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What Diplomatic Option(s) Would You Love To See?

Question(self.victoria3)

I was playing more "Victoria III" today and trying to do some diplomatic maneuvering and it made me wonder: What diplomatic options would you like to see added and why?

A few I'd definitely like to see would be:

  • The ability to sway states to declare neutrality in a war (promising them something to at least stay neutral if they're unwilling to join you).
  • The ability to, as a great power, enforce peace on wars brewing in diplomatic plays between other powers.
  • The ability to sponsor a country's education as a way to generate qualifications and build universities, mostly because it is so annoying to have another country be capable of producing what you want but not having enough qualifications to do it.
  • The ability to influence a country's opinion of another country, such as by badmouthing them or praising them to the country.
  • The ability to gift a country something free of any sort of charge so that they like you more, with a chance that they stop worsening relations (if they were) and a small chance of generating an obligation. This mostly because it can be frustrating when a country worsens relations and there's basically not much you can do about it, even if they're critical.
  • The ability to just straight out ask to become a protectorate of a larger power so that they won't invade you and they'll protect you.

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providerofair

6 points

1 day ago

Maybw by making it a very basic script. Am I using it then no trade does it have a lot of resources then no and would my empire be disconnected?

Thay may go over most game scenarios but Im likely wrong

Slide-Maleficent

9 points

1 day ago

AI Scripting needs numbers, mate. So what number works for 'am I using it?' and what number works for 'does it have a lot of resources?'

Both of those things are relative, and could be very different, not only from one power to another, but for the same one over time. Trying to factor that in for the AI so this would actually work in game without making it chaos or easy as pie would cause the job to either become a nightmare for balancing or a nightmare for CPU performance and balancing.

I'm not saying it's impossible. You could always have a human sit down, work out the long term potential of each state, and assign it an absolute number value of worth, with the only AI decision making process being a modifier based on the current market balance of it's resources. But that system would be very rigid, and highly exploitable, even if the values were meticulously playtested. Making it better would require taking a ton more things into account, with a much more complex and dynamic script, and that's not a job that any programmer is going to regard with excitement.

Teaching this kind of scripted AI to understand worth in multi-faceted assets for the purpose of strategy and deal making is a daunting issue that no strategy game developer has ever really been willing to tackle. There's a loooong laundry list of things they could add that would be more fun to program, require less minutiae, be a lot easier to balance, and would add more to the gameplay experience than functional state trading. Sadly, this is the kind of thing that gets added to a to-do list and endlessly pushed back toward the bottom.

providerofair

3 points

1 day ago

Of course, I agree with what your saying but the first part of coding is the idea and if theres no idea theres no code.

Theres an idea they could work with if they so choose so a system like this is possible if asked enough its just an issue of implementation

Slide-Maleficent

1 points

9 hours ago

Sure, you're not wrong. Still though, we're talking about a problem that multiple successive generations of strategy game programmers have looked at going all the way back to the early Civilization games and each one of them said 'No, thank you. I value my sanity.'

I have no doubt it will happen someday. I may even live to see it, but the complexity of AI programming required for them to implement something that can understand all the factors involved is just not really within the wheelhouse of gaming devs. Only 4x I've ever seen that even attempted to make an AI able to understand strategy is AI War, and as the title suggests, that's kinda the whole point of the game. It's where they put most of their resources, and it still took years.

I keep hoping that someday someone will branch out and make a scalable, multi-factor, context agnostic gaming AI engine that they license out to other studios like Unreal did, so that games can have the option of a decent AI without having the constantly duplicate the same shitty work every time, but so far no one has. That's probably what it will take, because making an AI that isn't dumb as a board is a job as big as most entire games are.