AI Diplomacy

I  really liked the missions in Sins of a Solar empire.   That being said, I think that if an AI player doesn't particularly like or dislike you, and you request for alliance or something.  They should sometimes actually ask for something, like "go declare war on my enemy bob.  I want to see you battle him before I trust you.   Enemy of my enemy is my friend after all" and then actually fallow through later if you declare war.   AT the same time, I think the requests should be reasonable (I hate when they ask for something that is seemingly impossible like going and attacking a guy I can't reach)

My thoughts on diplomacy. I got to thinking of it when Frogboy did his big speechy text on re-doing 4x economics and what not. Now instead of production time taking into simplified assumption about goods availability and trading time, it could all be spelt out.

Well a bit of that I think can be used for our envoys and how they go diplomatificate. One of my issues with diplomacy systems is, calling another leader is instant as if on a video phone. Partly understandable on GC but not so much in the more traditional 4x games. Similarly, dialogue between the two is essentially a balancing act of how much weight on your demands you can have before it outweighs what you are offering. In addition, it is just weird in the olden times, and even in fantasy for two rulers to constantly travel to each other to have simple diplomatic agreements. So...

We send envoys. They don't have to be personalised too much. When you want to work out some deal with another faction. You will send your envoy. You won't send him with a single job that is selected from a menu (like EU). Instead, you allow to give him some parameters with which to work in, to achieve our diplomatic objective.

Say, for example, I want Faction A to stop fighting with Faction B, a friend of mine. I will bring up my envoy screen or whatever. I will designate his destination and then I will set his 'goal' at the meeting. Which is to get A to stop fighting. I will then give him parameters in which to help him convince him. I can allow him to use gold but go no higher than 1000. To offer trade agreements or not. Hell, we can even use our magic to 'bless' the envoy with greater negotiating abilities, to help make it easier. And that is where it excites me. Our envoys will have an ability ranking. Maybe it can be determined from our over-all level of culture/literature. Or each envoy can be unique and special. But rather than the player having to play the balancing act they send an envoy with parameters to negotiate for us. Essentially, it will be doing the same thing that we used to do. Working out a balanced deal, but that's something for the computer to do for us.

Also, to spin back on when I mentioned re-worked economics. Factions are generally at different distances to us. So envoys won't be sent or return instantly. An envoy to a neighbouring kingdom may only be one turn's work but for another it could be three. 

I love your idea hiddenranbir! Could it be that your envoy could be a unit? one that can be created in one of your cities instantly (meaning that it didn't have to replace another unit being produced) and that unit could move through another nations territory and when it reached another nation's city then a diplomacy window similar to Galciv or Civilization pops up?

I much prefer Gal Civ 2's system. They tried that in Medieval Total War 2, and that was annoying, since you'd have to have at least four to six diplomats at all time, keeping track of each one.

Then they'd die of old age, and you'd spend six turns gettig a new one over there.

I agree with Little0.  Even though the idea of envoys with their own stats and negotiation-options is kind of cool, I think it would feel like busy-work in the end and be more of a distraction from the other parts of the game. I think it makes more sense for magic-wielding leaders to speak to each other though magical means anyway.

Or maybe you could have a unit-based envoy system to be used until you finish researching the appropriate spell for magic instant-communication..  The counter-view to that would be whether or not magical communication is already a fundamental ability of magic users in the world.  (Maybe it is a basic known skill for most factions, but not for some?)

I agree 100% with everything you just said, Nezic. I was formulating a response in my head while reading this thread, but you just said it all. Great minds think alike!    

I like your idea of a spell that allows instant communication such as scrying where once both nations have the spell it allows them to communicate instantly.   But to tell you the truth I don't think that envoys would be that much of a hassle... all you would have to do is just hit "make envoy" on a city screen or diplomacy screen, the envoy gets created instantly and then all you have to do is right click another nation's city. When the envoy arrives, he disappear and the leader's head would pop up. I think it would add a depth of strategy and be something different

My intention was not to have the envoys as specific units you have to manually direct. But like the caravans, you could see them travel, under automation, to their destination.

The main meat of it is that you let them deal with the same old task that we end up, tediously, doing in nearly every previous 4x game; which is the balancing act of offers and demands. Until the AI agrees it is acceptable or the text goes green meaning it will be accepted.

... but I want to do that!

I understand, but you would have to designate the creation of the unit anyways, correct? Think Rise of Nations, when you create a caravan unit. You create it, tell it where to go and then its automated for the rest of the game. So yes I see your point, but I mean it has to start as a unit somewhere... unless...

You go into your diplomacy window and click on a leader's portrait and then an envoy is automatically sent out? and you get a pop up message saying "your envoy will arrive in 8 day/turns" ?

Me too! Besides, while maybe giving certain parameters like what to trade for and min/max values works for certain things (like resources, etc), it would be really limited in terms of tech/magic trading (if it exists) and actual diplomacy. Even for resources now that I think about it, it would be really hard.

For example: I want Bear Cavalry but I only have those silly horse creatures in my territory, so I decide to trade with my neighbor who has lots of bears. There are sooooo many things I could trade. I could offer horses, or gold, or iron, or to share my irrigation technology, or my iron smelting technology, or share some of my magic knowledge. I could even offer to declare war against his sworn enemy. How in the world would I be able to tell my envoy what quantities of which resources, which techs/magic, and what diplomatic offers I'm willing to make, and in what combinations?! Then there's the issue of whether I want a one-time purchase or a continuous trade deal - and that can depend on how much my neighbor asks from me.

It comes down to this: In real life, sending envoys work because they are/were very well versed in the needs and desires of their nations. They were trusted by their leaders to make good decisions. While Frogboy's AI skills are excellent, I won't trust any AI of his (or anyone else's) to know what I want until they are capable of holding an intelligible conversation with me. I could spend 45 minutes setting dozens of parameters and get lackluster results, or I could spend 5 minutes doing it myself.

