Territorial Diplomacy

from Elemental Forums

With all of the outpost spamming and pioneers sneaking around in your territory, likely you have some jerk of a pioneer plop down an outpost in some inconvenient place like a road or a choke point.  Your only option to get that territory from him is to go to war, which in this game tends to last until someone is wiped out.

It would be nice if foreign outposts (and perhaps cities) had something like a "Buy" button on them that put you into trade negotiations with the other player for control of the outpost.  The value of the outpost would depend on the value of the resources and improvements within its ZoC to the owner.  If you could also sell your own Outposts, you could almost barter territory and consolidate your holdings, resulting in more defined borders instead of the patchwork of locations were players have managed to grab territory.  I don't know how you would do the interface, but being able to cede or demand territory for peace would be an interesting diplomatic option.

3,322 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Being able to buy outposts would be nice. As far as outpost spam, here are some notes about the new build, so you might want to give that a try first and see how it's going:

 

 


 

AI less likely to build pioneers and instead focus on improving cities


AI now takes into account essence when deciding where to build a city


AI fixed bug that caused AI to build pioneers instead of city defenders


AI a bit smarter regarding expansion

End of quote

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I dislike the spam, but I think a better choice would be to make those outposts unholdable. This has to do with the monster-behavior issue. If you actually have to guard an outpost from monsters (absent a Warden), then they effectively become more costly to build and maintain, and that strategy becomes less useful.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

You may have missed this Frogboy post, just a few topics (currently) under yours:

 

This is what I'm working on for 0.952. 

For the longest time, the goal was to make the AI challenging in sheer raw expansion.

Now, I'm able to get it a lot more refined. This week (not in your build) I was able to finally get Pariden to play very differently than say Magnar. It's just that these kinds of changes take weeks to play test to make sure they aren't doing obviously dumb things. So there's weeks worth of work waiting to go into the next update.

End of quote

 

I would expect to see expansion less blunt, and more finessed according to the strengths of each opponent.  We'll just have to wait and see, but I'm looking forward to the changes.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Even with the changes, it seems a bit too easy to generate pioneers, both as a unit and to grab resources/ZoC. There should be a few better limits in place to prevent pioneer spam, and not just the AI valuing it less. Making pioneers take longer to produce, cost more, or making creating outposts take time rather than being instantaneous might all be options here, or throw in some game mechanics like preventing outposts from being built too close together. Or the further away they are, the less the benefit they provide. A bunch of options here.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Pioneer spam or no, it would still be a nice addition to diplomacy to be able to cede/demand territory to end a war.  I'm just not sure how it would fit into the diplomacy UI.