I agree with PvK, there are a lot of useful possibilities presented in the diplomacy screen - for me the most useful is the "trading" of resources and technologies.
However, I do have to agree that it's annoying to strong arm a long-time ally into helping you fight an enemy, only to find out that the ally is doing nothing to help! A few simple hardcode changes would likely solve the problem (ie.
if AI agrees to break treaty,
then break treaty for 10 turns;
if AI agrees to declare war,
then declare war and reject peace-treaties for 10 turns).
Perhaps the AI could be moded to even negotiate the
length of the term of the agreement.
It could become more complex of course. And this is what we all are hoping for. The AI could be programmed to respond with many different responses - and as long as it does them, then the coding efforts would be worthwhile:
"Hmmmm... a long term war with the B'Jong would be costly. We would be willing to declare war for 10 months instead of the 30 months that you propose"
Or
"Declare war on the B'Jong?! They've been our allies since the birth of the Grak Nork. But for 100 000 kT of minerals and your Sheild Generation 3 technology we would be willing to break our trade agreements with them"
Or
"Declare war on the B'Jong?! Perhaps if we were to punitively sanction them by giving you some of our war ships instead?"
just my $Cdn 0.02
edit - of course the human player would have to be held to his/her agreements with other players, otherwise we're right back to square one with the AI abuse
I suppose if we were to get really fancy we could make various diplomatic options unavailable at the diplomacy screen for the duration of the players "agreements". That is, if you make an agreement with Alien1 to go to war with Alien2 for 30 months, then you would have a greyed out button when it came to entering into diplomatic relations with Alien2 until the 30 months was up.
Or, you could start up normal relations with Alien2 again, but you'd be warned that if Alien1 finds out, your relations with Alien1 will go right down the tubes (say -20 points for backstabbing).
That's 2 more of those Canadian coppers for ya
[ 09 May 2002: Message edited by: jimbob ]