Double, triple, quadruple crossing negotiations

[Bensellars12]

This is something I'd love to see. Take a scenario I sometime use below:

Napoleon has a strong civ and is playing aggressive. I don't like him. He keeps asking me to go to war with the Polynesians... Who I quite like. So I agree to join Napolean in his war in 10 turns . I take a mini army along with his up to the nearest Polynesian city and at the last minute turn on Napoleon - who's army is now trapped between a the city's defences and my army. Once it is destroyed I advance on Napoleon's nearest city and take it while his army is depleted, followed by another - meaning Napoleon is no longer a threat.

I would like to be able to tell the Polynesians that this is my intention from the start. They could then use this information how they please... Either agree to join me in my plan or decline, and possibly try to collude with Napoleon against me. Then Napoleon would have the choice of joining Polynesia in taking me out, or in turn informing me of Polynesia's double-cross and justifying his case to take them out in the first place.

This could lead to all sorts of intriguing diplomatic scenarios - to which you can throw in the ability to bargain/bribe with gold/tech/units/cities - and could turn a seemingly predictable game situation on its head. Also any civ could bluff with False info.

I know these things kind-of happen in the game - but mostly you are guessing - the actual negotiations could be dynamite.

Would it be going to far to steal ships/armour and learn the languages and ways of another civ... And then commit an atrocity under their flag? False flag moves could be awesome!

Oh the possibilities

 

[ProMeTheus112]

it's nice idea but to me it sounds way hard to implement for the AI to be able to work with this without opening the door for all kinds of extremely heavy abuses by the human (?)
they can only understand the concept of fooling and being fooled by fixed definitions of it so if you know how they define it you can likely consistently fool them

 

[Metecury]

This is something I'd love to see. Take a scenario I sometime use below:

Napoleon has a strong civ and is playing aggressive. I don't like him. He keeps asking me to go to war with the Polynesians... Who I quite like. So I agree to join Napolean in his war in 10 turns . I take a mini army along with his up to the nearest Polynesian city and at the last minute turn on Napoleon - who's army is now trapped between a the city's defences and my army. Once it is destroyed I advance on Napoleon's nearest city and take it while his army is depleted, followed by another - meaning Napoleon is no longer a threat.

I would like to be able to tell the Polynesians that this is my intention from the start. They could then use this information how they please... Either agree to join me in my plan or decline, and possibly try to collude with Napoleon against me. Then Napoleon would have the choice of joining Polynesia in taking me out, or in turn informing me of Polynesia's double-cross and justifying his case to take them out in the first place.

This could lead to all sorts of intriguing diplomatic scenarios - to which you can throw in the ability to bargain/bribe with gold/tech/units/cities - and could turn a seemingly predictable game situation on its head. Also any civ could bluff with False info.

I know these things kind-of happen in the game - but mostly you are guessing - the actual negotiations could be dynamite.

Would it be going to far to steal ships/armour and learn the languages and ways of another civ... And then commit an atrocity under their flag? False flag moves could be awesome!

Oh the possibilities

What you are looking for is a multiplayer game with friends.

 

[Bensellars12]

metecury, I've never ventured into the multiplayer game... Never really got my head around how it would work, with the games being so long (I.e. Weeks) and all players needing to be playing simultaneously around their own lives.

Prometheus, you make a very valid point - perhaps it would fall flat with the limitations of AI. I've not really considered what rules the AI players work on before. I would have thought that one of the programmers is clever enough to come up with an algorithm based on a leader characteristic (I.e. % trusting or sceptical, % rational or knee-jerk emotional) and game situation (relationship/level of trust with and threat posed by the civ's involved) weighted with a random number probability that will occasionally tip the balance beyond the expected AI decision. With the number of leaders,different game situations and a slight random element, most human players would probably struggle to understand sufficiently to consistently abuse.

It could lead to a very complicated diplomatic chain for the human players to figure out. And if the AI for a sceptical, rational leader just assesses the relative threat of their opponents mathematically (from knowledge of proximity, military strength, population, economy, warmongering reputation etc) and sides against their greatest threat - they would probably make better decisions than most human players. On the flip side you could have great fun goading the knee jerk, emotional AI's into wars and manipulating the over-trusting AIs. Then it would just be a case of balancing these AI weaknesses with other strengths of the civ. Maybe rather than abusing, unwitting human players could end up getting themselves into a real diplomatic tangle - especially when the AI occasionally acts out of character. Or you get caught out goading a knee-jerk Civ into war and end up facing their wrath yourself. Perhaps the over-trusting civs could be less forgiving and more vengeful when their trust is broken.

 

[ProMeTheus112]

maybe that works, but then it takes too long to compute haha I don't know

 

[Bensellars12]

Haha, when you put it like that it makes me pleased I'm not a programmer.

Honestly though, I think it would be really light on the processing. I only dabble in a little VBA for Excel, but I think I could knock up a basic alogorithm to knock out an AI decision from the available demographics and relationship data. I would think the relative proximity of each civ would be set up as variables somewhere in the existing coding too. It would be easy to add two sliding scale characteristics to each civ (i.e. 0 to 100 for totally sceptical to totally trusting; 0 to 100 for totally rational to totally emotional).

Maybe once that was set up you could add a changing level of ambition or civ goal (i.e. a civ with a chance of winning might target the strongest competitor, a weak civ might be most concerned about the closest/most aggressive opponent - or just try to please everybody, a vengeful civ with no hope of winning the game might make it their mission to take the civ that cheated them out of the game). The AI could be quite unpredictable.

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas & Suggestions