Treaty Secrecy...

herr neumann · Post by **herr neumann** » Mar 03 2004

I think it is not that impossible to keep a treaty secret. In open democracies where all travel plans of your president/prime minister are made public long before, it is quite difficult to veil big secret treaties. But there are also more authoritarian regimes (e.g. military dictatorship in the game) where press is pretty much under government control and there is quite a little chance that info about some treaties will leak to public. Foreign espionage is another matter - the leaders of other countries might have more info than people of your own country.
Ok, this is the case of population but player is a LEADER of a country in the game so it doesn't apply directly to him.

The easiest example is again The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As far as I know rest of the world didn't know about secret appendixes of this pact for sure up to the capitulation of Germany when documentation was recovered. There where rumours of course - when two former enemies, Russia and Germany, decide to come to an agreement its gotta be more than just mere non-agression. And Soviet Union admited existance of this pact only somewhere in late 80's/early 90's.

tkobo:
"Well, even public treaties have secrets.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was for the most part a public treaty,but it had a secret apendix in which plans were included to divide eastern europe."

I think it was actually other way around. MRP was secret treaty and its public part was only for cover-up. Ooor it is matter of interpretation.

djtrix:
"I'd say keep the meeting public but the actual treaty ambiguous.

An example may be:

"The Prime Minister of Canada met with the President of the United States last Thursday. Our sources indicate that topics on the agenda included free trade, continental defence, emmigration, refugees and loan relief." "

This is good idea IMO.

I think this treaty business should be modeled in the following way in the game:

A) some treaties are always public: trade treaties, Mutual Defence, Alliances etc. All or most info about them is know to all

B) Some treaties or part of treaties are secret: agression treaties, some military equipment treaties etc.
Leaders (and population) would know about them through nosey journalists (in open democracies). Or more propable is that you receive an e-mail from your foreign intelligence department in a way djtrix described it.

djtrix · Post by **djtrix** » Mar 03 2004

I agree with the government affecting how public/private your treaties are. This can be a downside or upside of "switching governments".

Can any of the Battlegoat team let us know if any of this is feasable before we go off and concieve of even more complex and grandious schemes??

(I happen to think that this simple feature would add a HUGE amount of atmosphere to the game and would be well worth a good investment of time)

djtrix · Post by **djtrix** » Mar 03 2004

On 2004-03-01 21:07, BattleGoat wrote:
We cannot pick and choose any further what are public and what are private. The question now is, should all other agreements be made public or not? Let us know what you think. We are just in the process of implementing News Items, so we need to know whether these should be included.

I just re-read this and realized that we have seriously strayed from the origional question postulated by "BattleGoat"... If there is no option to make certain treaties public and other private, then I vote for veiled public treaties as I described in my first post. EG. The press gets leaked an "agenda" but it's not known if that was EVERYTHING that was talked and maybe some issues were not even discussed, or some were not concluded.

Another thought that is probably too hard to code: If during the negotiation process you put some items on the table that are rejected by one side and then withdrawn from negotiations, those could appear in the media's version of the event to confuse the issue. I believe this simulates RL where a leader will talk about what they want to accomplish with a meeting and not necesarily meet that goal but have the media still writing about it.

Can you tell that I'm much more interested in the Diplomacy than the military given my interest in this thread and disinterest in most others??

pg · Post by pg » Mar 03 2004

i think gov't types deciding what treaties are public knowledge would be the easiest way to do this.

democracy - everything is known
monarchy - few secrets
dictatorship - many secrets

pretty sure those are the 3 different gov't types.

JXai · Post by **JXai** » Mar 03 2004

That sort of thinking would definitely help make goverment types more powerful. I can't think of a reason I would switch governments ATM, but I suppose those reasons aren't really implemented now anyway.

ilkhan · Post by **ilkhan** » Mar 04 2004

Keep it secret. Make em sweat.

If I'm playing Iraq I may not want all the countrys on my borders knowing I'm making nice nice with Isreal to get there Mirkava tank designs. That could be a very compremising position to be in if it were found out.

