[Rising Tide] So, where's the actual diplomacy ?

You can call me a cynical prick, after my first wave of excitement about Rising Tide's new features died down I'm becoming more sceptical again.
The issue is that for all the talk about a new diplomacy system, I haven't seen much diplomacy. Yes, you can trade traits, but unless there are still parts of the UI that weren't shown or aren't finished yet, that seems to be all.
I see no option for bribing others into war.
I see no option to directly trade resources without trade routes.
I see no option to trade energy.
I see no option to actually influence other Civs' behaviour, which is what diplomacy actually is.

Yeah, a lot of questions still unanswered even after that diplomacy video with producer or whatnot.
What does neutral/cooperation/ally "lock" actually mean? Besides the looking good on paper? What are the implications? What are the actual benefits besides increasing the traded trait's output? How DOES it affect ACTUAL DIPLOMACY? Seemed to me like you'd have no real trouble getting ALL of them to ally state just by increasing "respect" or "fear" a little bit. What then?
What if someone has like -10 respect and +10 fear? or vice versa. If that CAN'T happen then why do we even have two of them?

GoodSarmatian said:

I see no option for bribing others into war.
I see no option to directly trade resources without trade routes.
I see no option to trade energy.
I see no option to actually influence other Civs' behaviour, which is what diplomacy actually is.

Click to expand...

Well, do you think these need to exist? I think it's actually a rather... refreshing idea to have a diplo-system that has a somewhat positive outlook on "working together" instead of basically being an AI-abuse-machinery.

Bribing AIs into war has always been nothing but a cheap way to cause chaos. Trading resources has always been something that was only really beneficial to the player. Same for trading Energy. And none of these were things that required any "skill". It's just a lot of clicks.

What I agree with that there should be some ways to "force" AIs to do stuff as a bonus for good standings. And it will be very important that the trait system is has a good balance and changes a lot between games. If it's just the same auto-picks every game, then.. that would be sad.

Yeah, I think those options should exist, and the AI should be good enough that they aren't just exploits. resource trades get abused because the AI always buys for the same price, no matter if the actually can use the resource, which is pretty weird because the Civ 5 AI seemed to "know" when it had enough iron or horses. Bribing AIs into war is a legitimate tactic to keep your aggressive neighbours busy. I think it should be possible with enough energy and capital to start or stop proxy wars or keep the AI fropm doing stuff that they always complain about when you do it (expand in your direction, antagonize aliens, attack stations...).

There ought to be a way to tell the AI to stop settling near you or to move their units away from your border, their response as to whether they'll comply, ignore or even declare war depending on the fear/respect mechanic.

One of the problems with Civ 5 is that they would only do one of two things - either comply or ignore. Meanwhile the player was curiously left with a different set of options - either say we're just passing through or declare war.

Why the disparity? The AI should have mostly the same options as the player and vice versa.

Mustakrakish said:

Seemed to me like you'd have no real trouble getting ALL of them to ally state just by increasing "respect" or "fear" a little bit. What then?

Click to expand...

Actually, I think it would harder that you think. We saw in the latest let's play that each civ has different requirements of respect/fear for being an ally. So Elodie might require 9 respect to be your ally whereas hutama might only require 7. Also, an alliance cost diplo capital. Lastly, we also know from the let's plays that each civ will change their respect/fear towards you differently based on their traits. So hutama might respect you if you build trade routes and might lose respect if you build military units. Elodie might like you more if you focus on culture but hate you if you focus too much on science. Brasilia might hate you if you focus on culture but love you more if you focus on military. So pleasing everyone won't be easy.

SupremacyKing2 said:

So hutama might respect you if you build trade routes and might lose respect if you build military units. Elodie might like you more if you focus on culture but hate you if you focus too much on science. Brasilia might hate you if you focus on culture but love you more if you focus on military. So pleasing everyone won't be easy.

Click to expand...

I can see that backfiring in a few ways, with the most militant factions allied and dominating the map together with hard power while the more commercial and cultural factions are swept aside.

After all, if Brazil respects my large army and he himself has a large army, there's not really going to be much friction between the two evenly matched military powers that end up oppressing the more pacifist leaders instead of balancing each other out.

That seems a far cry from what was suggested earlier in interviews, which is that some weaker sponsors might look to you for help and protection against a hostile neighbor.

Westwall said:

There ought to be a way to tell the AI to stop settling near you or to move their units away from your border, their response as to whether they'll comply, ignore or even declare war depending on the fear/respect mechanic.

One of the problems with Civ 5 is that they would only do one of two things - either comply or ignore. Meanwhile the player was curiously left with a different set of options - either say we're just passing through or declare war.

Why the disparity? The AI should have mostly the same options as the player and vice versa.

Click to expand...

