since failure could cause the government to collapse. "Home" territory transfers are not an option. ***Vendetta could be an option, but it would then have to be accepted by your senate and people. Very difficult. You would have to have an extremely good motive, and it would probably only work in the more ancient times, based on, f.e, difference in religion, in skin colour...These are different to casus belli, as here you would have to convince your gov/people to actually exterminate another civ. In the modern times vendetta should be virtually impossible. This is linked to the Gov/social models, and the characteristics of your civ's culture(aggressiveness, tolerance,etc). ***


There has also been quite a lot of talk about the interface and the coding element of diplomacy, but I felt it was outside the scope of the model itself. I hope this helps to clarify things a little bit. Now it is you guys' turn to see what's too hard to implement, and to figure out all of the equations! Seriously, Mark, I await your comments on this update! And where the hell has Kull gone anyway?

[Mikael]

What I'll now be working on are the exact connections between the diplomacy model and other models, such as the Gov/Social/Military models, and I'll also do some more precision work on the model. (getting rid of all the "etc" and ",...", and "more details need to be added" ). I'm planning to work on it this coming weekend.

Cheers!

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Mikael:

Thanks for taking this on! I only have a few minutes now, so I will just give brief comments.

I like many of your additions! I will just comment where clarification was requested...

On why a civ would want to create another one with part of its own territory: It Happens! It could be you can't hold it anyway due to rebel sentiment, or you are a government that is philosophically opposed to ruling other peoples. So IMO this should stay in the model. Germany after WWII is an example

Treaty by marriage/hostage. Yes it should be more broad. I actually had planned to have marriage/hostage etc simulated by leaving a money 'deposit' that would be claimed by the other side if I clearly violate a treaty.

We Must put in a link back to the previous Diplomacy thread at the top of this one, so that people can find the discussion that has gone before. Could you do that? Just use the 'http://' button on the toolbar when you edit it. (Perhaps a link also to the Diplomacy coding thread I just bumped up would be good too.)

Kull just lost interest. Perhaps he will return some day!

Your plan for where to go sounds good. Looking forward to it!

-Mark

[LDiCesare]

I'd like to add a point on treaties:
It should be possible to demand that a civ split. For example, youwage war to "free" a civ from another one. You may just conquer one square, but may want, as a peace treaty, that this square and several others form a new civ. I think it is a bit like what happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire after WWI. It also explains why you may want to split your civ in two, just to please your neighbours.

[Mikael]

OK, Laurent, I'll incorporate your idea into the model, as it sounds good and I have no particular problem with it.
Thus I'll create two more possible clauses to treaties(the other one is a variant of your proposal):

- impose civ to split itself into two civs (borders decided by the player).

-territory transfer to a third party civ.


BTW I also included links to the other relevant threads at the end of my first post.

[Mikael]

Hmmm...

This made me think:

take for instance a civ that has no internal cohesion and where a particular province, which has a totally different culture, has a strong feeling against the civ to which it belongs. There have been several uprisings in the area and the province is about to declare independance. But officially it still belongs to the original civ because of its weak military.
(example: Russians struggling to maintain Chechens within their borders).

Would you, as leader of another civ, be able to encourage this uprising and support financially the rebels, even though they do not, in game terms, constitute a civ?

What do you guys think? Is this going overboard, or would it be a worthwhile addition to the model?

[Mark_Everson]

Mikael:

I like your idea, and actually think it may be In the govt model somewhere!

BTW could you put the links at the top of the first post? It is our convention, and also is much easier for someone to find that at the end of the first, second, or nth post in the thread .

[Lord God Jinnai]

I think you did a good job...just 2 things.

1A. On cacus belli, what about places that don't require them. Cacus belli were only designed in Europe to keep it in balance and a somwehat similar idea is used today. Also cacus bellis didn't apply to every civ, only 'recognized' ones and an opposing civ may not abide by cacus belli rules.

1B. Cacus belli wars shouldn't count as much in state relations as non-cacus belli ones (where cacus belli aree used).

2A. In relations, things that are bad are usually remembered much longer than things that were good. Thats human nature. Also more recent things have more impact than past things (ie if your country assasinated a leader of another civ 300 years ago it wouldn't have the same affect as if it were 3 years ago).

2B. When a government changes, (not the ruler, but the governmental type) to one more favorable to the other civ, a lot of their past grievences shouldnt matter in state relations. Japam, Germany, Russia, etc are modern examples. The people might see things differntly though.

[Mikael]

OK guys I've done a lot of thinking and I'm pretty satisfied with what I've come up with.

-I've made some more additions to the model, such as the inclusion of a new diplomatic state, "vassalization". This effectively happens when one civ is considerably more powerful than one of its neighbours. Instead of just crushing the neighbour, it may offer a vassalization treaty. This means that the "dominated" civ will have to do anything the "dominator" civ wants them to do, namely, pay tributes, offer gifts, accept military presence on its territory, really anything that is ordered. In exchange the powerful civ guarantees the vassalized civ military protection. Note that the vassalized civ remains independant and has its own government. Excessive mistreatment from the dominator civ might result in riots, and finally a refusal to continue being a vassal(similar to declaring independance).

-I've thought about Lord God Jinnai's suggestions, and decided to add two things to the reputation submodel:

*an "our common history" modifier. Thus, even though civA may have an exemplary objective rating in trustworthiness, if they have broken a treaty with civB, then civB will give civA a much lower rating in trustworthiness than other civs(subjectivity). So, your civ will not be viewed the same by all other civs in the world.

