In MoO, it is random whether a technology will or won’t be available to any given race. Some technologies just never show up. Is this true here as well?
Of course. That’s one of the best things about MoO 1! :)
Over 50% funded!
Wohoo I just made the Nurn empire my vassal. Though I haven’t found what the practical implications are. My empire income has not increased. What do I gain by making them my vassal?
Good luck in the KS home stretch @jeffgraw
Vassals will fight your enemies (any empire you are at war with, they are automatically at war with too), and of course not having to mop up every last colony speeds up the end game.
I was close to making vassalization optional before the KS began, but I figured it was too risky and I’d end up breaking something important.
Thumbs up to mop up reduction, which is tedious, to me at any rate. Smart move. I see that a vassal immediately enters into trade and tech exchange so my empire gets BCs from that. But it does not look like I can interact with the vassal other than to give them a gift? Their attitude towards my empire is “restless” which is generous given I invaded their capital world.
So hopefully, we won’t have many suicidal empires fighting to the end so unrealistically?
Yeah, not much you can do there yet. I’d like to be able to give them directives though.
Oh, they’ll still do that because the AIs are meant to liberated and are therefore playing to win the game. But you can vassalize them by capturing their homeworld. Or be vassalized by them by losing yours.
I spoke too soon. Vassalizing is amazing! After a few turns your vassal forgives and forgets and once a tech exchange is set up, they will trade anything with you as long as you exchange something.
So that leads to several questions:
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If you take their home world will they vassalize no matter what? What if they have 20 systems and you just took their homeworld? Seems if they still have a lot of power, they should continue to fight back. Seems like this could be exploited.
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What I hate is you have an enemy empire of 20 systems and you knock them back to just a handful when their continuing is obviously futile. Seems to me that should be another condition of vassalism - If the enemy is only x% of your strength, they should vassalize instead of fighting to the end.
Any thoughts about this?
It can be exploited to the extent that a player or AI misplays. But eventually I’d like to expand on the system to allow for empires to gain their freedom back in some (typically very difficult) way. In such a scenario, capturing a much larger empire’s homeworld could lead to some interesting dynamics.
I’m not necessarily against that concept, so long as it makes sense for both players and AIs and doesn’t create schism between the two. However, my intuition says that players would be less likely to concede in that way while the homeworld method has the benefit of being symmetrical.
After the most frustrating experience with Valve over the course of 16 days (officially out of love with that company now), the KS beta is finally available on Steam.
Cool.
The Kickstarter campaign is 2/3rds of the way to the finish line with three days to go. I posted my first ever review on Steam [zeal of the newly Kickstarter converted]. If you have backed the game a review on Steam could help get Jeff over the finish line.
Just checking in to say that I probably won’t have time to play this in depth any time soon, but based entirely upon your posts here and the incredibly detailed description of your design philosophy, plus a few minutes with the beta, I went ahead and contributed to the kickstarter at the two-key level and have shared it with friends who may be interested as well.
This looks like it will address a lot of the complaints I have about 4X games (I’m a galactic emporer! I shouldn’t have to micromanage build queues on freakin’ backwater Rangus VI!) and I love the design for flexibility and ease of customization.
I’m looking forward to finding more time to play in the near future and seeing where the game goes from here!
Maybe I missed something, but is there no option to tell another leader, "Please remove your ships from my space?
No, not that I have seen. Nor is there the ability to tell them to stop spying, though they will message you sometimes when they catch you spying to tell you that it is straining the relationship, or something like that.
Yeah, the spying as well. I’d really like both options.
Hate to bother him, but… @jeffgraw any idea?
I’m a bit torn because I see the benefit from a narrative standpoint, but this is the kind of thing that seems ripe for exploitation and is likely to create schism between players and AIs.
Maybe there’s some way to square the circle…
Like, for example, perhaps the requesting side offers a certain amount of BC for the aggressors to remove their fleets? But those funds are held in a trust until certain conditions are met.
Or maybe I can implement an ultimatum system. Eg. “well will go war unless you cease X” where if those conditions are violated within some time frame a state of war is declared automatically.
I’m not sure either of those ideas are great. There are probably a whole host of solutions that I haven’t thought of. Certainly open to hearing suggestions (maybe @tomchick or @BrianRubin have thought of this already?) but I don’t want to naively re-implement the solution from MoO 1.
Hi,
I’ve never seen this done in any strategy game with diplomacy.
Premise:
We know that there are diplomats who pull of tremendous feats where they could successfully pull 2 hostile countries together, or keep vastly smaller countries as independent nations in an asymmetric match up. Is there a way to implement this?
Gaming outcomes we would like to see:
Example Scenarios, a very small power (whether player or AI) is between 2 or 3 contending powers which are much larger. In a typical game, they either get steamrolled or the designer have to gimp the AI or introduce some special heuristics to accomplish getting the small power eliminated.
But in our game, we want to let the small power somehow accomplish a diplomatic coup that not only lets the small power survive, but gets aid from one or more major powers! Either through tech or arm transfers!
Possible implememtations?
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Through implementation of “an enemy of my enemy is my friend” type of heuristics. For example, is 2 empires hate one another less than they hate a smaller power, then their diplomatic evaluation should be adjusted to reflect this.
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Employment of a “card” type diplomacy as in Star Ruler 2. So that someone can specialize in diplomacy and concentrate on cards that can avoid wars and/or influence a “favourability” factor between powers.
How do we prevent the human getting an upper hand over the AI by exploiting this? By imposing the rule that “favouribility” factor have to be brought to negative before war can be declared by powers.
No war exist in a vacuum, populance and public opinion have to be influenced. This is like U.S. declaring war on Britian right now. The “favouribility” factor is way too high. So the human player have to bring down this factor with cards so that he can declare war.
I think far too many designs tack on the diplomacy subsystem, which is totally not how the world works. In the real world, war serves as an addition to diplomacy, not the other way around.
Edit: The diplomacy aspect in all the 4X we have seen are subpar/unrealistic/unfun. It’ll be nice to see a game that can do this well.
Edit2: If diplomacy can be implemented and let smaller military powers prevail, a TALL civilisation can be built without any other special systems or require massive tweaking of stats (like the stupid happiness stat of Civ)