That's why nuking everyone in a Civ game might be a good thing, but nobody would think of doing that in the real world.Įarly game, for instance, often see everyone being somewhat weak. You're actions are aimed at a precise end, which is either time or game determined, where real world actions are aimed at continuity. Games eventually end, making most games evolve along a curve (early, mid, late) which determines what is and isn't good decisions and strategies.
Games end, the real world is, for the foreseeable futur, never-ending: It's hard to incorporate it meaningfully, because these two things are somewhat incompatible.
The problem is that the elements that make diplomacy both interesting and necessary in the real world are absent from most games. Else, it just goes in all directions and changes its mind whenever a small opportunity like if it was suffering from ADD. Longterm goals are, in my opinion, a sine qua non condition for interesting strategy AI. Should they annex them, the war is pretty much pointless for them because they have very little interest in Great Britain and you can easily negotiate a peace treaty without too many concessions besides those lost territories. If you play as England and own Calais and Bordeaux, France will try to regain them. Usually, it's stuff like "Hey, this province is our core province, it rightfully belongs to us, to annex it to get this bonus". They're issued missions, much like the human player has missions issued to him. They also have rivals, allies, opinions of every other country they know so a long-standing vassal or ally won't even think of backstabbing you (which is why playing portugal is possible without having Spain betraying you despite their clearly military superiority).Īlso in Europa Universalis 3 and 4, AIs have longterm goals. You can see why would this country refuse that offer (different religions, different allies, tensions etc), or why would they agree. In Europa Universalis 4, you can see every factor influencing AI decisions by hovering over tooltips, which is fantastic, in my opinion. Knowing only one players will be victorious but having to team up in the early/midgame only to be ready for when the victory is ripe from the taking, it's something that, I think, is missing. I think it could bring a lot to the genre, a prisoner's dilemma like situation, adding an extra layer of metagaming and complexity over a mechanically and theorycrafty rich genre.
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Obviously, it has a lot of potential drawbacks (many players ganging up on the best), but why hasn't free diplomacy been a thing in other RTSes (besides an option to toggle others as ally/enemies)? The twist is that all players start off as allies and have to figure out who is booming too quickly or progress subtly enough not to be spotted instantly (as in outputting 10 tier 3 battleships per minute) but still progress quickly enough to be able to strike when the time is right.Īnd it was an absolute blast, the game quickly turns into a diplomatic clusterfuck, trying to influence others, pinging other player's base followed by the pinged guy's "?" in allchat, the horror of realizing you've nuked a fellow non-phantom, thus diminishing your odds of victory, finally to end up in a 1v1 match against a non-phantom, meaning your plan has worked and you're just one tiny step away from victory. There are also two paladins with lower bonuses whose job is to eliminate the phantom before it's too late.
His role is to eliminate all non-phantom players and to do it, he has a massive bonus to resource production (and in SupCom, resources translate directly into shorter construction and recruitment times). I've played a custom game for Supreme Commander Forged Alliance called Phantom, the rules are simple. What about RTSes? Diplomacy is most of the time completely absent. Grand Strategy games actually have implemented really in-depth diplomatic options (such as having royal marriages, forging claims, sending insults, sending diplomats to improve relations over time, casus belli, concepts such as core provinces, border frictions et caetera). Total War sure as hell can't (especially Shogun 2 with the Realm Divide scripted event that forces even the weakest vassal to turn on you despite having virtually zero chance of surviving the onslaught). Very few manage to pull off AIs that actually have motives and make logical moves. Diplomacy is very often the weakest point of strategy games.