Diplomacy Woes

[tonystowe]

While playing as South Africa in the African Campaign I managed to maintain the peace for a whole seven months! I was astonished when the Namibian Fed declared war against me and when I researched the reasons behind the declaration I was at quite a loss. My military had been realigned in terms of power projection, supporting positions and organization but none stood out as threatening in nature to Namibia. I had dissolved all of the Garrison Infantry, SA-7 and SA-14, and placed all towed artillery in reserve along with several of 30% of IFV's and AT.

Diplomatically I gave in to Namibia graciously just to acquire a ridiculous Free Trade and an Embassy and to be honest far more than I wanted to give up for such petty diplomacy acts.

On to my point: Once the war started Namibian forces done made a half decent first strike that caused me some concern, however the organization and deployment of my troops turned the tide quickly into my favor. At this point I pushed for twelve months into Namibia were I slowly took ground, demolished his military and took key resources.

It was at that point, when Namibia made no attempt at attacking that I thought it was a fine time to begin serious negotiations towards a ceasefire and hopefully restoration of peace. My first action was complete withdrawal of my forward forces to the approximate original boundary. The second action was an offer to Namibia for me to GIVE them back the 1.55 million acres (for lack of a better term) of territory that I had taken from them. NAMIBIAN FED REFUSED THE OFFER!!! There were no ties, not even a request, initially, for a cease fire. Amazing! I believe that an AI country whose military is whipped, who cannot defend itself and has no other option - SHOULD take an offer when given to it on a silver platter!

Tony

[red]

You're treating the AI like a human. You think it understood the threat posed by you in this new situation where you had realigned your military in terms of power projection?

[Balthagor]

what if this "free land" you offer borders one of its enemies? Currently the AI does not accept any land trades. There are no clear rules for when it should accept.

[Il Duce]

At some point in the games update history, there was a condition where the AI nations would do just about anything for the kind of trade you had proposed - land for peace was fairly easy to force on an AI nation, and unreasonable Land swaps could deprive the AI recipient of subtantial chunks. So the code was changed such that any land trade proposal to an AI is pretty much doomed to fail.

You just have to accept that the AI's are pretty unsophisiticated when it comes to diplomacy - it takes some time to figure out what works best, and it is not always 'rational.'

[George Geczy]

One of the interesting side-effects of the flexible diplomatic trades system we have is the AI factor - specifically, how should the AI handle complex and somewhat subtle offers?

Land trades is one very good example - there can be so many 'hidden agendas' in a land trade offer. Are you trying to create a buffer between yourself and an enemy? Are you trying to put the AI into harms way? Are you trying to give the AI a few million people that you know it can't feed? Are you trying to force the AI to over-extend its defense to make attacking it easier? And so on.

Brad Wardell, designer of Galactic Civilizations II, recently said on their forum that he wouldn't put in a feature that he couldn't try to make the AI understand. He even listed some of his favorite wish-list features that got cut just for this reason.

If we followed the same thinking, then land trades would not have made it into the game. In fact, since the AI refuses them now anyways, land trades can only be used in a multiplayer game.

It's hard to say if we can ever change this one in the future - there may be certain (limited) situations where the AI would accept such trades, but even so I can see the human players looking for ways to exploit the AI's thinking. It may not be as bad as selling Manhattan for a bunch of beads, but then again it could be...

-- George.

[Il Duce]

Might I suggest something that wouldn't add a lot of code, but might help humans to do diplo with AI's?

As you mention, there are diplo options that you want to have for MP games - things that human players can do to or with each other, and there are things that AI's just can't do.

Perhaps you might want to have a color code in the menus so that when you are dealing with an AI, you know which items are relatively meaningless - land trades being a case in point.

As another alternative - and I think I might have seen or suggested this in a long-ago posting on what advisors 'ought' to do - it would be nice if the State minister could pop up and critique a proposed diplo exchange before you fire it off.

[BigStone]

It's hard to say if we can ever change this one in the future -

I've never liked the idea of trading land...
But there was a idea posted awhile ago (can't find it... ) that
it would be nice to be able place factories etc on allied ground...