dunkleosteus
Roman Pleb
Diplomacy is bland. Whether other Civs like you is mostly arbitrary, and mostly based on your warmongering. There are other sort of "Global" counters but they lack any sort of cohesiveness.
City state diplomacy is even worse. It's just "who can have the most Envoys". The Civ 5 premise, where there was a relationship counter was arguably a lot better, but being able to purchase relationship with City states ruined it- it became only about whoever had the most money.
A combined system with a relationship counter and envoys would be better, and this is how to implement it as well as the above problems with civ-civ diplomacy.
Let's start.
Respect has to be one of the most important factors of Diplomacy in this system, and it's a value that you can see and that you need to maintain. Respect is a number, between -100 and +100 that represents how respectable you are in the eyes of other civs. It modifies everything they think about you and how you interact with them.
Surprise wars or wars without casus bellis nearly always incur a massive respect penalty upon declaration. Other important factors are promises and demands- if another civ asks you something like "You have troops near my borders, are you planning to attack?", you have the usual three options- "No, only passing through", which incurs no negative or positive bonuses unless you break the promise which results in a massive respect hit; "Yes, prepare to die!" which does not lose you any respect beyond what a normal war declaration would; and "ignore." which immediately gives you a respect penalty, but does not incur any further penalties for your later actions.
But respect isn't only about being peaceful- declaring wars on other civs that themselves have low respect results in a reduced respect drop or possibly no respect loss- some monsters need to be stopped.
Making demands is a gamble in terms of diplomacy as well- if the other civ refuses, you will take a respect hit unless you declare war on them (this does not provide any casus belli, so if you have no existing CB, you'd have to declare a surprise war). If the other civ accepts your demands however, your respect will increase or decrease depending on your relative respects- demanding from a civ of higher esteem will lower your respect and demanding from a civ of lower esteem will increase your respect.
In addition to respect, you have a personal relationship with other civs just as is currently implemented. There are however major changes to what affects this relationship. Discovered espionage always results in a loss of relationship. However, individual agendas should be easier to deal with- if another civ takes issue with your actions, they will use an appropriate diplomatic request to you- for Civs that care for religion, this might be something like "Why are your people heathens? Why don't you embrace the true faith?" (Looking at you, Phillip) and depending on factors including your current relationship, you may have various responses- "You're right, we'd welcome your missionaries!" This would usually result in an immediate and large boost to your relationship. There's the obvious counter, "We'd never allow your false beliefs in our Temples!", resulting in an immediate loss of relationship. With increased diplomatic access and influence however, there are further options such as "Surely our two peoples can find unity in our beliefs?" is a diplomatic option that is usually locked- the opinion the other civ has of you may affect their reaction- they could positively accept this and drop the issue, freeing you from being hurt by that aspect of their agenda. Alternatively they could negatively respond, saying "No, you are wrong. There is no way our people can co-operate."
Of course there are other agendas, such as Germany's city state agenda: "We demand that you renounce your relationship with _____ city state!", to which you could respond "Of course, that relationship has ended." This would increase your relationship with Barbarosa but drop your relationship with the city state. In addition, you'd lose half of the envoys you have with the city state (but they're not gone!). Another option would be "Not a chance." which immediately drops their opinion of you but increases your relationship with the city state slightly. Further options might be "Our apologies, our intention was not to impose." which may result in a neutral outcome with no penalties.
Envoys:
I mentioned above that envoys and city state relationships should work differently and they should- envoys should not be permanently assigned or lost from city states- instead, envoys can be added or removed from city states at any time. In addition however, envoys are required to be sent to other civs.
When you send a delegation, you automatically get +1 relationship per turn and are able to begin sending envoys to that civ.
With a single envoy, you get the option to offer and receive trade deals from the civ. With 3 envoys, you have the option to "discuss" with them- this could be to request that they move their troops from your borders, ask their opinion of another Civ, praise them, insult them, or send them gifts. Gifts might be sums of gold which go directly into the other Civ's gold balance, but could also be something like sharing your culture or research with them (which costs you gold but might give them a small amount of science, culture or great person points). If they accept, their opinion of you will increase.
