New option Idea for SE4 - Surrendering

[dogscoff]

Surrendering could be balanced by making it less of an immediate benefit. For example, newlay acquired ships could be unavailable to receive fresh orders for a turn or two. New tech levels could be dripped through to the receiving empire over the course of several turns. This would give other empires the chance to seize some of the surrendered booty before the receiver had a chance to consolidate it.

Oh, and I heartily agree with the option to refuse a surrender.

[Baron Munchausen]

You know, with almost every other diplomatic option you do need both parties to accept. Treaties, other than declaring war, trades, gifts, even tribute has to be formally accepted. I don't see why MM can't let you choose to 'accept currender' or refuse it.

[ July 01, 2002, 18:00: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[mottlee]

How about in a fight having the "Enmy" if beaten give up! rather than distroy the whole fleet

[Repo Man]

While not really addressing the topic directly on point, the concept of surrendering could be greatly expanded in SEIV. It might take some serious recoding, but I can wish.

The best gaming model for a surrender that I have ever seen is from Empires in Arms. It’s a non computer game for the most part, unless Aide De Campe is being used as a supplement.

A surrendering power would offer a surrender.

The winning power would then counter offer with either a conditional or unconditional surrender. A conditional surrender had to be accepted by the loser, while an unconditional surrender could be rejected.

For the terms of a surrender, there were two tables, one more severe than the other. An conditional surrender allowed two choices from the lesser table, while an unconditional surrender allowed three choices from either table.

Following a surrender, there was a mandatory peace imposed.

The in game effect was to allow for multiple wars, wars of revenge, and carefully designed peace treaties which added a lot of flavor to the game. Such a feature could help eliminate the 1000 years wars between brotherly empires, a part of SEIV which makes me pull my hair out.

[RiTz21]

Thanks for the comments people !!

-> geoschmo: I think the mechanism to calculate who did the most damage to you is already implemented in SE4 - Think about it: how is the SCORE calculated ?? Anyone doing something to your empire that lowers it's score could be recorded. Then if you surrender, the code just has to lookup who did the most damage and that would be the receiving empire. Here I would add another Idea: An option to set the Minimum percentage of 'Score points' to loose before you are allowed to surrender. For instance, you could set this % to 25%: This would mean that you CANNOT surrender unless you lost 25% of your Current total score -> and then you would be able to surrender to the empire that did the most of this damage. This has the added benefit of making it harder to surrender to friends...

-> Baron Munchausen: your said "The AI in Master of Orion would surrender to one of your rivals just to spite you. That was one of the most realistic features of the original MOO AI. I liked it"

Woa !! Relistic ? Do you mean realistic as what happends in real life ? I don't think France surrendered to the British when the Germans invaded it in world war II ... Could you explain what You mean exactly ?

-> Baron Munchausen: "I'm not in favor of any hard coded game restrictions" - I agree completely with you. That is why my original message says "Option" ... Magic word here

-> DavidG: That's a nice idea ! (limiting what you can to in Diplomacy) - But it should be optionnal (magic word again

-> geoschmo: "We had a long drawn out discussion on this forum a while back about whether surrendering to an ally or not is realistic. Basically it depends on your point of view"

Hmmm I would be curious to know how the proponents of surrendering to an Ally while you are invaded justified their point of view !!!

-> ZeroAdunn: "Surrending to an ally is realistic" - See my comment to the Baron

cheers !
RiTz21

[Baron Munchausen]

Realistic meaning it was like what a human player would do. Sure, a 'real' country doesn't usually surrender to another just to spite a conqueror, though I don't think it's unknown in history. But a real human player does do this in a strategy game. That's good AI programming.

[Repo Man]

I confess that I have not had as much time to play as I want, in fact, SEIV is not on my HD right now (not to worry, as soon as I have time to play, its going back).

Maybe I missed it in game play, but an empire can surrender to another empire it is not at war with?

If this is how it is, seems to me surrender should be limited to those empires currently at war with the surrenderor.

Surrendering to a friend is kind of silly IMHO.