Diplomatic GUI

[yellowdaddy]

I think that players will either reload the game after knowing the deal or try making 25 different deals until they get the good one if we don't provide a tool that lets know the result.

I think that can happen in Civ3 in my experience. Having said that, I don't think many people could be arsed to keep rebooting the game for such a piddly result - unless they're obsessive.

I don't see the point in "moods", unless you're dealing with a single character who has supreme control over a domain.
More complex governments would not really have such a factor playing a significant role in decisionmaking.
So perhaps it's a govt tech level thing.


The aspect of realism I'd like to see is relationships between countries - not in the way I described above, but rather like a bucket with a hole in it - you have to keep a trickle of water going into it to keep the level up to where you want it.
And although it mightn't be the overriding factor in AI policy-decisions it could be a contributing one, along with the more important ECONOMIC relationships as mentioned previously (in what I thought was a decent way of structuring it).

I think there can be a compromise between the two positions of Alms and LdC...
That the level of intelligence and relations (i.e. bilateral agreements) can dictate the degree to which you know what the result of an offer will be - and I think that satisfies the realism aspect.

[alms66]

I don't see the point in "moods", unless you're dealing with a single character who has supreme control over a domain.
More complex governments would not really have such a factor playing a significant role in decisionmaking.
So perhaps it's a govt tech level thing.

My reference to moods were to use them as a method of displaying the AI's reaction to a deal. So if you put 1 gold down and the AI is giving up Alaska, the mood would probably be 'very angry', so if you were to propose this deal and the AI accepted (moods don't indicate acceptance, just the reaction), your relations with the AI would have just taken a massive hit. On the other hand, if you put down 1,000,000 gold for Alaska, the AI's mood might be 'very happy', so if you proposed the deal and the AI accepted, you'd get a boost to relations.

The moods would be emoticons of sorts displaying the AI's feelings about the deal, whereas the trade bar would aid in deciding whether or not the deal was balanced, and your advisor would help you decide when the deal would most likely be accepted. Even if it's not accepted (assuming you haven't made the AI storm out of the discussions declaring war), it would be altered to a more acceptable form by the AI, which the AI would then propose to you. And this would occur over and over, until a deal was struck. We could put a cap on the number of proposals allowed (say 3 per side?), forcing the player to 'continue the talks' the following turn. Each deal should then be in a list of treaties (unless the deal was a one-time trade like gold for Alaska), allowing the player to leave any treaty he desires at any time.

I think there can be a compromise between the two positions of Alms and LdC...
That the level of intelligence and relations (i.e. bilateral agreements) can dictate the degree to which you know what the result of an offer will be - and I think that satisfies the realism aspect.

I don't like it. I want to have equal knowledge regardless of whether I just made contact with them or have known them for 1000 years.

The aspect of realism I'd like to see is relationships between countries - not in the way I described above, but rather like a bucket with a hole in it - you have to keep a trickle of water going into it to keep the level up to where you want it.

I want to second this. Relations should not tend towards neutral, they should always be dropping instead. If you put enough money & time into relations you can reach a balance or even a positive flow. If your relations have hit rock-bottom with another civ, you should have to work hard to regain a neutral level.
One way I could imagine this working is that there is always a -5 to relations per turn after contact is established. Trade deals might add a +.1 per turn for the length of the treaty, other deals might add anything from +.01-+1 for the length of the treaty. An abstracted 'Foreign Ministry - Relations' entry in the budget would put cash into improving relations and might net as much as +3 per turn (though that amount should be very rare).

I imagine this running on a scale of -1000 to +1000, with 0 being neutral and the level of relations at contact. Numbers could, of course go beyond these limits, but they don't have any effect other than absorbing drops (or increases) in relations. There should, of course, be no level at which war is automatic, but relations should play a significant role in treaty-making and the decision to go to war.

[Lord God Jinnai]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by alms66
I don't like it. I want to have equal knowledge regardless of whether I just made contact with them or have known them for 1000 years.[/quote[Aren't we greedy? ^_^

Seriously i don;t think you should know on first contact what they are like. Your not omnipitant, as much as you might think so. ^_-

Originally posted by alms66
I want to second this. Relations should not tend towards neutral, they should always be dropping instead. If you put enough money & time into relations you can reach a balance or even a positive flow. If your relations have hit rock-bottom with another civ, you should have to work hard to regain a neutral level.
One way I could imagine this working is that there is always a -5 to relations per turn after contact is established. Trade deals might add a +.1 per turn for the length of the treaty, other deals might add anything from +.01-+1 for the length of the treaty. An abstracted 'Foreign Ministry - Relations' entry in the budget would put cash into improving relations and might net as much as +3 per turn (though that amount should be very rare).