Praise is an option that may increase that civs opinion of you, but various praises are only available under certain conditions. If the civ has recently won a war, you may congratulate them on their victory. You can also praise the size of their military (if it is larger than the global average), on their religious devotion (if you have the same religion), on their research (if you have a research agreement), etc.
Insults are less limited than praise. Insults can include mocking the size of their army, their economy, research, faith, culture or tourism, telling them off or just generally expressing anger towards them. Insults will take over those general "I hate you" messages you get from AI when you own their city. If you insult a civ that has denounced you or that you have denounced, you can get a positive respect boost (for not being a pussy).
With 5 envoys, you gain the ability to declare friendship or an Alliance. When diplomatic service is unlocked, you can request to build an embassy in their capital which costs gold but makes your envoys more effective.
For each envoy you send, your relationship will increase with them each turn (but not linearly). For example, the first envoy might add +1 relationship per turn, with 2 you might have +1.8 per turn. 3 might give you +2.44 per turn, etc. With each additional envoy increasing the relationship by 80% as much as the previous one. With an embassy, this might be 90% as much, or the initial value might be higher, like +1.5 for the first envoy.
The higher your relationship is, the faster it decays, so with a single envoy, your relationship would cap out at the moment that your relationship began to decay at -1 per turn. Likewise, each envoy you add will increase the resting point of your relationship.
The closer your relationship is to 0 (neutral) the more the change in your relationship per turn will be influenced by your global respect, where you lose less relationship per turn when you are highly respected. The reason it biases towards neutral is that your closest friends won't care as much if other civs dislike you and your worst enemies won't care if others like you.
City States also operate with envoys. Often, you will have to choose between sending envoys to other civs or to city states. However, as I mentioned, you can remove envoys from city states or civs and move them to others whenever you please. City state diplomacy operates very similarly to Civ diplomacy- it increases the same way and the same amount for each envoy you send, however instead of the resources being gifted to the "suzerain" of the city state, having at least 3 envoys allows you to initiate trade deals with the city state as if it were a civ. Friendly city states often give nice deals when selling strategic resources or luxuries, and while a trade is active with a city state, you get a bonus to your relationship with them.
City states will still issue requests, but these will be global as in civ 5, usually more frequent and will grant a relationship boost to whoever completes it. The requests will be much more varied than in Civ 6, where it is usually conversion, a trade route or building something. City states might request gifts of gold, trade routes, clearing an encampment, military protection (have enough military units near their borders), they might also ask you to denounce a civ that is bullying them, gift them a specific type of unit, harass another city state, or other options. Some quests are first-come-first-serve, for example clearing a barbarian camp can't be completed more than once, and they'll only accept military protection from the first civ that is able to complete it. However, gold gifts, unit gifts and trade routes will be duration based, and will give relationship boosts for each time it is completed.
High relationship with City States does not result in suzerain status immediately, instead with enough envoys and a high enough relationship, you can offer friendship and alliances with city states, just as with other civs. With at least one envoy, city states will yield their normal "one envoy" bonus that they currently offer. Friendship will cause city states to favour you over non-friends as well as give you casus bellies against other civs that declare war on them and give the bonuses that 3 envoys would normally give you. Alliances cause city states to favour you over friends and non-friends, allows you to request they join your wars (and so levy their military) and will often result in the City state sending gifts of gold, culture, science or great people points to you, as well as give the highest and final bonus that would originally be yielded by having 6 envoys.
If you currently have the highest influence with a city state and at least a friendship, you can declare yourself the suzerain of the city state. As soon as you do this, all positive bonuses you have to your relationship with the city state are removed, your relationship can only decay. You enter a permanent alliance for the duration of your suzerainship, get the city state's normal suzerain benefits and also a science a culture bonus based on the size of the city. When your relationship decays to 0, your suzerainship ends, and another civ may declare themselves the suzerain instead.