*an "our common history" rating. Consequences of the modifications of the "Our common history" rating(not to be confused with the "our common history" modifier): the ratings may go from 1(they are our worst enemies) to 10(they are our benevolent masters, close to vassalization). If the rating tends to approach 1, the civ is more and more tempted to start a war with you. It may either start a war all of a sudden(if it's an aggressive civ), or wait for the "spark", or excuse. Other consequences: more and more overt spying acts from their part, the building up of alliances against you. If the rating tends to approach 10, they will more and more offer you favourable treaties, pay tributes, offer gifts, and suggest alliances.

-good acts include: favourable treaties, good relations over long periods of time, common enemies, any kind of cooperation, similar culture, "elder brother" syndrome(ie, civA is significantly more powerful in any field so civB respects it more.).
-bad acts have a tendency to outweigh good acts(LGJ's idea). They would be: any kind of war(obviously a vendetta makes relations even worse than a limited war), unfavourable treaties, overt spying ops, jealousy (your civ is slightly better than his in any field, or the both of you are on equal terms), opposing cultures, "casus belli" type provocations (your culture is a minority in his civ and mistreated).


NB: (again LGJ's idea) obviously no civ has an eternal memory and bad acts as well as good acts will tend to be forgotten as time goes by. Good acts will tend to be forgotten first though. As these "modifiers" are forgotten, the civ ratings will lose their subjectivity. Another LGJ idea: if civA changes to a more favourable government in relation to civB, civB will voluntarily forget (more or less) the bad acts that had been done by civA(I know, this is a simplistic description).



The exciting thing is that the "Our common history" rating could totally replace the casus belli system I had thought of originally. It would be much simpler and more effective I believe.


What do you guys think??

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Mikael:

Vassalization sounds good in general. I've had that in mind too, but may never have written it up.

I may not have understood fully what you said, but here are my comments on what I thing you're saying... Declarations of war should depend on Much more than just dislike and history. There are Realpolitic issues of power of individual states and alliance blocks. I strongly believe that ratings for "our common history" and (both general and bilateral) Trustworthiness, Aggression, Competence, Tyranny etc. are only Inputs to the decision to go to war. FE the govt of Iraq utterly hates the US right now. But realism prevents them from declaring all-out war and trying to disrupt US airfields etc. in neighboring countries. Hate even, is not enough. It is really a diplomatic AI decision as to when diplomatic states should change. (or a change should be attempted.)

So I guess my input is for you to have the model enable what a player might want to negotiate on, and what they would want to keep track of. When that is fleshed out we can figure how the AI should respond to the information. We can certainly discuss it here too, but it is a deep topic all by itself! The Diplomatic AI in Demo 4 was already fairly sophisticated in that it considered balance-of-power issues much more realistically that that in FE Civ2.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well whether or not the nation declares war could be judged on the strenght of its alliance + strength of opposing alliance in both a short-term and long-term war. Other factors such as publich discontent could sway too.

[Mikael]

Mark, if you feel something isn't clear, don't hesitate to ask me about it. I realize I was rather confuse there with the "Our Common History" modifier and rating, because I hadn't had the time yet to write something clearer. Before doing that I wanted some feedback. Which I got, many thanks

Now concerning the decision to go to war: of course the "Our Common History" rating will not be the only factor for deciding to wage war. As you said, other issues are of much greater importance, such as military balance (much weaker states wouldn't be dumb enough to attack) and alliances(my ally wouldn't tolerate it if I went to war with the Celts, and that ally is extremely valuable, so I won't go to war with the Celts, even though we hate them). My goal was only to find a variable that may trigger hate or worship in relation to another civ(and this in turn *might* trigger war, but as you said, there are other variables).

Now, when you implied this discussion was only AI related(at least that's what I made of it), I disagree. The "Our Common History" rating will strongly affect the people of the player's civilization. So the player might decide not to wage war against a certain civ, but he might come under increasing pressure by his people to declare war, because they hate the civ in question. Not declaring war might then have severe consequences on internal matters such as riots, and up to assassination of the peaceful ruler.


On another note, I also included into the Diplomacy options two more things:

-the ability to send gifts (money, military units, resources, techs). This would be closely related to the concept of vassalization, but not necessarily tied to it.

-in treaties, a new option: ask for voluntary disclosure of whatever information that would have been provided by passive spying (social, gov, military, and geographical info). Kull had already integrated voluntary disclosure into the model, but only as an inherent part of state relations. In this addition voluntary disclosure would be independant from state relations(example: even though we only have a peace treaty, I ask the civ for information on the exact location of their troops). This would BTW also include the sharing of world maps.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Mikael, sorry for my part of the misunderstanding! And I obviously didn't state my position that clearly either. But I can say that I agree completely with everyting in your latest post, so I think we are back to mutual comprehension .

[Mikael]

That's cool!

I'll keep adding stuff, trying to concentrate especially on the "Era Limitations" and "Govt restricitions" parts.

By the way, I was reading the Social model and suddenly noticed it was considerably different to the one I had grown up used to (manurein's model, I realize this was a long time ago). Why has manurein's model been abandoned? I made a search for this, trying to find out exactly when and why the switch took place, but couldn't find anything relevant.