If You're Struggling on Emperor or Below Here's a Tip

[MrRadar]

@MrRadar
This all reads good on paper, but sometimes the AI will just hate your guts for no reason, because of RNG elements like "first impression" and other agendas.

I speak from the experience of my games - friendships are really easy to achieve more often than not. Yes sometimes it might happen that the AI probably decides to attack you and won't commit to a friendship even on smily face, but the key word here is "sometimes". That means isolated cases. Of course they mark your memory and leave a burn 100 times stronger than all the unremarkable favourable cases, but you can't dismiss diplomacy entirely just because of one or two unfortunate examples.

The RNG of the first impression can be also managed to some extent. If you're exploring with your warrior and spot AI borders on the very edge of the fog, think twice about moving further. Better retreat with your warrior and let them discover you. It seems AI really does not take well your discovering their capital with a warrior. It would be interesting to learn more about the mechanics of those first impressions, I browsed around a bit, but couldn't find any hard facts.

 

[Bibor]

And now to completely hijack this thread