However they do diplomacy, I really hope they give us direct control over negotiations. I also think diplomacy should be instantaneous, no envoys, either by default or after learning some fairly simple magic.

Yes that is it. The envoy is automatically sent, just as I imagine trade caravans are automatically sent when a unit with specific material requests made.

I'm always a fan of having lots of game options and would also urge we get a choice. 

man, you'd have to give me a lot of gold and stuff before I'd give you MY bears.   AND,  you'd have to make a big promise that you'd ride them into the heart of my biggest enemy for sure.

Such promises are easily broken once you have.... BEAR CAVALRY!

Lolol,

I am also in favor of travelling envoys.  I'd say ... tech tree, with the diplomats getting better.  Want instant comms?  Research it.  But that's X number of weeks before you get your bear cavalry or sunstrike or create vampire spells.  OTOH, you should ALWAYS be in control when a foreign diplomat visits your channeler.  Oh, were you out looking for the Sunstone of Brilliance?  Hope your regent or statesman or seneshal (whomever) has good diplomatic skills.

But my MAIN point is: if the envoys are on the map, your enemies can seize them, and read the packets, like in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Is anyone else hoping for a 'Don't show me caravans' button so you can see the game without clutter?  Actually, NM, they did something similar in GC2.  I'd also like to request that caravans and envoys don't hide each other with their graphics.

There are so many ways to make those unobtrusive I am not too concerned.  If anything else they can just take a lesson from the Medieval TW Campaign map.  I thought that trade links were very well and unobtrusively represented there in a way that both added to the game and was graphically pleasing.

I like the idea of having the diplo network run on the same 'infrastructure' that moves resources--no need to manually monitor the units, but they are vulnerable on the map, and so should be any papers that are insufficiently enchanted to protect them.

I'm hoping to have more options on the mini-map than we have in GC2, *including* a button that toggles those filters on and off for the main map. It should be easy to both focus on caravans and to ignore them.

So now we have to consider these players in work.  We can then assume that the AI diplomats will work just like humans, no SoaSE like missions per se, because they will be acting like humans do. 

So, it makes me wonder just how robust this AI is going to be.   I mean they would have to come up with a quite a bit of different responces if they are going to act even remotely like players.  Especially if you are going to have diffrent personalities.

I think in this 64-bit world, the AI is gonna be pretty state of the art. 

yeah, maybe.  

I've only done so-so AI programing, and its mostly algorythims for pathing and such.  That is more number crunching then memory.  I had one that did different responces, and basically it would go through what was typed to the AI and pick out key words and phrases, then search its own data base for responces.  Again, mostly number crunching with troubleshooting to find more and more efficient ways to understand what the person is saying.   So 64-bit wouldn't change that much since its clock speed that matters there. 

But I can see how serious high-end strategy game AI would need to store a lot of data for quick reference in RAM and such, where 64-bit would be used

Yeah I don't think going 64 bit will allow revolutionary AIs. What should, though, is multiple cores.

Actually since programs can use more memory in 64-bit programs it could potentially have a huge impact on AIs but it would largely depend on whether modern AIs are limited by processing or how much code they actually have. If I had to guess I would say the current bottleneck is with space not processing power since very few programs really tax processors. 

I dunno, based on the posts I've read by Frogboy regarding the AI in galciv2 and multi-core support, I think it's the other way around. I'm no expert programmer (at best I could be called an amateur programmer), but from what I know, even a complex algorithm itself doesn't take up much memory, but running them sure can. Especially because it often entails running the same code over and over.

Well, we have to remember that the AI's need to be tracked like players.   Like, not just path finding and such (which is not memory at ALL and pretty much 100% your processor) but seeing how a player-computer would react could use a bit of memory.

It has to know quickly what not only all of its resources are, what it can and cannot see, and what new things it can do,   but also it should have a list of recent actions (which is where the memory is).  For example, lets say it saw a HUGE army sneaking around the outskirts of its town.   Ok, in classic AI it would say "HEY!   get those guys away from me" but the moment they pass out of his line of sight, he forgets about them.   (or he doesn't because the AI is broken and doesn't follow the rules of fog-o-war).

Now, thats no fair.  That makes him automatically much dumber than a human, because a human wouldn't forget there are guys over there...   no, he'd probebly send a scout out to watch the guys (since he can't see them anymore, its suspicious) or talk to the other player to see if he can find out what he's planning and what the excuse for having an army over there is (since if you say to another human, 'whats that army doin' off port bow?' and they respond "I'm goin' to kick yellow's ass" you knowing that yellow is off that way.   That's perfectly reasonable).    Classic AI can't do that kind of stuff.   It would require I don't even know what, and there would have to be memory alloted to holding information like that for quick reference.   

Now, this is where 64-bit AI might be usefull.  Again, I've only done simple AI so I don't know exactly what it would take, but I imagine that holding information like 'this guy has done this, this, this, and this which is all suspicious.   But he does this and this, which means he's a nice guy and not picking a fight with me right now.  I can see one of his cities, which contains this and this, which would let me assume he's not gathering an army on my boarder right now, and I know he's at war with red but the war is not amounting to something since I do not see many units heading his way so he be willing to risk a two-front if he doesn't actually start suffering some heat from red.   I could try to bribe red though, give him some gold to make sure there is some heat there, I know red likes me and there is an army that could be hitting this other guy.  At what price?  and how can I lower it other than giving him other stuff' might be memory-hogging.    thats some seriously awesome AI goin' ons right there!    I don't really know what it takes to make that.

Ok, point taken. Here's to hoping Apple updates bootcamp to work with 64 bit version of windows before Elemental comes out...