Diplomacy is broken

[diotavelli]

It might be a bit better than in Rome, but I swear diplomacy in Medieval is just plain broken. I am talking about version 1.2 so you know. The AI controlled nations of Europe are moronic. The only way to keep them peaceful is to constantly feed them gold. It doesn't matter that you are the strongest military power in the world, and that they are the weakest.

I decided to give Egypt a go on a long campaign M/M with diplomacy in mind. .......Then Turkey decides to be a moron and blockades one of my ports. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? .......I invade, take half their territory, and ask if they want a ceasefire now that its clear they really don't have the advantage. .......Then the pope declares a crusade on Antioch. England, France, Poland, Denmark, and Spain all join. I'm now at war with /all/ of them .......I look at my repuation.... somehow I'm very untrustworthy?? Even though I've been doing everything in my power to be a nice guy? Giving money to nations i'm at war with, always releasing prisoners... yet I'm very untrustworthy. .......Then its the same story- Byzantine refuses for a ceasefire, relations plummet, and I have to take their territory. ......Russia and the Moors both refuse to ally with me for some unknown reason, even though I started feeding them gold and we share the same enemies.

Diplomacy in M2:TW sucks.

There's two issues here, as I see it. The first is seemingly senseless and/or random port blockades by the AI. This is what tripped you up in the first place: the AI doesn't necessarily need to have any ill-intent towards you to blockade one of your ports, so this can happen even when you're playing the good guy. This is what happened here.

The second issue is maintaining a trustworthy reputation whilst being at war. The game is designed to make this very difficult. Essentially, every turn you're at war, your reputation drops. The more your reputation drops, the more inclined other factions will be to avoid allying with you and to think of attacking you. There are two routes around this.

The first is to become good at blitzkrieg and make sure every war you get dragged into finishes very quickly; however, if the faction you're fighting has lots of allies, you'll struggle to maintain a trustworthy relationship (they'll still keep their alliance with a destroyed faction, for some reason). The second is to avoid wars - but as you've shown, that's easier said than done.

Does this mean diplomacy is 'broken'? That depends on what you think a working diplomatic engine should offer. I get the impression that some people would like an engine that allows them to maintain great relationships with everyone when they want to but also allows them to go on the rampage when they feel like it too. I can't see how that can work.

A diplomatic engine that was nice when the player was nice and nasty when he was nasty would be no challenge at all. Imagine it: turns 1-20, be nice to everyone, grab all rebel provinces and build up your economy; turns 21-40, be nasty to factions A and B thereby causing them to attack you, allowing you to maintain good relations with everyone else; turns 41-60, repair relations with badly bruised factions A and B, turn up the heat on C and D so they attack you without your reputation being damaged; and so on. That may be a gross oversimplification but it sounds like what people seem to want.

Historically, alliances between genuine rivals and neighbours in medieval Europe and the Middle East where very, very rare. Most retainers were bound to their liege by loyalty alone (from a legal point of view, anyway). You had to be suspicious of your neighbour because you were in competition with him for the loyalty of powerful vassals and the territory they held. You might work together on a Crusade but this worked better in theory than in practice (cf. Richard oc e no and Philip Augustus and the 3rd Crusade). As for the Muslims - well, you might think they have more in common with each than with the Christians but why? The Egyptians and Turks disputed the Caliphate and the Moors had little to do with the other two. And inter-faith relations? They were shocking for the most part. The game reflects all this.

In medieval Europe, a state of undeclared war existed between close neighbours for much of the time. It was highly unusual and very difficult for neighbouring monarchs to maintain good relations for long periods. Most didn't bother to try, although they'd avoid outright hostilities for the most part too. Hence the state of undeclared war I mentioned earlier. Border raids, cattle rustling, etc. If either side ever wanted to build a case for a 'just war', they normally didn't have to look far.

So, is the diplomatic engine broken? Yes, in so far as you can't tell opposing armies to get off your land and you can't broker ceasefires easily enough; no, in so far as being able to easily manipulate factions to behave as you wished simply on the basis of how you behaved to them would be one-sided, unrealistic and unchallenging.

The real problem, as I see it, is the pesky one boat blockades that tend to start all these things snowballing in the first place. Get rid of them and the whole thing makes much more sense.