I imagine this running on a scale of -1000 to +1000, with 0 being neutral and the level of relations at contact. Numbers could, of course go beyond these limits, but they don't have any effect other than absorbing drops (or increases) in relations. There should, of course, be no level at which war is automatic, but relations should play a significant role in treaty-making and the decision to go to war.

I haveto disagree slightly with this. Only in that lack of any contact would tend to bring it to a more neutral manner, simply because they might likely have forgotten you even exist!

[alms66]

Aren't we greedy?

Seriously i don't think you should know on first contact what they are like. Your not omnipitant, as much as you might think so.

It's the simple matter of having needed information at hand to make worthwhile deals in an uncertain environment. By using the system I outlined above, the player can't be certain of what the outcome will be, therefore we don't want to add to that by not giving adequete information to make an educated guess as to what the outcome will be.

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
I haveto disagree slightly with this. Only in that lack of any contact would tend to bring it to a more neutral manner, simply because they might likely have forgotten you even exist!

Of course, there would be some change in relations if contact was 'lost', but there are so few situations which would constitute a complete loss of contact that discussing this one particular issue is probably a waste of time at the moment. If I had to eyeball it right now though, I'd grant a +.01 or so per turn (in addition to a +5 to negate the constant loss), so that civs can't just go into isolation in order to improve relations with the world.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by alms66 Of course, there would be some change in relations if contact was 'lost', but there are so few situations which would constitute a complete loss of contact that discussing this one particular issue is probably a waste of time at the moment. If I had to eyeball it right now though, I'd grant a +.01 or so per turn (in addition to a +5 to negate the constant loss), so that civs can't just go into isolation in order to improve relations with the world.

I agree that just going isolationist shouldn't be an easy way to raise relations. What i was talking about would usually not be intentional...although it could be. Generally though loss of contact means something not good for atleast one of the two parties has happened.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
I agree that just going isolationist shouldn't be an easy way to raise relations. What i was talking about would usually not be intentional...although it could be. Generally though loss of contact means something not good for atleast one of the two parties has happened.

What specifically were you referring to? The destruction of the civ? In that case, I think it would be best to treat the new version of the civ as a completely new civ (at relations 0) rather than retain the old relations level, as obviously things have changed at that point.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by alms66

What specifically were you referring to? The destruction of the civ? In that case, I think it would be best to treat the new version of the civ as a completely new civ (at relations 0) rather than retain the old relations level, as obviously things have changed at that point.

Doesn't haveto be destroyed.

It could be locally destroyed, but move elsewhere, outside your known area.

Or over time, even if we don't lose knowledge of discovered areas in geographical terms, not interacting with a certain region would tend to have each nation forget much about each other. This wouldn't be an isolationist policy, but could be caused by multiple factors.

[Max Sinister]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I think that players will either reload the game after knowing the deal or try making 25 different deals until they get the good one if we don't provide a tool that lets know the result. I would do the latter. Since it's not fun, we'd have to provide an incentive not to retry, like in civ/civ2, but that proved unfun too imo.

Hmmm, about the repeated-reloading-till-you-like-the-result thing (I admit, I often did it too): Would you like it if the game counted how often you reload a certain game and decrease your highscore one point everytime you reloaded? Thus, we could see at all highscores how "honestly earned" they are.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Its feasable and wouldn't really hurt reloaders in any way, except their ego.

Also there could be an "iron man" mode where it saves only when the game exits and you can't reload during the game, except by exiting.

[LDiCesare]

One thing I thought about that would make me buy into not known results of diplomatic actions: You make the offer on your turn and get it accepted/rejected on the next turn. This could even be a counter offer and you could make a good deal over 10 turns but in a hurry you would have to let go more in order to make sure you get what you want now. I'm still unsure I'd like a diplomacy where I don't know the result for sure, but allowing it to drag even though you know you can get the deal could be interesting.
As for relations lowering over time, I think yes, relations woth beighbours should slowly deteriorate unless actively trading with them/pumping money into maintaining good relations. With far away civs, there is little reason why relations should change unless both civs have something they want and can't share.

[yellowdaddy]

I don't like it. I want to have equal knowledge regardless of whether I just made contact with them or have known them for 1000 years.

I get the sense that most of this discussion is imagining a gameworld in a more modern era.

I don't think you can apply the same rules to pre-industrial scenarios.

Equal knowledge equals boredom and predictability; more to the point: it's not realistic.