The higher the mutual relationship is between two civs or city states, the better the benefits you get from trade routes and co-operation- city states may even send their own trade routes to your cities, generating gold for you.
Espionage:
Espionage in Civ 6 is a bit weak. Your options are limited and are relatively shallow in terms of what they do and how they do it. It's usually something like "steal artwork" or "sabotage a district". Instead, spies are secret diplomatic agents. They can sour a civ's opinion of another civ, promote the owner of the spy, create propoganda (generate tourism for you), cause civil unrest (-1 amenity from unknown source in the city), "encourage" barbarians to spawn near the civs borders, or disrupt their trade routes, create scandals (which might lower the respect of the spied-on civ), and with very skilled spies, they might even be able to falsify diplomatic interactions.
That final option is interesting- to explain, when you select this option with another civ, you choose an additional civ (yourself or any civ other than the target), and your spy will attempt to falsify a diplomatic action from the target civ. The action might be an insult, a denunciation (if you're lucky), or some other action. Unless the target discovers the spy before it completes its mission, the target will never understand why their relationship with another civ has changed.
Trade:
The deals that you get from civs are no longer dependent entirely on their opinion of you (no more "I'll give you one lux for 10 luxes" crap). Instead, their opinion of you will determine the maximum value of trades they are willing to have with you (so for example if they moderately dislike you, they wouldn't want to have more than 10 gold per turn worth of gold or resources going to you). If they really hate you and the maximum value drops to zero, they will issue an embargo against you, and refuse all trade offers completely. If a civ is willing to trade with you however, they will give you a fair deal for anything they are actually interested in.
One final thing I feel I need to add because it ties into diplomacy in general- City capture.
Civ 6 plays fast and loose with domination. It uses loose and poorly designed warmonger rules to try to control conquest. War usually always involves city capture as it's the only effective way to gain ground against another civ. Civ 6 added the option to return cities after a war, but this is poorly implemented.
Instead, City capture is very expensive. When you conquer a city in a war, you do NOT gain immediate control of it and cannot choose production or get yields from it or raise it. Conversely though, the owner of the city has no control of it. The city will stop producing anything, but will count as friendly territory for the conqueror.
With this feature, capturing a civ's final city does not mean their immediate elimination from the game- instead it causes an immediate surrender by that civ. In the trade screen, the options to return a city or cede a city are altered- returning a city should be the default for most wars. Ceding a city relinquishes all claims on the city by the city owner, meaning they can't try to reconquer the city with a casus belli or insult you for owning it.
Any cities that are ceded or annexed by you cause immediate and massive penalties. Taking cities is the only thing that generates warmonger score (with higher score dependent on your current warmonger score and the number of cities you're taking) and will usually result in a respect drop unless the cities are ceded to you. Additionally, there is a long period in which the cities suffer large amenity penalties due to conflicts of culture and belief and add smaller (but not insignificant) amenity penalties to all your other cities.
This means you cannot conquer endlessly and eliminating civs is difficult. When you end a war, you can request than any cities you've captured be returned to their original owners (even if that civ has been eliminated), which will generate negative warmonger points and generate respect for you, while losing respect for the other civ.
When you win a war, you gain respect automatically (the loser loses respect), and get additional respect based on how favourable the surrender deal was for you.
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Basically, this system gives you way more options for interacting with other civs and city states, should help remove some of the hate that people have for dealing with whiny cry-baby AIs by giving you a choice to try to settle them down and should help curb run away domination- no more wiping civs off the face of the earth just for existing, but you can (slowly and through many wars) swallow your neighbours.
As an afterthought, I think a good option for a "Diplomatic Victory" would be to be allied with every existing civ and for their to be no wars being fought. Tricky, but possible with a better diplomacy system. This victory is essentially "world peace". This is also the only victory that could happen simultaneously for multiple civs, if two civs are allied with everyone. If this happens, both players win.
