Magicke

Join Date 01/2010

Diplomacy Screen/Player Interaction

Just a couple ideas

Was thinking how to improve Diplomacy in game. I've been playing a little Civ4; you recall how the different civs would ask you to trade or fight a war with them..My take is there wasn't enough dialogue options. You need at least 1 more screen of dialogue to help set up planned warfare. So the AI civ/faction asks you to attack player A. What if one of your options was "I will join in your conquest but lets plan the conquest first. We will attack on turn 4 at waypoint D."

Just want to say that setting up combat with allies should have a little more depth than lets attack and at random targets in enemy territory. Yes, I would like an option for raising fields and causing general disruption of enemy resources and also making planned tactical strategies with allies. I am thinking specifically of AI allies. AI allies tend to do things that are counterproductive to your strategic goals or current battle plans.

Another thought, you know when in Master of Magic or others and the screen comes with an ally/opponent who wishes to discuss something with you? Would it be possible to have a video teleconference? If player A has idea to proposition player B with could we have little picture window with live imaging in it for multiplayer? I realize only a few people might use this option but it would make the player experience more closely knit. Yes, yes everyone using Ventrillo, etc. already, but, talking strategy, joking, etc.. would be extremely fun if you could see your friends at same time. This feature would be great to have for modding/role-playing as well. Some have stated that you don't have a true RPG experience without player interactions. This would alleviate that to a large degree. I realize not everyone uses a webcam or would wish to. I think this would be a popular feature as time wears on for gaming/friends. I remember lan gaming with friends and a huge part of that is proximity to "see" people, joke, eat, break together. I see bandwidth and data over lines increasing and expanding as the years roll on.

Why or why not?

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GW Swicord

Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

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Having diplo functions that let you do at least a little coordinated military action would be awesome. Even if it's as basic as I-Attack, You-Attack, and a target list of pop sites and 'significant' forces/stacks in the field. In my wild dreams, I'd really like to be able to sign a mutual aggression pact against a roaming champion who refuses to pick a sovereign and settle down.

I'd settle for just being able to choose among a few 'tone' levels in more basic locations, so we could learn and apply things like Krax hates grovelers, Tarth hates bullies.

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Being able to mark places on the map and send those marks to other players. If anyone has played wesnoth, they could be like the labels you can put on the ground. If you are sending them to a human player, marking a spot with a phrase like "Spearmen go here" would be fine. But for an AI, perhaps you would need special marks, something like defend here or attack here in X turns. Stuff like that.

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that would be nice now maybe all the ai can send all there peasents at me at my super soldiers might be a little fair then

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Would it be possible to have a video teleconference? If player A has idea to proposition player B with could we have little picture window with live imaging in it for multiplayer?

Do we have to dress up as our sovereign before we answer?

Strategic planning is probably tricky to implement for AI allies. HoI3 had an interesting feature where you could give your own military objectives, and the AI would plan accordingly for you. Perhaps that would be enough - during negotiations you could flag target cities as objectives for your ally to go after. The ally AI can presumably judge the difficulty of a given objective, and negotiate with you accordingly.

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Another thought for making diplomacy more interesting/ fun would be to have multiple players at the same negotiation. In other words: I remember playing Civ4 and trying to convince Player A to attack Player C, but they would only do so if Player B would join in. This led to the middleman having to close and open (oftentimes) a rediculous amount of diplomacy screens to communicate a simple idea.

This would make negotiations between players (particularly if you're playing with 6+ people) easier. All of your allies can be at the same table and talk about the same thing at the same time without having to open and close a multitude of diplomacy screens to get you and your 2 or 3 buddies all on the same page. And this game was rumored to have multi that supported up to 32 players at one point, and if that's even remotely true then this type of multiple-players-at-the-same-table-at-the-same-time diplomacy would be invaluable.

In retrospect, reading over my post, developing and scripting this type of diplomacy could be an AI programming nightmare, but if playing with real players it might have some potential.

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Allowing for a Round Table diplomacy function would be interesting. Maybe in SP having the egalitarian racial trait allows it (in addition to egalitarian's normal benefits), while in MP anyone can use it.

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When talking with the AI, it should be pretty much point and grunt diplomacy. Anything more is a bonus. But for toher players, having all the bells and whistles would be fun.

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Do we have to dress up as our sovereign before we answer?

Yes

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You don't have to dress up as your sovereign, you get to dress up as your soverign. Think about it as a positive and all those regal robes and cermonial armor will feel much lighter.

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My race is nude i.e. Spiders

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