Imagine a scenario, say in Ancient China - and one in Modern East Asia, e.g.: a "Three Kingdoms" scenario, and a "WW2/Japanese invasion" scenario.
Right away you've got tech. differences which affect the extent to which powers can know stuff about each other, (not to mention tech limits on how they can fight wars and manage resources); there are also tech limits (or should be) on the sophistication of their systems (economic, political, bureaucratic...) and knowledge (science, geography, philosophy): all being things I presume are researched as in CIV.

You can be as isolationist as you want to until long-range ocean-going ships and aircraft are invented... Japan, Korea, Bhutan, New Zealand...

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Moods are nothing new as an idea - when I first brought my designs for characters faces, they were collections of categorised face "objects"; end of the day, some ****'s got to draw all the bits of face (in the system there were 6 types of each 6 of bits in 4 "race" categories - 144 bits), so they can't be a priority, really.
Just do it with text for now.

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You can afford to ignore reloaders' interests.

[alms66]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
One thing I thought about that would make me buy into not known results of diplomatic actions: You make the offer on your turn and get it accepted/rejected on the next turn. This could even be a counter offer and you could make a good deal over 10 turns but in a hurry you would have to let go more in order to make sure you get what you want now. I'm still unsure I'd like a diplomacy where I don't know the result for sure, but allowing it to drag even though you know you can get the deal could be interesting.

Why does it have to be accepted/rejected on the following turn? Why not simply allow a counter proposal on the same turn? There could be a limit to the number of counter proposals, as I suggested before, and when that is reached, then the status of the treaty is saved until next turn, when the "talks" can continue (in other words, the counter proposal limit is reset, and talks can be held off for an infinite number of turns in this way, until the deal is accepted or rejected).

Originally posted by LDiCesare
As for relations lowering over time, I think yes, relations woth beighbours should slowly deteriorate unless actively trading with them/pumping money into maintaining good relations. With far away civs, there is little reason why relations should change unless both civs have something they want and can't share.

As for active trading/pumping with money, that's what the 'abstracted' budget entry, "relations" is for. Regarding 'far away' civs, I think the distinction of 'far away' is relative to technological progress and should not be used at all. The better approach would be to divide the 'relations' budget across all civs equally, unless the player specifies a higher priority with certain civs, and disregard the concept of distance all together.

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
I get the sense that most of this discussion is imagining a gameworld in a more modern era.

Certainly not, by me.

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
Equal knowledge equals boredom and predictability; more to the point: it's not realistic.

Diplomacy is one area you really can't measure well with the reality stick. In reality, diplomacy is far more nuanced than any computer this century will ever be able to handle - modern diplomacy moreso than ancient diplomacy, obviously. It would be far more frustating than anything, IMO, to give the player certain information in the modern age and not give it to him in the ancient age. By information, I simply mean what is put at the baragaining table and knowledge of the AI's response.

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
Moods are nothing new as an idea - when I first brought my designs for characters faces, they were collections of categorised face "objects"; end of the day, some ****'s got to draw all the bits of face (in the system there were 6 types of each 6 of bits in 4 "race" categories - 144 bits), so they can't be a priority, really.
Just do it with text for now.

I'll say this once again. By 'moods' I meant using an emoticon-like depiction to show the player what sort of change in relations he can expect with this AI, if it accepts the deal. For example, if the player has beaten the AI badly, and demands half of the remaining land the AI controls, puts limitations on his army and economy, and demands per turn payments, obviously the AI's "mood" would change for the worse (thus a disgusted/hatred face would show), whereas if the player gave the AI all it's land back, gave per turn payments to rebuild the country and other such generous acts, relations with the AI would improve drastically (thus a happy face would show).

[LDiCesare]

Why does it have to be accepted/rejected on the following turn?

Because it doesn't feel, to me, as artificial as a limited number of times you can contact the other civ. A limited number of times, like in civ1/2, means you must remember how many times you saw the other civ this turn. It would have to be shown in the user interface because when you load a game, you don't remember if you contacted that civ before saving or not. It feels more artificial to me than anyhting else, and I found it extremely annoying in civ2 (and civ3 but the model there is different) when the ai refused to hear you. In general, it doesn't feel to me like a tbs when there are things you can no longer do in a turn, while the turn is actually only a planning phase (as for movements).
Giving an answer on the following turn lets discussions drag and take time. If you are desperate for finding an alliance in 1 turn, you will have only 1 turn of diplomacy to get your deal so you will be inclined to give more in order to make sure you get it. If you have more time, you can get better deals. In order to achieve this, you have to make, at some point, diplomacy take more than one turn.

