[licker]

I think the difficulty is that people value NAP differently from Alliance.

If you sign an Alliance then that is until the end of days, or until the two parties agree to break it, but honestly it sounds like the people who expect these NAPs to be arbitrarily binding don't want to actually use diplomacy.

Its all fine and well to say 'don't sign a NAP you don't want to keep' but my guess is that unless you want to force rather cumbersome definitions and conditions into your agreements it's not really worth the head ache.

More likely you'd see someone agree to one of these NAPs once, and then realize how utterly ridiculous they are and never agree to them again, so the reputation issue probably isn't as much of a consideration as people here think.

It gets back to why you play the game though, if you think you have a chance to win and realize that your 'partner' (though there are no true partners...) is going to beat you to the goal what are your choices?

If that's your approach just go AI and be done with it.