New option Idea for SE4 - Surrendering

[Spuzzum]

Originally posted by 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.

I agree with this idea more so than the others -- "surrender", by my definition, means to "cease hostile action against a superior foe and accept all terms set forth by said foe". And what would I call hostile action? War.

So, if you're not at war with someone, how the heck could you surrender to them? You can easily be subjugated, but that would require the subjugator to either offer that position to you, or else force it upon you (which would then make it surrender =P). Alternatively, you could request to be subjugated, which would be a Last-ditch effort against being forced to surrender to your enemies.

To put it into numbers, there are absolutely zero non-abusive ways of surrendering to an ally in SE4's scope. If you're surrendering to an ally, you're cheating.

There's still a way of cheating, even if this is implemented -- just declare war on an ally, then surrender to them.

Perhaps the only way of surrendering would be if an enemy has a ship in your home system? (That too could be abused, but not as easily.)

In any case, whatever Malfador comes up with, someone will just find a way of abusing it. I say go for making it only work for people you've declared war with, then let the chips fall where they may from there.


New Politics options?:
Surrender - immediately surrender to an enemy (i.e. must have declared war)
Propose Subjugation Treaty (Subjugatee) - request that an ally/neutral/enemy subjugates you
Propose Subjugation Treaty (Subjugator) - request that an ally/neutral/enemy becomes your subjugate

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by dmm:
Hellooooo .... anybody home?
If you disable surrender to prevent "spite surrenders," then you'd better disable trades and gifts also. Because otherwise the "spiteful" player can just gift/trade everything to another player, and he has accomplished the same thing as surrender. (With the small difference that the receiver can decline.)

Correct, except that's not a small difference. That is ALL the difference. If a player wants to leave the game bad enough to pull something like this, I say let him go. But if the recieveng player had to accept the surrender, or gifts, then I don't feel so bad about taking out my frustration on him. He is no longer an innocent victim.

Geo

[Baron Munchausen]

I'd still like to see 'surrendered' empires retain an underground identity and reconstitute themselves (rebel!) if the conquering empire is badly weakened by external events. Like systems having individual attitudes to other empires, this would take some complex tracking, though.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
I'd still like to see 'surrendered' empires retain an underground identity and reconstitute themselves (rebel!) if the conquering empire is badly weakened by external events. Like systems having individual attitudes to other empires, this would take some complex tracking, though.

This is a great idea, and actually I don't know how complex of tracking it would require. The game already maintains the player spot for the dead empires, and if you view any of the former empire population it list's them as conquered. It seems to me that most of the coding required then must already be in place to do something like this. In fact this may have been an original intention of Malfador's. Have you ever notice the message in the speech file about granting "independance" to a colony? Maybe something like that is what this was supposed to be about?

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

The 'grant independence' option was added due to my prodding on the old eGroups/Yahoo Groups SE4 discussion list before anything was officially released. Unfortunately it seems never to have been implemented like so many other things. I'd be thrilled to see the AI just use the same options it used to use in SE III, like demand surrender, demand tribute, request help against another empire, etc. This would make the game much more lively and interesting. I've only seen the AI demand surrender ONCE in many, many games.

[Marvin Kosh]

Personally, I like the way the AI Politics is handled in Alpha Centuari/Alien Crossfire - when another faction offers their surrender to you, they continue to have an identity whether you accept them as your loyal Pact Brother, or whether you eliminate them to the Last man.

I love the idea of a conditional surrender. You could get down to some serious negotiation there.... technologies, planets, ships, and of course, reparations. Some moolah in the form of resources, which means they can't go building up their forces again until they rebuild enough production (assuming they've been running in deficit because they're the losing party).

I also think the planetary bombardment (to kill off population) should be something you have to specify deliberately from the interface, so you can strike at military targets only, and have the option to blockade the planet. This gives you some leverage in a surrender negotiation - if they fail to hand over what you want, let rip with the mass drivers