[alms66]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
Because it doesn't feel, to me, as artificial as a limited number of times you can contact the other civ. A limited number of times, like in civ1/2, means you must remember how many times you saw the other civ this turn. It would have to be shown in the user interface because when you load a game, you don't remember if you contacted that civ before saving or not. It feels more artificial to me than anyhting else, and I found it extremely annoying in civ2 (and civ3 but the model there is different) when the ai refused to hear you. In general, it doesn't feel to me like a tbs when there are things you can no longer do in a turn, while the turn is actually only a planning phase (as for movements).
Giving an answer on the following turn lets discussions drag and take time. If you are desperate for finding an alliance in 1 turn, you will have only 1 turn of diplomacy to get your deal so you will be inclined to give more in order to make sure you get it. If you have more time, you can get better deals. In order to achieve this, you have to make, at some point, diplomacy take more than one turn.

I wasn't suggesting a limit on the number of times you can contact a civ in a turn, but on the number of counter-proposals that each side has regarding a specific deal. You'll notice that although I suggest 3 per side above, I only do 3 counters total in the example below - this was merely to save time and not have the proposal take up too much space.

Lets say we have Rome and Greece as the only civs in the world to make this example simple. Let's also say that this is turn 1 and they already have contact with embassies and all that. Let's also say that Rome is roughly 5 times as powerful in military and economy as Greece.

Now, on turn 1 Rome calls up the diplomacy GUI and clicks on "Greece" to enter talks with them. Rome drops a demand for 5/gold per turn for 20 turns, and puts nothing in return. Let's label this as Treaty A. Well, the trade bar shows that this is a completely one-sided deal, where Rome gets everything and Greece gets nothing. The relations ('mood') indicater shows annoyance/angry tones, letting Rome know if they make this proposal that the Greeks' relations with them will deteriorate because of it (in other words a -1 to relations for some length of time- just an example number). The Roman advisor also says, "I would not be so generous with the Greek dogs, sire. You are a most wise and compassionate ruler.", indicating that the Greeks will most likely accept the deal. So, the Roman player proposes the deal, but the Greeks don't accept, they decide to try and bargain some favor with Rome. They adjust Treaty A (counter 1) to be an island known as 'Sicily' on their side and to 75/gold per turn for 30 turns on the Roman side, and a pact of non-agression. The Roman player, seeing that this deal favors the Greeks more than the Romans on his trade bar, immediately lowers the payments to 50/gold per turn for 30 turns and hits propose again(counter 2). The Greeks feel they are unable to accept anything less than 60/gold per turn for 30 turns, adjust the treaty to suit, and counter the Roman offer (counter 3). At this point the Romans could accept just to get the treaty concluded, but the Roman player doesn't do this. Instead he adds a trade treaty to the deal, and lowers the payments to 50/ gold per turn for 25 turns (counter 4). Now counter 4 causes a save of the state of Treaty A, and a message is displayed saying that the treaty can be continued next turn. If the Roman player wishes to call up the Greeks again and propose another treaty, he can, but Treaty A is on hold until the following turn (talks regarding this treaty have 'broken down').

On turn 2, the Romans either get an automatic message asking if they want to continue the talks, or they must enter the diplomacy GUI, select "Continue Talks" and seltect Treaty A, at which point they are on "counter 4" from above, as though the treaty had just been proposed by the Romans. The counter is reset (to 3 counter proposals). Negotiations continue as above, until one side accepts the bargain, or outright refuses the treaty, at which point "Treaty A" ceases to exist and talks are finished on that particular treaty.

One important thing I want to point out here is the relations indicator. You'll notice my exact words were, "letting Rome know if they make this proposal that the Greeks' relations with them will deteriorate because of it", not, "letting Rome know if they make this proposal and the Greeks accept it that the Greeks' relations with them will deteriorate because of it". This is the key to keeping from 'pissing off' the AI in negotiations. If you want to avoid that, you won't continuously propose deals which clearly indicate a drop in relations. If you feel you can bully the AI, propose what you want, just don't be surprised when the AI refuses the treaty and declares war on you. If you want 'perfect' diplomacy, you simply have to ignore the effects of the relations indicator - or better yet, have it apply only when the treaty is accepted rather than at each proposal.

-edit-
An ultimatum clause would be a good thing to include in this sort of diplomacy, so that they player or AI can effectively say, “Take the deal as-is, or else!”

[LDiCesare]

I don't see the difference between how many counter proposals you make and how many times you contact. Nothing prevents me from making a treaty with 2 counter proposals, then stopping and proposing another treaty of the same kind, essentially nullufying the limit of 3 counter proposals.
Reading your exampe, I still prefer predictible diplomatic bargains in the turn we do the bargaining. Lowering relations through a faux-pas and bullying would still happen the way you describe, and stating things like "so it or else" could very well cause an immediate declaration of war.