City state diplomacy is even worse. It's just "who can have the most Envoys". The Civ 5 premise, where there was a relationship counter was arguably a lot better, but being able to purchase relationship with City states ruined it- it became only about whoever had the most money.
A combined system with a relationship counter and envoys would be better, and this is how to implement it as well as the above problems with civ-civ diplomacy.
Let's start.
Respect has to be one of the most important factors of Diplomacy in this system, and it's a value that you can see and that you need to maintain. Respect is a number, between -100 and +100 that represents how respectable you are in the eyes of other civs. It modifies everything they think about you and how you interact with them.
Surprise wars or wars without casus bellis nearly always incur a massive respect penalty upon declaration. Other important factors are promises and demands- if another civ asks you something like "You have troops near my borders, are you planning to attack?", you have the usual three options- "No, only passing through", which incurs no negative or positive bonuses unless you break the promise which results in a massive respect hit; "Yes, prepare to die!" which does not lose you any respect beyond what a normal war declaration would; and "ignore." which immediately gives you a respect penalty, but does not incur any further penalties for your later actions.
But respect isn't only about being peaceful- declaring wars on other civs that themselves have low respect results in a reduced respect drop or possibly no respect loss- some monsters need to be stopped.
Making demands is a gamble in terms of diplomacy as well- if the other civ refuses, you will take a respect hit unless you declare war on them (this does not provide any casus belli, so if you have no existing CB, you'd have to declare a surprise war). If the other civ accepts your demands however, your respect will increase or decrease depending on your relative respects- demanding from a civ of higher esteem will lower your respect and demanding from a civ of lower esteem will increase your respect.
In addition to respect, you have a personal relationship with other civs just as is currently implemented. There are however major changes to what affects this relationship. Discovered espionage always results in a loss of relationship. However, individual agendas should be easier to deal with- if another civ takes issue with your actions, they will use an appropriate diplomatic request to you- for Civs that care for religion, this might be something like "Why are your people heathens? Why don't you embrace the true faith?" (Looking at you, Phillip) and depending on factors including your current relationship, you may have various responses- "You're right, we'd welcome your missionaries!" This would usually result in an immediate and large boost to your relationship. There's the obvious counter, "We'd never allow your false beliefs in our Temples!", resulting in an immediate loss of relationship. With increased diplomatic access and influence however, there are further options such as "Surely our two peoples can find unity in our beliefs?" is a diplomatic option that is usually locked- the opinion the other civ has of you may affect their reaction- they could positively accept this and drop the issue, freeing you from being hurt by that aspect of their agenda. Alternatively they could negatively respond, saying "No, you are wrong. There is no way our people can co-operate."
Of course there are other agendas, such as Germany's city state agenda: "We demand that you renounce your relationship with _____ city state!", to which you could respond "Of course, that relationship has ended." This would increase your relationship with Barbarosa but drop your relationship with the city state. In addition, you'd lose half of the envoys you have with the city state (but they're not gone!). Another option would be "Not a chance." which immediately drops their opinion of you but increases your relationship with the city state slightly. Further options might be "Our apologies, our intention was not to impose." which may result in a neutral outcome with no penalties.
Envoys:
I mentioned above that envoys and city state relationships should work differently and they should- envoys should not be permanently assigned or lost from city states- instead, envoys can be added or removed from city states at any time. In addition however, envoys are required to be sent to other civs.
When you send a delegation, you automatically get +1 relationship per turn and are able to begin sending envoys to that civ.
With a single envoy, you get the option to offer and receive trade deals from the civ. With 3 envoys, you have the option to "discuss" with them- this could be to request that they move their troops from your borders, ask their opinion of another Civ, praise them, insult them, or send them gifts. Gifts might be sums of gold which go directly into the other Civ's gold balance, but could also be something like sharing your culture or research with them (which costs you gold but might give them a small amount of science, culture or great person points). If they accept, their opinion of you will increase.
