Has anything really changed from CA?

[Owen Glyndwr]

The diplomacy can certainly use some improvement, but I still think it's a great deal better than in RTW and M2TW. Contrary to the OP's statements, I tend to be able to get peace treaties from many AI nations. Sure, many of them declare war again a few turns later if they are still adjacent to you, but peace is certainly possible at least for short periods.

I think one of biggest problems isn't that the AI declares war too often, it's that it declares war at the wrong times. I'm currently playing an Austria game, which is very different from my previous post-1.2 games due to a total lack of trade income. At the start I was only able to afford about 1 army stack and I had a devil of a time fending off Poland. If ANY other nation had declared war on me, I would have been in serious trouble. No other nation did however. I was able to finish off Poland and consolidate my position shortly before the Ottomans declared war on me. If the Ottomans had declared war while I was still invovled with Poland, they could have wrecked me. Instead, I am able to beat them by focusing on them alone.

Europa Universalis 3 deals with this situation very well IMO. In that game, the more wars a nation is involved in, the more likely that other nations that dislike them will declare war on them as well. It's a typical human strategy that works well: strike when your enemy is pre-occupied elsewhere. CA needs some kind of coding like this.

Yes definitely. You also see dogpiles like that in the Civ 4 games. Where one nation would be put under by 1 or two civs, and all of a sudden it was a 5 on 1 venture.

What I would love to see is diplomacy AI which works more like Civ 4. It looks like CA made some attempts to make their diplomacy more like this (With the "friend o meter" and the ability to immediately open negotiations). However it sounds to me like the AI in Civ 4 acts more logically. Sure there are certain leaders such as Shaka and Monty who are often perfectly sporadic, but there are other who make perfect sense (Such as Isabella, who can be your best friend if you share religions, and your worst enemy if you don't). The funny thing about Civ 4, actually, is the human player is the one who ends up looking more like the AI from this game (They develop a long standing relationship with someone and then just up and betray them out of the blue with no warning). Also in Civ 4 there are certain signs that a civ is about to go to war (The We Have Enough on Our Hands Right Now note in the diplo screen tells the player right away that that civ is preparing for war, and to start checking the relations screens to see if it might be them).

Sure a lot of people say that the game is more interesting when the AI is "unpredictable", but unpredictability does not equal humanlike. Ever since I started with R: TW, all I've really ever wanted to see is allies who I can feel somewhat emotionally connected to, all I get is factions which I may try to befriend now, but just know that someday they are going to attack me, and I will have to kill them (Kind of like the feeling in all those zombie movies where the protagonist's best friend/girlfriend/mother gets bitten, and they know that they will turn eventually...)

Sorry for the long rant, I hope at least some of it makes sense to someone...


*EDIT* Also in Civ4, I really like the fact that going to war is no laughing matter. Your economy (Military upkeep), and city happiness (War Weariness) take such a big hit from the declaration itself that the player really has to consider the options, and figure out, not just if he can win, but if he'll be able to deal with the implications of winning (higher upkeep, changed political status, science affected) It's really neat actually, I'd love to see things from Civ4 implemented in these games (But with the neato battles, and minus all the complicated micromanaging and math...)