That's probably a limitation in the code. The AI "knows" if it likes or hates you, but as far as I understand it, it does not "know" if it's in a good enough position to declare war or not. The "Okay, units are setup somewhat fine, declare war!"-order is probably not that flexible. Forcing the AI to decide whether to declare war or not would probably have rather dramatic impact on the outcome.

At the same time, if the AI could not make such a demand then the player had all the time to set up perfectly and the AI would have no way of stopping that.

So overall I think it's just limitations in the AI. Some things it just can't handle - it's still not a human player that needs to play by exactly the same rules.

I think you should be able to ask AI to not attack station X, to stop digging for ruins and so on for a cost in diplomatic capital proportional to your status, ie cheaper if friends more expensive if not.

Cyon said:

I think you should be able to ask AI to not attack station X, to stop digging for ruins and so on for a cost in diplomatic capital proportional to your status, ie cheaper if friends more expensive if not.

Click to expand...

Only if the Ai can do the same to you.
That has been the big problem with all 4X diplomacy.
Diplomacy = manipulating other players, but humans don't like to be manipulated by AIs.

KrikkitTwo said:

Only if the Ai can do the same to you.
That has been the big problem with all 4X diplomacy.
Diplomacy = manipulating other players, but humans don't like to be manipulated by AIs.

Click to expand...

Of course the AI should be able to do it to, and the player would then gain diplomatic capital. And both AI and player should be able to decline but that could result in worsened relationship.

Ryika said:

That's probably a limitation in the code. The AI "knows" if it likes or hates you, but as far as I understand it, it does not "know" if it's in a good enough position to declare war or not. The "Okay, units are setup somewhat fine, declare war!"-order is probably not that flexible. Forcing the AI to decide whether to declare war or not would probably have rather dramatic impact on the outcome.

At the same time, if the AI could not make such a demand then the player had all the time to set up perfectly and the AI would have no way of stopping that.

So overall I think it's just limitations in the AI. Some things it just can't handle - it's still not a human player that needs to play by exactly the same rules.

Click to expand...

I'm hesitant to write off too many things about AI that we don't really know for sure, especially since the devs seem to be doing a no small amount of tweaking, to the point where something like knowing if it's in a favorable enough position to wage war should seem almost trivial. I mean if it can be coded to understand when, where and how to move ocean cities around and take into account the Fear/Respect dynamic, it should be able to grasp that a player answering, "No, I will not move my units from your border." means "Time to start churning out more units of our own and fortifying our side of the border."

Cyon said:

Of course the AI should be able to do it to, and the player would then gain diplomatic capital. And both AI and player should be able to decline but that could result in worsened relationship.

Click to expand...

agreed with this

From what I've seen the new "diplomacy features" are just modifiers for AI's chance to hate you, or love you.
From what I've seen so far in the videos, it will ONLY cause endless peace, just like BNW expansion did to civ5, where you have to use AI-changing mods to actually make them go to war. Otherwise they'll just be too damn afraid to do anything to you. Not that AI would declare war often right now anyways - in those few games I've played only ONCE I got attacked, by a force small enough to be repelled by a city with single Ranged Marine unit..


Ocean gameplay is nice and all, but... what I actually wanted from expansion:

- larger maps (largest map in BE is about as big as standard map in Civ5).. I get 4 cities and they cover 1/4 map? lol. Not to mention map generation creates a really weird impassable continents where half continent is impassable and the rest is literally just beach..

- actual map editor and a fuction to save a map to use later (like we had in civ5)

- actually doable covert actions. I usually play on epic, and not a single city was able to last (without a change of owner at least) till I frikkin finish that quest for recovering info in any game I've played so far, because it takes about 35 turns to get enough intrigue and another 33 or so turns to complete quest covert ops. That means I was never able to do anything at all with covert ops..

- more different resources, instead of whole civ depending on 1-3 strategic resources of which you need about 100 if you want to build both buildings and units (since instead of civ5's 1 resource you generally need 3-6), generally that means I don't have enough resources even if I take the virtue that doubles their quantity, and other civs refuse to trade unless you give them back obscene amounts of favors.

- option to hide trade units completely (engame is just a mess of trade convoys with every civ having 25+ trade routes)

- "favors" actually doing something useful, instead of little things like having to rack up favors just to make AI sign cooperation agreement or open borders, which civs in civ5 offered voluntarily or for minor cash bribe

- civs having smaller "THIS IS MINE" territory, because with the maximum map size of BE, they each "covet" about 1/3 map, and they're really butthurt about you settling any cities at all.

- unique units for civs... current system is NOT made for modding. You can probably add an endgame unit just fine, but making an upgradable one is not possible without writing a lua bible

- fixing bugs! those gameplay videos make me really worried, because unless they play on 8yo PC, I really expect the game to react faster (quests etc took 3-20s to trigger, etc).. no word if they at least fixed the current UI bugs

I suspect we haven't seen every thing for diplomacy yet. Didn't they mention something about spending DC to get AI players to assist you in war? Meanwhile resource trading is now a function of Trade Routes rather than diplomacy which is proper in my opinion.

