Quote:
Gandalf Parker said:
That is pretty automatic, and happens a lot with multiplayer games. Did you need some sort of menu in order to allow it with solo-play games? Im just commenting because adding menu features is alot of work and this seems kindof cosmetic.
|
More like just adding a checkbox of Allied victory on/off. I was thinking in terms of how it was done in the original Age of Wonders where they had this small box that you could click on or off. Much like the cheat detection on/off when setting up a game. Of course, the functions and new menu items for the message menu would have to be added, four that I can think of: declare war, propose alliance, propose peace/truce (to return state of war to neutrality) and cancel aliance (to reset alliance to neutrality).
The only actual UI
change or
new addition required would be a diplomacy status display screen where you can see if you're at war with, neutral or allied with the different nations. The rest could be done by just adding the menu options, assuming the menu buttons have been made on the list type basis as follows:
Pseudocode
Code:
Menu Button 1
display code
functions
Menu Button 2
display code
functions
etc
Adding three new ones to an existing menu should not be difficult. Writing the actual diplomacy code (i.e. how the AI should behave in the three different states) could be easy or difficult, depending. As I see it, neutrality and war don't need much, the existing AI implementation works just fine, usually the AI will initially leave you alone for a while unless you bother it. It will eventually attack and pursue the war more or less actively (unless it gets seriously attacked from another front).
Alliance option can already be set with map commands in the map file to specify that nation A and nation B will not attack each other, the alliance coding would just have to make this a resettable variable, with the actual status determined by the actions from the message menu.
Optionally, if a little bit more complex diplomacy were to be added, there could be a relationship value for the nations on a scale of +/- something for different actions. Breaking alliance without declaring war should obviously decrease chance of renewing the alliance in the future, otherwise this could be abused against the AI. Increasing the value should be through considerable (meaning really big) gifts of gems, gold or magic items and declaring war on an AI nation's enemies, while decreses would be through declaration of war, even more for attacking without declaration of war and most for backstabbing an ally.
The idea is basically a system like AoW 1 had, simple and effective. Scope for influencing relations here is more limited, but then again, alliances are often less imnportant in SP games than MP, and I think my idea as such would offer a relatively simple and effective (yet hopefully not too complex) framework for formalizing stuff in MP. Secret alliances would still have to be done as neutrals with verbal agreements, but you'd have to formalize them eventually to get pantheon victory.
Of course, like I said, this is more a wider feature request than just a simple improvement suggestion, and because I know nothing about the actual Dom2 code, I have no idea how feasible it is to implement and how eager the devs would be to do that even if it is feasible.
But just thinking of the possibilities, e.g. heat vs cold nations games and other kinds of alliance (e.g. Ulm and Marignon vs Man and Pangaea would be anoher pretty thematic one) games would be easier to formally set up, you could have really nice full pantheon clashes where you don't need so much to worry about being constantly backstabbed.
Did this post make things any clearer?
Edi