Praise is an option that may increase that civs opinion of you, but various praises are only available under certain conditions. If the civ has recently won a war, you may congratulate them on their victory. You can also praise the size of their military (if it is larger than the global average), on their religious devotion (if you have the same religion), on their research (if you have a research agreement), etc.
Insults are less limited than praise. Insults can include mocking the size of their army, their economy, research, faith, culture or tourism, telling them off or just generally expressing anger towards them. Insults will take over those general "I hate you" messages you get from AI when you own their city. If you insult a civ that has denounced you or that you have denounced, you can get a positive respect boost (for not being a pussy).
With 5 envoys, you gain the ability to declare friendship or an Alliance. When diplomatic service is unlocked, you can request to build an embassy in their capital which costs gold but makes your envoys more effective.
For each envoy you send, your relationship will increase with them each turn (but not linearly). For example, the first envoy might add +1 relationship per turn, with 2 you might have +1.8 per turn. 3 might give you +2.44 per turn, etc. With each additional envoy increasing the relationship by 80% as much as the previous one. With an embassy, this might be 90% as much, or the initial value might be higher, like +1.5 for the first envoy.
The higher your relationship is, the faster it decays, so with a single envoy, your relationship would cap out at the moment that your relationship began to decay at -1 per turn. Likewise, each envoy you add will increase the resting point of your relationship.
The closer your relationship is to 0 (neutral) the more the change in your relationship per turn will be influenced by your global respect, where you lose less relationship per turn when you are highly respected. The reason it biases towards neutral is that your closest friends won't care as much if other civs dislike you and your worst enemies won't care if others like you.
City States also operate with envoys. Often, you will have to choose between sending envoys to other civs or to city states. However, as I mentioned, you can remove envoys from city states or civs and move them to others whenever you please. City state diplomacy operates very similarly to Civ diplomacy- it increases the same way and the same amount for each envoy you send, however instead of the resources being gifted to the "suzerain" of the city state, having at least 3 envoys allows you to initiate trade deals with the city state as if it were a civ. Friendly city states often give nice deals when selling strategic resources or luxuries, and while a trade is active with a city state, you get a bonus to your relationship with them.
City states will still issue requests, but these will be global as in civ 5, usually more frequent and will grant a relationship boost to whoever completes it. The requests will be much more varied than in Civ 6, where it is usually conversion, a trade route or building something. City states might request gifts of gold, trade routes, clearing an encampment, military protection (have enough military units near their borders), they might also ask you to denounce a civ that is bullying them, gift them a specific type of unit, harass another city state, or other options. Some quests are first-come-first-serve, for example clearing a barbarian camp can't be completed more than once, and they'll only accept military protection from the first civ that is able to complete it. However, gold gifts, unit gifts and trade routes will be duration based, and will give relationship boosts for each time it is completed.
High relationship with City States does not result in suzerain status immediately, instead with enough envoys and a high enough relationship, you can offer friendship and alliances with city states, just as with other civs. With at least one envoy, city states will yield their normal "one envoy" bonus that they currently offer. Friendship will cause city states to favour you over non-friends as well as give you casus bellies against other civs that declare war on them and give the bonuses that 3 envoys would normally give you. Alliances cause city states to favour you over friends and non-friends, allows you to request they join your wars (and so levy their military) and will often result in the City state sending gifts of gold, culture, science or great people points to you, as well as give the highest and final bonus that would originally be yielded by having 6 envoys.
If you currently have the highest influence with a city state and at least a friendship, you can declare yourself the suzerain of the city state. As soon as you do this, all positive bonuses you have to your relationship with the city state are removed, your relationship can only decay. You enter a permanent alliance for the duration of your suzerainship, get the city state's normal suzerain benefits and also a science a culture bonus based on the size of the city. When your relationship decays to 0, your suzerainship ends, and another civ may declare themselves the suzerain instead.
