Bribing

[Horst Nordfink]

You can always kill each and every diplomat that comes near you!

[bovi]

Ambassadors will help a lot with settlements. If you get problems with family members deserting you for trinkets, use your faction leader or heir in the stack and it will be immune.

[Sand]

Assassins are the answer - kill every enemy diplomat you see. All of them. No survivors. High influence diplomats are a good second choice to protect your cities or stacks, but killing diplomats solves the problem permantly.

If assassins are failing to do the trick....there is the dark art of surrounding an enemy diplomat with a ring of units [8, or less if you can call some impassable terrain into play]. When youre sure the diplomat cannot move [check the yellow boundary], then move another unit onto the diplomats square.

Yeah I know, but as they say - the AI gets the cash and you get the brains.

[ereunao]

Seems fair enough to me, Sand. Why should we have to pussyfoot around trying to assassinate an enemy diplomat on OUR land?

Just send the army in to arrest and dispose of him.

(I recently lost Ippone and a near full stack of high grade troops to a nasty Poeni Mnaibomb. But I'm not bitter.)

[Sygrod]

Doesn't the cost to bribe drop if with the happiness level?

Anyway: To guarantee the disposal of diplomats, which are not that difficult to kill in the first place, place your assassins in a training program. Find either an enemy or eleutheroi army controlled by a captain and kill the captains as they replace each other. Their skills will climb to the point where you can even dispatch enemy generals and destruction of buildings in enemy cities is a real option. Keep some of these ruthless monsters around and the diplomat problem is greatly reduced, and don't just keep them on your own territory. Go touring!