[licker]

Originally posted by Pocus:
I think there is two issues : diplomacy, and sharing of same space. I dont care a dime about diplomacy in MP, but I would have really appreciated to have an order which would let the troops of my ally move thru one of my province without triggering a combat with the units I have there. This, I miss a lot.

the problem of not having that is that the game is more compartimented by physical positioning of players that most other games. You wont have choice, and you are forced to interact with your neighbors, be it peace or war.

I'm not sure this is really such a problem. It could be for some situations, but really what you need to do is agree to swap provinces with your ally or just hand over one or two so that he can get the border with the common enemy. If anything this type of action requires more diplomacy (though you can't do it SP) than just giving a right of passage (ala CivIII). Besides I'm sure there are more coding issues involved here. For example what happens when there are 3 (or more) sides involved in the battle? Its possible to happen now, but not with multiple sides already in the province.

I havn't said much on this issue because I don't think that a game like Dom really needs anykind of SP diplo model. The holy war theme leeds easilly enough to the belief that the pretenders would never grant any kind of authority to each other, at best they would just ignore the others until they had the time/resources to directly challenge them. I do understand the Machiavellian attatude of doing whatever you can to acheive your end results, but for the sake of gameplay (SP anyway) the simple approach seems to work.

That said, it shouldn't be that difficult to add some sort of an 'attitude' setting that allows the SP to see what the reletive attitudes of his neighbors towards him is. Of course the attitude doesn't have to mean anything, but it would be a nice cosmetic touch perhaps. As you can gain intel on provinces where you have dominion or spies, add to the info the relative attitude of the province toward your nation. At least that way you'd know if the other nation was seething at you, or merely annoyed, or whatever.