We’ve all suffered from the stupid way the diplomacy system works in this game. But I think I’ve just made an amazing discovery, which might allow us to play the game properly despite the way it’s been programmed.
First of all let me explain the background to how I made this discovery.
I am currently eleven years into my current Spanish Campaign and I've just about got things on an even keel. Trade is growing, technology is being acquired things are looking up for Spain.
Suddenly, I click end of turn and I get message informing me that France, a country which I consider a close friend with mutual interests has declared war on me. It's the typical ‘dumb diplomacy' event that has had us all scratching our heads trying to work out how the hell this game works.
So, anyway I was pretty damned annoyed and planning to post yet another ‘Dumb Diplomacy Thread’ on the forum. But I wanted some to get the screenshots below to prove that France had no reason to declare war on Spain. To do this I saved my game and then reloaded the autosave from the turn before.
As you can see from the Above screen shot France has succeeded in engineering itself a national disaster in the making and is at war with just about everyone with no allies and very few friends.
I cancelled our alliance rather than committing national suicide with them a few turns ago, but as you can see we are still friends, and more importantly Spain is still Frances main Trading Partner and the only one it is actually capable of trading with without defeating the British Fleet.
So, Spain and its three Allies are just about the only friends that France has in the world at the moment and as you can see from the ‘Friend-O-Meter’ above we are getting friendly every turn by +35 points. [Incidently, a word of warning. You may notice that Spain suffered a -14 on the 'Friend-o-Meter' for Acts of Sabotage against France. Now in fact Spain has never committed any acts of sabotage on French soil, what we did do was blown up a Dutch shipyard in support of Frances naval blockade. However, it seems the 'Friend-o-Meter' considers any location occupied by a hostile force to be the property of that hostile force even if they aren't getting any benefit from it and are actually trying to prevent it being used. Which is pretty dumb, but worth noting if you think your helping a friend to destroy something he wants destroyed.]
Meanwhile, Frances enemies, mainly Britain and Austria are getting more and more hostile towards Spain, even though Spain is not currently allied to France. I think the 'Friend-o-meter' is currently running at -44 for diplomatic relations between Spain and Britain.
So, a logical diplomatic strategy for France would clearly be to petition Spain and its Allies to form a Catholic Alliance to counter the Protestant Alliance of Britain, Austria and the Dutch. That would have actually made sense and as the diplomatic situation worsened with Britian I would have been pretty tempted to stand with France against our mutual enemies. Instead, when I clicked end turn for Winter 1711 they France declared war on Spain, effectively screwing up my game, and signing its own death warrant.
Totally Stupid! Totally Illogical! Totally Annoying! TotalCrap! Totalwar!
And that would have been the end of this post had I remembered to take a screenshot of the French Declaration of War. But, I was so angry at the time that I’d forgotten to save it.
So, I thought no problem, I’ll simply take my screenshots of the evidence that France had no reason to declare war, then I’ll end my turn again and take a screenshot of the declaration when it appears.
BUT…..it didn’t.
The turn ended and France did NOT declare war on Spain, and the game rolled on. In fact, I’ve done several more turns and France is still silent. They haven’t asked for an alliance, which would be the sensible thing to do, but nevertheless they haven’t committed diplomatic suicide either.
So, what does this tell us about the ‘dumb diplomacy’ problem?
Well for a start it confirms that it’s not based on any sort of logic, or threat assessment. If it was then the circumstances that triggered it would have triggered it again every time I ended my turn.
Likewise, it confirms that this is not a scripted event. Because if it was a scripted event then the script would trigger it every time.
It seems to me that what we are dealing with is a programmer with a sick sense of humour and a ‘God Complex’, whose basically having a laugh at our expense. At some point he decided to include a random ‘I’m gonna f*ck up your game event, into the program.’, which basically looks at the game and triggers a random declaration of war from whichever country is in the best position to cause the player grief, regardless of the logic involved or the players previous actions to avoid that event.
If that’s true then obviously I’m disgusted that CA would allowed that sort of code to go live in a so-called strategy game. But the good news is that the solution seems to be just to reload your last turn and replay the end turn repeatedly until eventually the random trigger doesn’t fire.
Then you can get on with the playing game.
[Actually, thinking about it this isn't the first or only game I've come across where this sort of 'random screw the player code has appeared.'. I alsp play Warhammer Online and it has the infamous 'Rally Call' button which was supposed to indicate that your presence was needed at a crisis point in battle, and for ages players accepted the rally call only to find themselves pointlessly transported miles from their current quest location and dumped in a warcamp where nothing was happening, then having to waste hours traipsing back where they had come from. It has since been revealed that the 'Rally Call' button is another 'sick programming joke' and just randomly triggers for no reason at all. I can also remember a rather neat flight simulator where you got to fly a Lancaster Bomber on a dambuster mission. It was a really nice little simulation, except that some programmer thought it would be fun to trigger random barrage balloons that suddenly popped up in your flight path and destroyed your plane, and there was nothing you could do to avoid them, 30', 3000', 30,000' didn't make any difference what hieght you flew at. I even tried flying in the wrong direction and heading for Ireland and they still popped up. So this could be just another in a long line of programmer jokes at the players expense.]
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