Post by **BattleGoat** » Mar 04 2004

I sort of let the topic stray a bit because it was interesting to see what people thought. The investment in time now to re-invent how some of the diplomacy is handled "publicly" is unfortunately not possible...

So, back to the orginal question: For the initial release, we will have some treaties that are by their nature public. The only question we can accept input on for the initial release is; "Should all other treaties also be know, or should they be private?" (Personally, I'm leaning to private... That would also give your Intelligence guys something else to discover.) Or should we tie it to the Government types as has been suggested?

FYI... Just because this might not show up the way people want in the initial release, doesn't mean it won't be incorporated in subsequent development. When we have the time to redesign some of the game engine elements, this is definitely an aspect of diplomacy we will reconsider.

Fobok · Post by **Fobok** » Mar 04 2004

Keep them secret. It really opens up more avenues of strategy, and gives more to discover with espionage.

Ashbery76 · Post by **Ashbery76** » Mar 04 2004

The idea of Government types and secrecy being linked, just what proof is there for this theory?It should be down to money spent on intelligence, just like in the real world.

djtrix · Post by **djtrix** » Mar 04 2004

My Vote: Secret.. Based on government if possible.

herr neumann · Post by **herr neumann** » Mar 05 2004

On 2004-03-04 15:41, Ashbery76 wrote:
The idea of Government types and secrecy being linked, just what proof is there for this theory?It should be down to money spent on intelligence, just like in the real world.

The major difference is that in Open Democracies press (or more broadly - all communication in society) is not cencored as a rule and this means there is much info to population about foreign policy also.

In totalitarian regimes there is no free press which could find out and tell people (and other countries too of course) that president just had a very secretive 1-day flight to Cuba with the intent of... People knew only as much what the government wanted them to know.

So to sum it up:
I think it's not ONLY money spent on intelligence that matters. The freedom of communication is also important. If people have right to investigate and critizise the government deals then it is also much more difficult to keep things in secret than in closed societies where these kind of actions would result in some kind of punishment.

If all countries in the world would be authoritarian/totalitarian then treaties could very easily remain secret.

If all countries would be open democracies it would be difficult to have secret treaties as communication is free in the society.

BTW - my vote would be on the private treaties also.

Ashbery76 · Post by **Ashbery76** » Mar 05 2004

You know what bush and blair talk about during these meeting? does anybody? did you know when the war was decided? the fact is your theory has no evidence of reality.Treaties secrecy has nothing to do with political systems,nor does it has anything to do with what the population knows.

RCBricker · Post by **RCBricker** » Apr 04 2005

little late but what about adding a check box to the treaties screen (of any treaty) to add an apendix. This appendix can be any other treaty added to the original. It will have a check box that says make public which is defaulted "on".

Example:

The much loved MRP

the original treaty is Non-Agression treaty. The apendix was the division of eastern europe.

By the way is there going to be disputed terriotories? How about spheres of influence?

Legend · Post by **Legend** » Apr 04 2005

There will be territories that are disputed but still owned by one region. These areas are detailed in our storylines and are sometimes loyal to the region not currently in ownership of that territory. Some stories have settings where a piece of land was just recently invaded and the player is urged to take it back. Most "real world" disputed areas that we have just handed to a particular region and is no longer disputed is usually smaller than our hex size. I learned that there are many islands of the coast of east asia that are disputed but they barely show on our satellite imagry.

As I don't want to spoil anything there are certain areas that players should find interesting once they read the story and are given the option to respond. I won't get into any details tho'.

RCBricker:
Can you elaborate on "spheres of influence"?

RCBricker · Post by **RCBricker** » Apr 04 2005

it is an area or region of special interest to a given country. Pretty well out dated now a days but still followed a little bit.

The eastern bloc was the last sphere of influence that I know of.

It is basically an area that a country has sway over or special interest in (but the countries in that sphere are independent or at least considered independent)