Missed your edit yesterday ...
Perhaps we're confusing the definition of the word "Diplomacy" here. Nation-states engage in diplomacy all the time. A diplomatic corps has a singular mission - advance the interests of their nation. Even in eras where nations have been direct rivals vying for supremacy diplomacy has still boiled down to hammering out terms under which both nations believe their best interest are being served.
Well, i was talking of something completely diferent
I was musing over the whole "game is competitive because the AI does not show explicitely it's diplo stance" mantra that is around here since day 0 of launch ... more on that below.
You are absolutely right though. Diplomacy is war with verbose suited guys and the objective is always to get a good result for your country ( or atleast the less bad possible due to circumstances ).
The competitive nature of the situation and the nature of the game have everything to do with the appropriate nature of diplomacy. In a zero-sum game with 1 winner and X losers diplomacy is about temporary alliances of opportunity and everyone should be aware of it. In something other than a zero-sum game with a clear winner and a heap of losers diplomacy completely changes. You can have situations with "haves" and "have mores" cooperating and all coming away with more than they started, as opposed to one "have" and a bunch of "have nots" as you have in Civilization.
The real restriction on the nature of competitive diplomacy in Civilization is that second place is just the first loser. In such a situation you always throw the proverbial Blue Shell unless the guy in first place is already on his way out and you're waiting to bag the next leader.
Ok, like I said above, my point was completely diferent one. I was just pointing that you can have a game focused on competitiveness with or without diplomacy inside, or the other way around. In other words, competitiveness and the existance of diplomacy are unrelated, unlike a lot of people seem to think around here. It looks that you are not one of them ( your quoter to whom I responded was , by the looks of it ), so sorry for taking the brunt that wasn't meant to you
Now in the games where there are both, you are right, diplomacy is only one more of the tools in the bag. But the issue is that Civ diplo in itself is not a zero sum game ( and even in the big picture it technically it isn't a zero sum game because the value of the win for the winner is not equal to the module of the sum of the loss value of all the losers ... and this is not a trivial matter, since it makes the zero sum game strategies not necessarily good ones in this situation ), a thing that means spreasheet analysis case by case + a look at the bigger picture.
In the end, I agree with you, the Civ V diplo system in itself is not bad ... probably it lacks some options, but that is another issue. The big issues are the AI lack of understanding the game enviroment in general, the opaqueness of the UI that makes the understanding and handling of the diplo situations somewhat less than intuitive ( like other poster some pages ago said, we have a foreign advisor, so why not put him giving us some feedback on the other players diplo stances, but without putting +10 you liberated us in the screen ) and maybe some common sense added to the tune up inside the the AI diplo rules ( treating the attacker and the defender equally is stupid, for a quick example, even because one of them actually attacked
)
I agree. The AI should be looking beyond simply "stab the leader" to a plan of "stab everyone in front of me in the correct order so I can win" with a fall-back plan of "stab/boost the guy who hurt/helped me the most now since I can't possibly win."
- Marty Lund
You are right, but you need to take it with a grain of salt. One of the things that sometimes wannabee bench Civ AI coders tend to forget is that you need to be alive to win
This means that before thinking on winning, you actually have to care with your own survival first and IF you have a good degree of certainty of that you can start thinking on how to win. If not, first take care of your own survival
... In other words, if you are a major player, think on winning, if you're not, think first on being one
Unfortunately as far as I know ( without the SDK in front of my eyes I can't assure this ) Civ V AI as it is does not care with their survival possibilities when plotting their grand plans
But the fact is that none of the civ AI coders i know ( Soren, Blake, jdog5000 ) ever putted a lot of emphasis on teaching the AI to play the diplo game ( while they always loved to tune up the military AI ... not that it is not needed
but good armies are useless if you make bad diplo IMHO ), so waiting for it was surely wishful thinking.