Diplomacy is getting tiresome.

[Crimson Castle]

Hello,

I've been playing MTW for nearly a month now.

(Before that I was playing Shogun - finished the total campaign several times and loved it)

But I am starting to get bored with MTW sadly. Its not so much the battle fights. Its more the diplomacy.

I own nearly half of Western Europe and conquered the whole of the Middle East ages ago. I also try my best not to be the aggressor in wars - allowing the enemy to preempt me first.

But noone wants to ally with me, marry Princess, etc.. I left one of my front-line provinces practically vacant to tempt someone to attack me but no luck for over 10 years!

Can I offer one suggestion. Implement a negotiation sub-game for diplomacy.

You should be able to threaten your opponents or bargin with them. Your ability to get your demands should depend upon the skill of your emissaries and also the power of your nearby armies.

You should also be able to negotiate to get weaker factions to merge with you or trade provinces or gold for rival Princess and territories and alliances.

If you break treaties too often, you will get a lousy honor rating which will disuade other people from allying with you. It may also cause your allies to conduct secret alliances with your enemies. All of which are oblivioius to you unless you have a good quality spy network.

If you help your allies by relieving enemy sieges or breaking their attacks - you should get a higher "white knight" rating.

(One other thing, the cute "3d" strategic map sucks. Its hard trying to move your pieces about if the place is small- ie Switzerland and the flags sometimes block and hinder your placements)

[MajorPain]

This game is just a copy of STW.

battle map is the same campain map is the same, fighting style is the same, diplomatic is the same

The only thing they changed are the timeperiod and added some more units. Oh, and added alot of more bugs.

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STW will always be #1

[Earl of Sweden]

I like your ideas Alita. Use the spies for spying instead of agitators.

[sidhe]

you can make the map bigger with your mousewheel. If you don't have a mousewheel, I don't know what to tell you..

[Crimson Castle]

Yeah, I know you can make the map bigger with your mousewheel. But maybe its just me but I don't like the "3d" strategic map. Especially, I don't like dragging those dozens of spys and bishops with my mouse across the map.

[Didz]

I have to admit I feel the same way about diplomacy.

I have practically given up trying to get factions at war with me to sign a ceasefire even when they are down to a single province and are balck and blue all over they still refuse to put quill to parchment.

As for princesses, well I've lost count of how many of the babes I've attempted to coax into my harem. What wrong with them, I am the most powerful ruler in the world, come and have my babies.

One other niggle is the diplomacy success failure parchments (well actually all the parchments). In STW the little movies were a great reward for diplomatic missions but I find these bits of parchment un-inspiring at best and in some cases its actually difficult to tell the difference between a Success and a Failure message. Whereas in STW when you got fed up with the movies the backup message was quite simple and clear.



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Didz
Fortis balore et armis

[Sir Marc]

Well i dont know what you guys are doing wrong but i get my princesses married (especially to those randy Italians and Spaniards)and i have had ceasefires agreed to...not that they always honoured them!
I play as the English, so far.

[Rnold]

Mostly i feel the same about diplomacy. I think that should be addressed to in the add-on. It is not so much annoying to find no one wanting to ally you - I guess in a sense it is how the game balances. It is much more annoying not being able to pressure smaller, weaker countries in order to ally or form alliances against a certain opponent.

Oh, and to zoom in on the strategic map, use 1 & 3 on the num keyboard.

[Furtrapper]

Broadly, I agree that it would be nice to have a diplomacy sub-game, as I've found the same (and get annoyed with allies suddenly turning on me and enemies stubbornly refusing to ceasefires) but in defence of the game, I'd say that this is nitpicking. It really does depend on what you're comparing it with.

The fact is that this game is considerably richer and far more compelling than others of its kin. The double-mode does allow tactical prowess to affect strategic aims, which is great.

But overall, developers, let's see MTW2 with more units on the tactical map (once a majority of the 16 are routed, doesn't matter how many reinforcements you have!), more interesting diplomacy and dynasty options.

Also - let me easily access province income breakdowns (annoying that this doesn't come up as a tooltip when everything else does), give me an overall picture of my generals' men, loyalty etc without having to click on every single one of them and make rebel AI much tougher and more concerted so that my enemies can't just overrun difficult areas of the map!

Otherwise - fantastic game!!!

[olaf]

It would be nice to have diplomacy mean more, perhaps that is something they will do in the inevitable expansion. More than that, I'd like to see the agents cleaned up, a lot. Its a freaking nightmare sorting through them all each turn trying to assign them missions, keep your assassins alive, etc.

As for cease fires, they are damn scarce for me too. Its very frustrating when I have a faction completely surrounded and all but neutered and they still wont sign. I would just eliminate them, but we all know the penalty for that is payback 10 years later in the form of 3 stacks of elite troops behind the lines.

One thing I have noticed, sending a princess to a faction results in positive results a lot more often than an emissary, valor aside.

olaf

[Hosakawa Tito]

I'm having the same problems playing as the English, early period-hard-glorious achievements. I believe the problem is I've expanded too much, control too many provinces. The Spanish, Sicilians, and Poles all attacked me after I had this great trade network setup from the middle east to the Baltic to the North Sea. I was pulling in 20,000+ florins a year for about 8 years, was non agressive after wiping out the French within the first 40 years of my campaign.It is now 1307 and not one faction will ally with me, except the Pope. My trade is totally cut off, I'm losing 1,500 to 2,000 florins a year, and the really funny part is I keep getting messages that I have the largest income lol. I have tried to persuade my adversaries to at least a ceasefire, by sending in dozens of spies throughout their possessions to foment rebellions and have totally wrecked their economies too, I'm bleeding 2,000 florins a turn and my economy is the best of them all? There is no interest in the AI factions for self preservation, none at all. I have the largest military and my war chest has dwindled from 160,000 florins down to 3,000. I might as well start over or conquer the entire map. I think the key to this glorious achievement campaign is not to expand too far and get too powerful because the AI would rather fight to the last man, last province, than to live to fight another day.
What a shame, I've got a lot of hours invested in this one, but I don't want to conquer every damn province, so I guess I'll have to start over. Hope they can tweak this in a patch.