GoodSarmatian said:

You can call me a cynical prick, after my first wave of excitement about Rising Tide's new features died down I'm becoming more sceptical again.
The issue is that for all the talk about a new diplomacy system, I haven't seen much diplomacy. Yes, you can trade traits, but unless there are still parts of the UI that weren't shown or aren't finished yet, that seems to be all.
I see no option for bribing others into war.
I see no option to directly trade resources without trade routes.
I see no option to trade energy.
I see no option to actually influence other Civs' behaviour, which is what diplomacy actually is.

Click to expand...

afaik, favors and resource trading are gone.
you can influence AIs by accepting or denying agreements they propose, since accepting will give the AI a new trait along with something it likes/dislikes.

the player earns respect points by mousing over AI's traits and seeing and doing what they like.
the player earns fear point by building and upgrading units.
that is all there is to diplomacy. and, yeah, one should improve asap his relations with AI(s) he took traits from.

Ryika said:

Well, do you think these need to exist? I think it's actually a rather... refreshing idea to have a diplo-system that has a somewhat positive outlook on "working together" instead of basically being an AI-abuse-machinery.

Bribing AIs into war has always been nothing but a cheap way to cause chaos. Trading resources has always been something that was only really beneficial to the player. Same for trading Energy. And none of these were things that required any "skill". It's just a lot of clicks.

What I agree with that there should be some ways to "force" AIs to do stuff as a bonus for good standings. And it will be very important that the trait system is has a good balance and changes a lot between games. If it's just the same auto-picks every game, then.. that would be sad.

Click to expand...

+1

The "current" diplomatic system for civ 5 and CivBE in SP is really just AI-abuse if OP thinks that diplomacy should involve bribing civs to fight others and it seems Firaxis wants to avoid this entirely by fusing MP and SP diplomacy into this new system. By that I mean, there will be barely any difference in how it's used between AI's and player or between players, with the exception of MP players keeping track of who tends to be better at this game and teaming up against them.

Maybe with alliances there could be the additional perk to persuade an AI ally to attack another sponsor (AI or player) so long as that AI ally also hates that other sponsor and also doesn't fear them and so long as you have sufficient respect between you and your ally. And then, maybe, if the war doesn't work out that could cause diplomatic rifts.

Besides, according to some of those youtubers who have tried CivBERT, they say there is more diplomatic activity than before.

ray111 said:

From what I've seen so far in the videos, it will ONLY cause endless peace, just like BNW expansion did to civ5, where you have to use AI-changing mods to actually make them go to war. Otherwise they'll just be too damn afraid to do anything to you. Not that AI would declare war often right now anyways - in those few games I've played only ONCE I got attacked, by a force small enough to be repelled by a city with single Ranged Marine unit..

Click to expand...

What ?

Yeah okay. Tried playing above king ever ? Cause i doubt it reading that about CIV V BNW.

Halbbruder said:

+1

The "current" diplomatic system for civ 5 and CivBE in SP is really just AI-abuse if OP thinks that diplomacy should involve bribing civs to fight others and it seems Firaxis wants to avoid this entirely by fusing MP and SP diplomacy into this new system. By that I mean, there will be barely any difference in how it's used between AI's and player or between players, with the exception of MP players keeping track of who tends to be better at this game and teaming up against them.

Maybe with alliances there could be the additional perk to persuade an AI ally to attack another sponsor (AI or player) so long as that AI ally also hates that other sponsor and also doesn't fear them and so long as you have sufficient respect between you and your ally. And then, maybe, if the war doesn't work out that could cause diplomatic rifts.

Besides, according to some of those youtubers who have tried CivBERT, they say there is more diplomatic activity than before.

Click to expand...

I will agree that bribing AIs to war was a cheap mecanic but something we all need 1 game out of 2 in Deity to avoid being wiped out without dedicating time to build an army when you just cant.

Now, if that option is really gone, then i hope the new mecanics are very punishing for betraying an ally, aside from the obvious losing of agreements between all parties. Backstabbing is part of the game but between allies it shoud only happen when there's an obvious mandatory reason to do it. Like closing in on a victory, or a sudden decision that affects that relationship.

Also, hoping that there is a clear and reliable way to incentive an ally in going to war with you vs another civ or to come defend you in case you're being attacked.

I also agree with the fact that you should be able to interact with AIs as much as they interact with you (stop digging there, stop hurting aliens, stop being friend with that AI, are you there for war , etc)

Also, there should still be a "commerce" screen that allows for basic exchanges of resources, science etc... Maybe with tweaked numbers but it should still exist.
One can also wonder what happened to the favor system. It was useless before so with this new thing, is it completely gone.

I miss trading techs and world maps. I know why they do it from a gameplay/balance standpoint. However, in real life, technology/intellectual property is really hard to hide and easy to copy.