Hey ice, big fan of your work on DW:U.

The Alliance issue you're having speaks to some pretty deep problems in GCIII, in my opinion. The whole idea that diplo tech offers bonuses to AI interaction is a rehash of the failed system from GCII, and it makes even less sense now that multiplayer is enabled.

Diplo research needs to be more than a sideshow to the standard colony/military spam game. Right now either it's a hilariously easy way to do an end-run around the AI, or it's useless. Neither option is very good.

It would make much more sense to move to a Diplo Points system, with techs like translators being more expensive but more valuable as gates to meaningful non-conquest interactions.

Just think about a Diplo Player approach under such a system:

- The Diplo Player has Diplo Points, and anyone who isn't doing a pure dumb conquest game needs Diplo Points for pretty much everything, not to mention somebody who can understand multiple races' languages and quirks. The person with the Diplo Points can spend them on themselves, or use them to broker deals between other parties.

- Simply conquering the Diplo Player isn't going to make Diplo Points magically appear in the galaxy. There's actually a good reason to not murderize them. They have something you may want. Indeed, if the game is balanced properly, it should be quite difficult to keep a war machine running without availing yourself of certain diplomatic actions like trade and tech-swapping.

- The Diplo Player gains a benefit from brokering deals. The more Diplo Points they spend to facilitate interactions in the galaxy, the more their Influence/Econ improves.

- They can spend extra Diplo Points (no extra Influence/Econ bonus) to "push" deals. Other races can defy them, but at a cost: influence penalty, econ penalty, other races party to that treaty can renege on other treaties without consequence, etc.

- They can spend DP on the UP to become OP (sorry, couldn't resist.)

- If Diplo/Econ are more fully merged, they can opt for the Banker route, offering loans and trade route piggybacking and interest for deposits. Failure to abide by the deals result in the usual Influence/econ/diplo penalties, plus the diplo player can put bounties out on the deadbeats, and other races can legally take their shit for a finder's fee.

A system like that solves a LOT of problems. It makes diplo meaningful in human-only games. It makes AI interactions more realistic, rather than having everybody suddenly love you and give you great deals just because you researched a few techs... while also maintaining a huge military so they don't automatically DOW you anyway.

It would require balancing passes, sure, but I think GCIII needs some pretty deep overhauls to resolve problems like the one you first mentioned in your post.

So let me get this straight. You try as hard as possible to employ every known balance exploit you can find, go for an under-played and thus underbalanced victory type, exploit a brand new and clearly poorly balanced (but cool) new feature, then complain game is too easy?

Uh huh.

Game might be too easy (I tend to agree with you), but you didnt prove it in this post.

Go and post a game where you get a conquest/tech victory in a non-skewed map (ie one with enough AI density to cause reasonable competition for resources), without hoovering up clearly imbalanced anomolies that Frogboy has already stated are getting patched this week.

There's exploits in every decent 4x game. As you increase the complexity, and interactions between features, then inevitably they will pop up. 

The key is to squash the huge ones that affect the most. Diplomacy victory is not one of them.

I admit his suggestions were productive and broadly made sense, although #3 is clearly a bandaid solution and a nerf to an arguably underpowered tree (when not exploited), and #1 has been posted about 100x before in the forum.

I read these forums quite often, and I always see players write posts like "waaahhhh godmode too easy", but invariably they exploit the shit out of something that is obviously unintended.

I think I've only seen a few replays where someone has actually beat the game on godlike with a reasonable map setting (ie not really sparse), factory-standard race, no ridiculous sensor boats, etc.

Hey Adam:

The title was selected to poke fun a little at past post threads on this topic where civil discussion often wasn't possible, the text in my post had no "waaahhh" in it at all. 

As described in the OP simply using the Diplomacy system with targeted research towards Alliance was by far the biggest factor in the Turn 53 win.  The Precursor Anomalies were only significant in the Turn 102 save i.e. at which point winning by any victory type is feasible.  If you look in my Metaverse profile you'll see other Godlike wins with Alliance prior to the Precursor DLC albeit not quite so fast (about 100 turns).

