Diplomatic Pressure

Making diplomatic ability relevant in multiplayer

from Elemental Forums

So the serious disadvantage with a "diplomatic ability" in multiplayer is that human players aren't likely to do what you tell them just because you have an arbitrarily high diplomatic skill. In fact, diplomatic ability is only particularly useful if you have powerful AI opponents that you can bargain with (a tall order in a multiplayer game). Considering diplomacy is its own tech tree, throwing diplomacy-heavy kingdoms a bone would be a good idea.

Enter Diplomatic Pressure.

Diplomatic Pressure is essentially diplomatic arm-twisting. On the diplomatic table, you can add "pressure" to the deal, which adds a unspecified negative consequence to rejecting the deal. Essentially, "pressure" represents a general perception that the deal is reasonable and to reject it would be unreasonable.

The consequences of rejecting a pressured deal can be specific or it can be random, sudden or gradual, severe or inconsequential, depending on what's better for balance. Here are a few ideas:

  • Sudden dips in relationships between the player's faction and other AI factions
  • An increase in negative random events.
  • Fewer quests offered.
  • A temporary drop in diplomatic ability
  • A temporary sudden gain the diplomatic ability of the pressuring nation
  • A loss in efficiency of treaties and trade routes with other nations.

But Will, can't you use diplomatic pressure as essentially a hostile act? Yes, and people should. Making ridiculous deals and then putting pressure on them could be a strategy in and of itself. Obviously, you can't have people doing this all the time, you'd need to balance it, but this kind of assholishness I think is healthy in a game. In particular if you've picked the path of diplomacy, in which case you probably need all the help you can get. Of course, overusing this is a double edged sword, as you're bound to piss people off and hurt your relations. You'd better have powerful allies.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Exactly ... maybe the larger the pressure, in general the larger the penalty. Since it seems to be a "Prestige" based mechanic ... I would think that you could handle this with prestige penalties a la breaking pacts.

Examples of this could be decreased prestige in a random city (-5 prestige for 5 turns, or -1 prestige for 25 turns)

penalty could be in proportion to pressure ... but this pressure can only be used by spending (Diplomacy Points) which build over time, at a rate dependent of your Diplomatic score. If you have enough Diplomatic Points to counter their pressure you can do so.

A fairly high pressure could have the example of SINGLE CITY 25 prestige (the above example, 5 for 5 turns or 1 for 25 turns)

meanwhile, breaking a pact is worth GLOBAL 40 prestige (-2 prestige "all cities" for 20 turns)

Perhaps a diplomatically skilled opponent can use a Worldwide Pity Memorial to increase the effect of the betrayal's penalty ... by a lot (-3 prestige "all cities" for 40 turns )

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tasunke, reply 1
Exactly ... maybe the larger the pressure, in general the larger the penalty. Since it seems to be a "Prestige" based mechanic ... I would think that you could handle this with prestige penalties a la breaking pacts.

Examples of this could be decreased prestige in a random city (-5 prestige for 5 turns, or -1 prestige for 25 turns)

penalty could be in proportion to pressure ... but this pressure can only be used by spending (Diplomacy Points) which build over time, at a rate dependent of your Diplomatic score. If you have enough Diplomatic Points to counter their pressure you can do so.

A fairly high pressure could have the example of SINGLE CITY 25 prestige (the above example, 5 for 5 turns or 1 for 25 turns)

meanwhile, breaking a pact is worth GLOBAL 40 prestige (-2 prestige "all cities" for 20 turns)

Perhaps a diplomatically skilled opponent can use a Worldwide Pity Memorial to increase the effect of the betrayal's penalty ... by a lot (-3 prestige "all cities" for 40 turns )
End of Tasunke's quote

OooOOohhh... I hadn't thought of prestige. All good ideas.

I had some more thoughts on this subject. After reading some of ckessel's thread I thought maybe it was interesting if pressure made diplomacy more "expensive", and it would cost more "points" to do certain actions. Alternatively, being pressured can make all of your treaties and deals less effective. Having, say, a %10 Pressure would reduce all trade, technology and resource treaties by %10. In addition, when giving gold in a diplomatic deal, %10 of the gold given would get "skimmed", so that in order to give 90 gold pieces to a nation, you'd actually need to give up 100, the other 10 gets skimmed, making all diplomacy a little more expensive.

Another advantage of this would be that nations more reliant on allies would be effected more, while more isolationist nations would be less effected, or perhaps could even ignore it.

To prevent a mess of everyone pressuring everyone else, you could have it so a nation can only put pressure on one nation at a time, only certain types of deals can be pressured, and players cannot pressure nations who have greater diplomatic abilities. A player can end the pressure on his nation at any time by accepting the deal (a friendly reminder would come up once and a while).

Galactic Civilizations III