The higher the mutual relationship is between two civs or city states, the better the benefits you get from trade routes and co-operation- city states may even send their own trade routes to your cities, generating gold for you.
Espionage:
Espionage in Civ 6 is a bit weak. Your options are limited and are relatively shallow in terms of what they do and how they do it. It's usually something like "steal artwork" or "sabotage a district". Instead, spies are secret diplomatic agents. They can sour a civ's opinion of another civ, promote the owner of the spy, create propoganda (generate tourism for you), cause civil unrest (-1 amenity from unknown source in the city), "encourage" barbarians to spawn near the civs borders, or disrupt their trade routes, create scandals (which might lower the respect of the spied-on civ), and with very skilled spies, they might even be able to falsify diplomatic interactions.
That final option is interesting- to explain, when you select this option with another civ, you choose an additional civ (yourself or any civ other than the target), and your spy will attempt to falsify a diplomatic action from the target civ. The action might be an insult, a denunciation (if you're lucky), or some other action. Unless the target discovers the spy before it completes its mission, the target will never understand why their relationship with another civ has changed.
Trade:
The deals that you get from civs are no longer dependent entirely on their opinion of you (no more "I'll give you one lux for 10 luxes" crap). Instead, their opinion of you will determine the maximum value of trades they are willing to have with you (so for example if they moderately dislike you, they wouldn't want to have more than 10 gold per turn worth of gold or resources going to you). If they really hate you and the maximum value drops to zero, they will issue an embargo against you, and refuse all trade offers completely. If a civ is willing to trade with you however, they will give you a fair deal for anything they are actually interested in.
One final thing I feel I need to add because it ties into diplomacy in general- City capture.
Civ 6 plays fast and loose with domination. It uses loose and poorly designed warmonger rules to try to control conquest. War usually always involves city capture as it's the only effective way to gain ground against another civ. Civ 6 added the option to return cities after a war, but this is poorly implemented.
Instead, City capture is very expensive. When you conquer a city in a war, you do NOT gain immediate control of it and cannot choose production or get yields from it or raise it. Conversely though, the owner of the city has no control of it. The city will stop producing anything, but will count as friendly territory for the conqueror.
With this feature, capturing a civ's final city does not mean their immediate elimination from the game- instead it causes an immediate surrender by that civ. In the trade screen, the options to return a city or cede a city are altered- returning a city should be the default for most wars. Ceding a city relinquishes all claims on the city by the city owner, meaning they can't try to reconquer the city with a casus belli or insult you for owning it.
Any cities that are ceded or annexed by you cause immediate and massive penalties. Taking cities is the only thing that generates warmonger score (with higher score dependent on your current warmonger score and the number of cities you're taking) and will usually result in a respect drop unless the cities are ceded to you. Additionally, there is a long period in which the cities suffer large amenity penalties due to conflicts of culture and belief and add smaller (but not insignificant) amenity penalties to all your other cities.
This means you cannot conquer endlessly and eliminating civs is difficult. When you end a war, you can request than any cities you've captured be returned to their original owners (even if that civ has been eliminated), which will generate negative warmonger points and generate respect for you, while losing respect for the other civ.
When you win a war, you gain respect automatically (the loser loses respect), and get additional respect based on how favourable the surrender deal was for you.
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Basically, this system gives you way more options for interacting with other civs and city states, should help remove some of the hate that people have for dealing with whiny cry-baby AIs by giving you a choice to try to settle them down and should help curb run away domination- no more wiping civs off the face of the earth just for existing, but you can (slowly and through many wars) swallow your neighbours.
As an afterthought, I think a good option for a "Diplomatic Victory" would be to be allied with every existing civ and for their to be no wars being fought. Tricky, but possible with a better diplomacy system. This victory is essentially "world peace". This is also the only victory that could happen simultaneously for multiple civs, if two civs are allied with everyone. If this happens, both players win.
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