Diplomacy is entirely broken

[Beskar]

peacemaker making a quip about its title in my Empire:Total War thread? Shame on you.

[Prodigal]

Regarding the OP, I've now tried 3 games as Prussia on h/h since the patch.

The first I played as a pre-patch game, spamming trade ships, & attacking poland. I gave that up pretty quick as the trade ships got wiped out & everyone declared war on me.

Second game, I stayed very quiet & simply built up home economy & troops in my two regions, by '21 I was allied with Poland against Austria, had not been attacked by courland on the smaller neighbours, Austria was wiped out, Poland & Prussia having pretty much divided it up. Felt like I'd been steamrollering though so started my current game.

Once again stayed quiet but allied with all the small countries to the west, this led to eventually to allying with Austria. Nobody randomly attacked me, I've got stable trade with the local regions & have just declared war on Poland. Currently I am at war with denmark, sweden, poland & courland. I've far more allies & than in a normal game & they're not acting weird, (sweden's an exception but I guess they want denmark).

So what's the point of all the above, well I'm not paying factions off, they're being reasonable & not going lemming, based on this I'm not sure where the problem is in the diplomacy in fact it seems like a great imrpovement.

[FactionHeir]

Allies are much less likely to betray your in ETW, but as long as you are not allied, relations play no role in diplomacy and they will declare war on you. So if you start off by allying with everyone (making sure you don't get into historical wars), there will be few who can declare war on you.

[al Roumi]

Allies are much less likely to betray your in ETW, but as long as you are not allied, relations play no role in diplomacy and they will declare war on you. So if you start off by allying with everyone (making sure you don't get into historical wars), there will be few who can declare war on you.

It may be true that allies are less likely to declare war on you than a trade partner is, but what's not clear is why they do when they do. For my part it's the un-predictability of who will betray you which is frustrating.

Defining some conflicts, there is a relation affecting variable (historic grievances, or somesuch -displayed in the diplomacy screen) which is presumably a fudge factor used (along with the pre-existing web of alliances)to nudge AIs into the type of historic conflicts of the age.

It would be great (and might help move this discussion on) to know exactly by what mechansim faction AI's decide to go to war. As you say FactionHeir, indifferent or Friendly nations go to war with apparently little traceable link to diplomatic relations -whic players would assume to drive such decisions.

My gut feeling is that the cause of these inconsistencies is not slack code but conflicts between the overlay of campaign and faction AIs. i.e. when the campaign AI overrules or over influences the faction AI with it's own priorities.

IMHO, such an overlay of 2 decision making systems will always result in bizarre and un-expected events (needless to say there are inumerable examples of this outside of ETW, like what governments say& do...). What, again IMO, players appreciate in strategic games is the capacity to analyse, evaluate and respond to rivals and their priorities -as Owen has described in his posts on CIV4 (in another thread).

Currently, I feel the campaign AI is ruinning that feeling of competing with rivals by inserting the equivalent of sticks in the wheel of considered and strategic game play.

I hereby move for an action to lobotomise ETW's campaign AI, all those in favour say Aye! please

[Fisherking]

Well, I just had some diplomacy that made complete sense and was anything but random.

I knocked out the French. Spain was a happy trade partner, however they sent a diplomatic proposal asking for France in exchange for most of their European holdings plus Cuba and New Mexico, with the little cash they had on hand. I turned it down and I got an immediate DoW from them, showing that they intended on having France one way or another. I still don't know that they have armies to take it but it had a definite intent behind the proposal.

[FactionHeir]

Right, so instead of pestering you every second turn to have you turn over a region, they now declare war outright on you if you refuse the first time?

[Fisherking]

It beats all the nagging you know.



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