[Wendigo]

Me:
>> diplomacy is strong enough as it is in MP.

Alex:
>This I disagree with this strongly.

No surprise here, we have held opposing views on this topic before in the newsgroup.

IIRC you campaigned for:
- Right of passage.
To which I answered same as here: it would only make gangfests easier.

- Exchange of commanders/mages/troops.
To which I said that allowing such would only dilute the differences between nations and result in a duller game, as nations would not have to find ways to compensate for their weaknesses because they could do so easily via diplomacy.

I haven't however seen any argument to counter the above ones, as the one that follows doesn't hold.

>In any conflict involving multiple nations, diplomacy is critical to success. It's an essential facet of strategy and has every reason to be modeled into a wargame. Particularly one as complex as Dominions.

This is a false analogy with RL. In RL it is possible for a nation to 'win' by staying out of trouble or either achieve a mutual gain by submitting to a bigger power. Obviously, this has no place in a game where 'there can be only one ruling God' by definition. You can say that you personally would like to have more diplomacy options in this game, but there's definitely no need for those as you seem to imply in your argument, the game is not a simulation of our world.

I do not oppose cooperative gameplay per se, but the limits of it must definitely be stated beforehand when the game is launched (looks like we at least agree on this), otherwise it only results in fustration as players develop different expectatives of what is, or not, allowed in a game that requires a heavy time investment.

And I definitely do not see any need to increase the power of what is already the most powerful MP weapon with further coding favoring its use (or abuse), for me this would detract from the game, by making it duller and less challenging (as in, your actions & gaming have a much lower impact on the result of the game the more powerful diplomacy is, as taken to the extreme what counts is how many nations you can get under the umbrella of your alliance vs that of your enemy).

I would rather have the devs spend their time in stuff that improved my enjoyment (balancing, micromanagement reductions...) or at least were neutral to it (Diplomacy in SP regarding the AI...).

[ October 16, 2003, 18:12: Message edited by: Wendigo ]