Hey guys,

As you may know, I am not in the Beta, however I have been reading the forums every day and watched the 2 lets plays that have been posted. I came up with this idea yesterday and thought it is pretty good. Let me know what you think, and please clarify stuff I don't understand about FE. I just read that beta 3 will be improving diplomacy, so i'll update when that's released. 

First of all, diplomacy in 4x games is an important aspect, i'm looking at MoM, Moo2, AoW SM, and Civ 5 as examples. In some of these games, you can win through diplomacy, either by allying a few civs and destroying the rest, or by having a vote for the most popular candidate. The alternate victory condition is compelling, because even though theres no historical precedent (afik) for a world-goverment, the idea is full of idealistic ambition.

Now, in most 4x games that I have played, the AI tends to be very friendly at lower difficulties, and extremely hostile at higher difficulties. This is bad game design since it restricts access to one of the victory conditions and to some of the game content just to add a little bit more difficulty (making up for bad AI). So making the AI challenging enough that you don't have to modify diplomacy to extreme degrees is pretty important. 

Difficulty aside, this brings up a common problem with AI diplomacy. Many times the AI will refuse to negotatiate with the player when the player feels they should. Having a list of relationship penalties like (you are in my territory -20, you killed another player -40, you use death magic -10, etc) makes it clear to the user why the AI is giving them the cold shoulder, and is a very nice addition. I don't know that you need to be so explicit, ideally you would write a bunch of dialogue that gives subtle hints as to why they are brushing off your offers. I also think that this highly artificial approach to relations between nations is overly simplistic.

I think that AI should be willing to play ball even with a player they don't like if: 

a ) they are overpowered by an aggressive nation,
b ) they have common features (enemies, magic, kingdom/empire),
c ) most importantly, they think they can manipulate the human player (make peace for 50 turns, build an army, and then do a sneak attack right when the treaty expires).

So basically, I think more focus should be placed on the frequency of diplomatic interactions, making the game more difficult if you never engage in any diplomacy, incentivizing transactions for both players (maybe make trade/research treaties that give strong bonuses to both parties), and trying to aspire to an average number of transactions/game. 

So that lays the groundwork, now I will give my suggestion

Diplomatic capital (Henceforth DC) is a great idea, but right now it doesn't really seem to have a unique purpose. I haven't seen it used, but from what I can tell its just a resource thats easier to collect than gold that can be used instead of gold to trade for diplomacy options. I really think that DC needs to have special powers to make it worth pursing, worth tacting faction/sovreign traits to enhance, worth special buildings to collect, worth defending an outpost or city to get terrain bonuses.

My suggestion is simple, make diplomatic capital impossible to refuse. Now currently, I don't think the AI CAN refuse a deal. Its a simple vending machine sysem for diplomacy... Option A costs 500, option B costs 1000... either you can afford it or you can't. This is a terrible system! I'm sorry, but nobody will ever pay 50,000 gold for a peace treaty, asking for that much when you aren't trying to insult someone is rediculous. Fixing this problem by making negotiations more realistic and fluid will require a large revamp but is crucial for diplomacy to be successful.

Some suggestions for ways to fix this:

• Allow more things you can offer/trade for like exchanging control of a city, giving technologies, giving spells, giving items, maybe even giving champions (obviously having the AI value things properly is a challenge).
• Give diplomatic capital to both parties for making treaties (and perhaps maintaining them), and take away DC for breaking treaties/war mongering.
• Make costs have a fixed base and small modifiers based on how many resources each empire has. Also, if one nation is poor the other nation should be considerate and potentially give a discount to make the deal go through, maybe earning extra DC for this kindness. It should be really easy to trade metal for crystals, for example, if one nation has lots of metal and the other has lots of crystals, but neither has large amounts of both.
• Make more types of treaties. For example, both nations get +25% prestige for 50 turns... if one nation has only 2 prestige and the other has 10, obviously one is getting a much better deal, so the weaker one accepting the deal should be valued highly by the stronger nation.
  
  

Note that none of these suggestions are based on faction-specific AI personalities. This is because you ideally should balance the system for human vs human players, and not rely on simple AI scripts to make things work. Obviously things like Capitar like you if you make lots of trade treaties should be added. That being said, the AI should have a societal-value system for deciding whether to make deals or not with a player.


Once you rebalance diplomacy so that you remove the deadlocks and things are properly valued, Diplomatic Capital can be given significance. DC should be a way to sabotage warmongering enemies by forcing their allies to turn against them, by abducting their cities or champions, by forcing them to donate gold or mana to your cause. A large pool of DC should be just as threating as a stack of powerful units sitting on your border, except it is more flexible though more indirect. Also, you can pool your own DC to counteract its use, basically neutralizing the proposal of the enemy by spending an equal amount. 

 The whole goal of this change is to make a pure non-violent diplomatic approach a viable alternative to conquest. You can use it to buy time to build up an army, to distract your enemies by turning other players against them, and to potentially win the game without ever capturing a city by force. The reason why it can't work this way right now is because the AI values diplomacy based on the poorly calculated faction power, which is so innacurate that it makes diplomacy difficult to use. I really think diplomacy should have legs for non-militaristic nations, so this needs to change.

The main problem I have with this change is that I remember seeing the AI (magnar I think) hoarding thousands of DC one game, while the player had only a few hundred. The player wasn't actively seeking out that resource, so I am not sure how easy it is to get DC. Obviously if you make DC more powerful, you have to balance more carefuly the acquisition and distribution methods. If its too easy to be a warmonger and have lots of DC, then it makes the whole system fall apart.


Finally, why bother? Is diplomacy even worth spending that much time on? Well, for one thing, diplomacy is supposed to be 1 out of the 4 victory conditions. That implies it should recieve a good amount of attention from developers. Secondly, most 4x games don't have very compelling experiences with diplomacy, FE has a chance to break new ground and have more ammunition for the marketing hype engine. I realize that right now there's plenty more important stuff to worry about, but don't neglect Diplomacy and let it become a side-attraction. 

Please give some feedback!