The problem with this is that you are constraining the AI in a way that you are not constraining the human. You could make an AI that values various treaties, that considers the length and depth of those treaties, and never suddenly backstabs an ally. But then you usually have nothing constraining the human from trating the game like a board game and treatingbfriends and allies badly when he/she feels like it.
Well, I personally don’t treat it like a boardgame either. But you can address that with reputation systems. Maybe they can backstab an ally once, but no one else will whatever engage with you after that. In a game where diplomacy actually matters, that can be a big handicap. Most of these games the diplomacy is nearly completely irrelevant, though.
I think the developers hurt themselves when it comes to AI because every race plays in such dramatically different ways. Instead of having a template with small changes like Civ, it’s drastic stuff. While I love how unique everything is… it does not lend itself to competent play.
It’s by no means perfect. The developers are a two-man team, which means updates are slow - but I believe something is planned for the future. Fingers crossed they add some more content; there’s some clearly unfinished sections to the game.
Thanks for the mentions of Stars in Shadow, I’m going to check it out. I actually picked it up a while back, but honestly it kind of got lost in the backlog.
Yeah, EU4 totally spoiled me in this regard too. It is possible to build trust with the AI.
I think this is easily remedied. If you backstab an ally, no other AI player will ally with you for the rest of the game, because you’re untrustworthy. Give the player freedom to act, and pay the consequences for their actions.
I REALLY need to learn EU one day. Its just so complex, I bounce off of it every time.
Apologies for thread derails, but if you do try to learn EU4 again, use the thread here as a sounding board! There’s a bunch of dedicated/experienced EU4 players here that will be more than happy to help ease you along.
Ill do that. I wish they had an EU Lite that would let you play the real basic parts and then add in complexity later. I still cannot really even grasp how to “WIN” a game lol
Sorry to bump the Endless Space 2 thread with this. Do we not have a Stars in Shadow thread?
In any case, I played a few games of it over the weekend. Not full games, mostly just starting new games and playing around for a bit. I found the Diplomacy in this title to suffer the same faults as I was complaining about, so I was wondering if I was doing something wrong.
I met a couple nearby aliens: the race of merchants and an aggressive bear looking guy. The bears loved me because of my military, the traders because we entered into several treaties which they initiated. I monitored my relations with them both, I agreed to help them whenever asked (money for shortages, food during famine, etc).
Right after signing a research agreement with the merchants, they declared war. I had just looked the turn before, and our relations were through the roof, just filled with a bunch of positive modifiers. We had trade and research agreements making us both some bank. I was giving them food. But WAR. Then, of course, once they banged up my fleet, the other guys came and attacked me because they now had a better military than me. So much for that.
Started up a new game. Ran into a neighbor (the bug guys that are good at science) and was getting along nicely. Same thing, we had a research agreement and a few other things going. Relations were pegged, no negative modifiers. One turn they ask if I’ll sign the treaty that allow the use of my space ports to refuel, which I accept. The next turn they declare war on me. Okay.
Turns out there was one little problem with their plan, though. Since they declared war, it broke our treaties and they could no longer use my planets to refuel. That also meant that all my planets were out of range of their fleets (and vice versa). Most boring war ever.
Is this another 4X I can toss on the garbage heap of terrible diplomacy? There is seriously no point in spending all the development time on a subsystem like Diplomacy if it behaves in this way. If every nation with great relations is going to attack me, there’s no point in me wasting any effort in maintaining good relations, they’re just guaranteed war targets. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I’d rather just play more of a wargame like Gladius.
There’s a beta patch (a little unstable) that is improving the diplomacy of SiS considerably. You can access it on steam via the password ‘alphatesting’.
I’ll give that a shot, thanks!
The beta patch has some sluggish turn times for me (not unexpected, I know it’s a beta branch) but so far in my one game, no more crazypants diplomacy. Hope it holds up! Thanks again for pointing out the branch.
Now, I shall jettison myself from the Endless Space 2 thread and stop the constant derails, just felt that I should at least post a followup to yesterday’s whine.
There are some other issues in the beta branch. You should submit logs and report bugs if (when) you find them!
Actually, if you have example games with sluggish turn times, the devs might be interested. They’re pretty active on both steam and their own forums (or at least, responsive to the fairly low volume of chat that’s there).
Is the Workshop not working correctly right now, or is there really not a single mod available for Endless Space 2? Was hoping to find something that might change things up enough for me to be able to get into this game, but it’s coming up completely empty.
Workshop working for me. I’ve no mod suggestions though.
Restarting Steam seems to have done the trick. No idea what was going on there, haven’t had that problem before. The weird thing is that it was only affecting Endless Space 2 as well. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had just purchased a DLC?!
Moar dlc!
I saw this. Very excited!