[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Mortifer:
Ok but what, if you are moving your army to a border province, to attack another AI? You will loose -50 relation points, and you didnt wanted to do anything bad against that AI.

Unless you can think of a way to easily formula that, Im afraid the answer would have to fall to "thats realistic". If another nations starts building up a huge army on my border, even if he says its for another reason SHOULDNT I get nervous anyway? Its not like that hasnt happened in the real world. Maybe, it could be lesser minus IF we are allies. It might be you coming to help me. But even then, to avoid abuse, I wouldnt make the AI totally trusting about large armies.

I like this -256 - 256 system.

Nope it would have to be just 1-256, or technically 0-255. The explanation why isnt worth going into here. It has something to do with computers only having two modes of counting efficient. Fingers or thumbs. One or the other but not both.

I think by giving gold, the max relationship what could be reached must be max. 100.
With giving items it should be 150.
With giving provinces, it should be 200.
You can make an alliance after 201.
After 200, only good actions will raise the "relation points". Example: attacking a disliked nation by that AI, casting destructive spells on common oppoments. etc.

Ouch. Now we are back in the memory thing. To track all those over time we would need more variables. Shall we have 8 variables with a 256 range for each of the (16?) races? Can we get along with one of the lesser scales if we do it as multiple variables? can we come up with 8 scales of 16?

For this discussion its going to be really hard to consider the things that the game can "see" in a single turn file vs storing information to make better judgements. Even though storing and thinking are obviously good things to have the AI do, it can move the whole project into the Category of major rewrite. We might need to split this conversation into 2 threads. One for really simple do-it-soon things. And one for the this-would-be-better but major-project-later things.