I certainly agree there are exploits in every 4X game.  The definition of the term "exploit" varies of course.  In this case I'm using features of the game in a strategic way, I'm not stacking the game with crappy custom factions as AI opponents for example.  As I said in my original post, I'm well aware I can play with "house rules" ... in fact I often do.  But what I can't do in my favourite 4X games in recent years is win after the equivalent of 53 Turns.  Ideally I'd like to keep those house rules to a minimum and in particular avoid house rules that mean I have to ignore entire features of the game e.g. diplomacy, custom factions etc ... these features are part of the fun.

Frogboy has made it clear in past posts he considers sensor boats a part of the game and uses them.  Initially I avoided using them but after reading Frogboy's comments started to use them.

Custom factions and diplomacy are features of the game, all I've done is use a faction with a focus on diplomacy and used the diplomacy system as is readily available to improve relations at every opportunity i.e. which some would call strategy, not an exploit.

A Huge map with 8 opponents I wouldn't describe as sparse.

I agree the impact of all this was unintended by Stardock but some of these can be fixed fairly easily, Naselus has knocked off a couple of them already in the IAB Mod e.g. sensor boats.  

With diplomacy a couple of quick band-aid fixes come to mind e.g. moving Alliance tech deeper in the tree, increasing the width of the diplomacy scale so it takes longer for relations to get to the point where an Alliance is possible.  This wouldn't stop our ability to exploit the AI in other common interactions, however, so tend to agree with posters such as poothedestroyer and Naseulus that more significant changes would be ideal.

Also note Macsen has some LP's on Godlike with victories using standard races and also without sensor boats.

Yeah look I agree your post was at least constructive. But I still think that a post about godlike just to say "hey I found this cool diplomacy tech exploit" or "diplomacy win is broken" is not exactly gamebreaking stuff for the majority of players. 

Unlike say "hey so I killed this precursor anomaly and now I just win. Or my favourite still... "Hey so I found this precursor military manufacturing world next to my home planet. Let the colony spam begin!!!"

Guess I missed your tongue-in-cheek

I guess i meant that the majority of players don't go for alliance victories. Even hardcore! 

This game still has a long way to go, but stardock are moving it in the right direction I think

I'm not convinced we are using it as designed. I think there's an implementation bug, but trying to figure out what it is is difficult. You can see some effects, though.

The file diplomacydefs.xml has a bunch of relations values that seem to be set up to activate AI behaviours - like

Should mean you only get races' UP vote if they have 8+ relations with you

or

means they should refuse to work with you in any way with lower than -5.

(I'm telling the forum these are your quotes because otherwise multiple quotes break).

However, these do nothing. You can edit them as much as you like, the AI ignores them completely. According to this file, there's a few actions which you're able to undertake at low relations which the AI should reject, yet presently it doesn't, making it easier to get on the relations treadmill than it ought to be (and this then pushes relations up rapidly).

The really relevant one here is this one:

Which should in theory force you to make all races like each other (or at least not hate each other) to be able to maintain alliances with everyone. Given that it's pretty hard to influence other races' opinions of each other, that should make an alliance victory something that happens once you've killed off the races who just can't get along. It should basically mean that you can't get into an alliance with two races who are at war with each other, since they'll very rapidly get to -6 mutual relations and one of them will break treaties with you.

Well naselus isn't talking about mods but game mechanics that don't function.

But that aside pootthedestroyer's first reply is spot on, ever since I found out how diplomacy works I wondered how the fuck that is supposed to work in multiplayer. Other players wouldn't give a fuck about any number of diplo points and dow you anyway and pootthedestroyer has presented a system that makes much more sense but nobody seems to coment on that.

Other than what those to said, I can only hope for an diplomacy revamp from stardock.
The Custom AI Difficulty Section of my own Suggestion Thread if implemented could also help out but I didn't have time to expand on the core concept yet so it's still very short. I also might add a Section based on what pootthedestroyer said about diplomacy later on.