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Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell so that they look forward to making the trip.

[Crimson Castle]

Quote Originally posted by Rnold:
Oh, and to zoom in on the strategic map, use 1 & 3 on the num keyboard.[/QUOTE]

I do have a mouse wheel and I can zoom into the province until its huge. But still there is a problem on trying to select the units for some reason. I click on them but they don't response. I have to move my mouse back and forth several times until I can select them.

I have a P3 800, GF2MX card. I also have about 50 bishops, 35 inquisitors, 20 High inquisitors all over my map.

[Pragmatic]

Quote Originally posted by Alita:
I do have a mouse wheel and I can zoom into the province until its huge. But still there is a problem on trying to select the units for some reason. I click on them but they don't response. I have to move my mouse back and forth several times until I can select them.
[/QUOTE]

They're probably hiding behind the Port/Docks. Anything that's near that item on the map is hard to click. Try moving the map to the side, so you grab them from the side, instead of straight on.

And what's with all the Inquisitors? I built a few, and they went wild on me, killing off thousands of people (thus lowering piety) and killing off my best generals. I had to sic my own assassins on them to get them to shut up.

[Crimson Castle]

I didn't know the inquisiters would kill your own generals??

As foe piety, I thought the "inquises" actually raised piety and loyalty.

Whenever I get any rebellions I sic them onto the rebel population to teach them a good lesson.

[A.Saturnus]

Does anybody know the game Genghis Khan from about early 90ty`s? It was in same way a forrunner for TW, so no RTS-elements there. You had quite a lot diblomatic possibilities there, some of which were sure good in MTW.

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In the name of electricity: CHARGE!!!

[Protoman]

Bump the ideas.

I was hoping for a more indepth poltical landscape as well.

[Pragmatic]

Quote Originally posted by Alita:
I didn't know the inquisiters would kill your own generals??

As foe piety, I thought the "inquises" actually raised piety and loyalty.

Whenever I get any rebellions I sic them onto the rebel population to teach them a good lesson.[/QUOTE]

Whenever an inquisitor goes on a rampage, and you get the message that it's holding an inquisition of the population, you'll get the message that the inquisitor says he managed to root out heresy in the population, and ONLY had to kill a few thousand people in the process. At that point, check out the piety in the province. In my case, piety took a 20 - 30% drop in that province.

And yeah, they can go after generals. I had one kill three generals before I assassinated them.

Best thing to do is to sic your inquisitors on OTHER factions. Far, far away. If you're France, for instance, I'd sic them on Poland and Hungary. Better yet, if you're Spain (which has one province that starts inquistors off with a +1 valor, making them harder to kill by assassins), do the same. Be sure to send them to provinces without ports/docks. And hope to high heaven that someone else assassinates them before they get back to your provinces.

Hi,

I've had this can't click on problem, too, even when the map is fully zoomed. I had one situation just yesterday where I couldn't try to bribe one army that was just slightly to the right and behind another with an heir in it. No matter how I moved in/out, left/right, the only one I could get to highlight had the heir in it.

In these dense, crowded stack collections that build up, it can be very difficult or even impossible to click on the right unit or highlight the right one, even with a lot of maneuvering.


Con chile,
V'ger gone

[scipio spinx]

RE: Inquistors

I've only recently starting using the Inquisitors and I have to say they're fun to play. Think of them as religious assassins. Find a Catholic faction general with low piety and let the good times roll. If they fail, the enemy general will gain a piety point or two, but your Inquisitor doesn't suffer any negative consequences. Just send him against another target. Leave him in a province long enough and bingo: The Inquisition, here it comes, The Inquisition, loads of fun ...

Just keep em the Hell away from home.

[Crimson Castle]

Quote Originally posted by Pragmatic:
Best thing to do is to sic your inquisitors on OTHER factions. Far, far away. If you're France, for instance, I'd...
[/QUOTE]

Sorry Prag,

I'm might be a little dumb here. But what to stop you from moving your inquisitor around?

I never had any of my inquisitors try to do in one of my generals. But as for the local population, IIRC even in the rule book, it suggests that you use the inquisitor to put dread into them to prevent them from uprising. Since i started making more "inquises", I don't have any more rebellions anymore.

[Crimson Castle]

Quote Originally posted by Protoman:
I was hoping for a more indepth poltical landscape as well.[/QUOTE]

They need to develop that a little bit more. I've conquered nearly half the world, but noone wants to ally with me. Instead i have all these small factions launching ridiculous attacks which I defeat easily.

I thought that by conquering the Muslim Middle East and building churches over there would gain me approval in the Christian world. But it did bugger all.

Afterwards, I tried my very best, round after round, getting my emissaries, bishops, cardinals etc.. to go hounding after the rivals' Princess, Kings etc.. all around the whole damn map. But to no avail.

So no more Mr nice guy. I just have to use brute force to take them all down. I eliminated most of the factions already. There's no other alternative really, aside from pressing the return button until the 15th century.

[Paladin]

Guys, try playing the 1092 Early campaign game on Expert. It should give you a bit more of a challenge.

You can download it here: http://home.pacbell.net/jpaladin/1092Early.zip

[Crimson Castle]

Will that be increasing the "power" of the Princess in MTW 1.1 ?

Your Princesses should have a charisma rating of some kind which will induce rival kings to make peace pacts or not.