RFE: no trading

[Teraswaerto]

Lying and misinformation in in-game diplomacy is one thing, but breaking an explicitly stated pact is something I don't see myself doing, because reputation as someone who can't be trusted to honor agreements will carry over to other games.

Same goes for cheating in trade, etc. If I was trying to just win one specific game and never play Dom3 again, then treachery and such would certainly come in to play at some point, especially since people tend to expect pacts to be honored.

[PhilD]

I was going to suggest making it possible to turn off item/gem sending as well as private messages, and then using anonymous TCP play, to really prevent private communications - allowing "send to all" messages for very limited coordination.

But then I remembered, it's a pretty standard thing in modern cryptography to be able to exchange private information on a public channel without prior agreement on a secret - in other words, the "sent to all" messages could be used to exchange private messages between players (all the other players could do would be to know that some player sent a private message; they wouldn't even know who it was for). So, you'd have to also take out public messages.

Still, a PBEM game with no diplomacy outside of the in-game messages would be fun - that would mean back-and-forth negociations would take two turns, so coordinating things would be a real challenge.

[Folket]

PhilD, what you are saying make no sense.

The receiver must have the key for the encryption, so there has to be a prior agrement.

[Maltrease]

I've also thought the idea of a no-diplomacy game would be a lot of fun. And to the Doctors point I've never seen someone betray a NAP pact, many people make a point that they have never betrayed one and bring it outside of the current Dominions game and tie it directly to themselves or Avatar.

I'll even say that due to a couple of my informal alliances or "gestures of friendship" being betrayed (and destroying my chances of winning a game) I've resorted to formally defined NAP pacts.

I actually dislike the ganging up on a leader approach particularly with the incredibly easy way to discover the leader by looking at the graphs.

While I see Gandalf’s point of disliking the "my strategy can beat yours"... I feel there is a large desire by many people to have exactly that.

Why not create a scenarios where players can test there skill against each other purely with the game mechanics instead of it being decided (mostly) by who took the time to communicate and create diplomatic arrangements with the other players.

The current way games are played is great and it’s a TON of fun! However, there is certainly nothing wrong with alternate forms of play (no diplomacy) or creating scenarios where player skill (strategy and tactics purely within the game) can be objectively tested against others.

Another mode of play that would be fun, eliminates the “don’t get to strong” problem and keeps the social play is to play team games. Break the players into two teams and the first team to eliminate the other wins (shared among all players on the team).