I like pootthedestroyer's ideas, which if I've read him correctly, mean that if you're a Diplomatic player, you got skills!! Skills that even people who might not like you much if at all need you alive for, so they won't go "Look at that namby-pamby with the lousy military, let's murderize his ass!" Your diplomacy skills give you a standing that means that other races may listen to you and do your bidding/take your politely worded suggestion: "Make peace with the Torians. Now, never mind that battle cruiser of mine you see looking out your office window, old bean! You make the choice you see fit! If you make the wrong one the battle cruiser destroys you, but hey, no pressure, now!" Or races will look poorly on a race that defies you.

If I've got this right, it sounds like a great idea. Not sure how workable it'll be to implement but I think it'd work. I'd add that I see espionage being able to undermine this to a certain extent - ie your standing in the Galaxy because of your Diplomatic Skills being downgraded by the Drengin doing something to the Torians and making look like it was you.

We already have abstract points that make the ai love you, while any human player doesn't give a shit. I don't mean + or - from treaties or actions but just flat out researched diplomacy points that give you + relations to anyone for nothing, except for human players.

An aggressiv player or ai shouldn't look at how many diplomacy points a diplo player has but how many allies he has and how much you care if you piss them off.

That would definitely work, but in a game like GCIII, I think it would make more sense thematically for "dumb conquest" (no offense, unless you're actually a Drengin IRL, then some offense) to be "free" from the perspective of Diplomacy Points. I think a player who goes full-on dumb conquest should be able to ignore Diplomacy Points and diplomacy tech completely and still be able to perform all of the traditional actions they want to perform. With zero Diplo Points, you should be able to attack anybody you want, DOW anybody you want, make a few basic, brutish demands (my two would be "give me credits or die" and "give me planets or die,") capture planets, demand unconditional surrender, and accept any ceasefire offer made to you by other players.

I would still love to see warmongers punished for being warmongers through the diplomacy system. However, I think it would make for a much more interesting game if the players with Diplomacy Points actually had to make a conscious choice to spend their resources to punish those warmongers. That makes for interesting and difficult decisions on both sides, and it gives "peaceful" players meaningful attacks and defenses against players who are trying to destroy them using traditional means.

What would make the "peaceful" game even more interesting is if Diplomacy Points/players had to juggle two compelling options for *how* to attack and defend against other players.

The first option would be directly spending Diplo Points on individual players to push deals, treaties, and relationships in their favor and against their enemies.

The second option would be spending Diplo Points on the UP to try to shape the entire galaxy's "international relations" ruleset in their favor. This is where the players themselves pushing and pulling over "proper cassus bellis" could manifest. There are already hints of this in the game' they'd just need to be refined and baked into the Diplo Point system.

And, it's worth mentioning, I think the UP could still function perfectly well as a baseline if nobody in the galaxy decided to invest in Diplo Points. It would just be a rather basic organization where non-diplomatic factors controlled how many votes people got (total population and/or military might, one supposes) and where players had less control over the power and nuance of the proposed policies. Thus, the strongest players would absolutely be able to use the UP to bully weaker players, but their options for how to do so would be painfully limited by their lack of diplomatic creativity and finesse. This would make thematic sense as well.

The other option, of course, is to have the UP locked behind *some* player investing in the diplo techs necessary to establish meaningful communication between all races. The danger there is giving that player too much control over the UP just as a reward for inventing it. That's something I don't support. If they want to control the beast they create, they should have to spend resources to do so.

Although I support the development of diplomacy in the game, any adjustments to accommodate MP seem less than priority to a game that is 99.5% SP. 

Also, I think that human players in an MP setting are too arbitrary and treacherous and unpredictable for any reasonable AI-usable algorithms or mechanics.  I think that Diplomacy features should be mostly ignored or disabled during MP except for flavor behavior for the AI itself. I know I would do everything I could think of to act outside of any Diplomacy mechanics and I would expect that from anybody I presently play Risk games with face to face.  They're nasty! 

You have some excellent ideas for MP diplomacy.  I will grant you that.  With the right balancing work it could possibly put a diplomatic player on par with militaristic players.  That would be interesting.  I don't know how much work that would be, but it seems like it could be a lot.  It is possibly more than the devs can justify given the percentages of MP play they see happening.