(By "reinventing the wheel" I mean freely brainstorming for future games)
I've been thinking... there is a fundamental problem when trying to create both a challenging and versatile AI, and a game system where "diplomacy" is an important attribute.
Basically, if the AI acted like a human player, they'd totally ignore your diplomacy score and just trade in their own interest. You can see a bit of this when trying to trade with the Terrans if you have a low diplomacy score... it's *useless*. They ask for the world... and since you're a human rather than an AI, you probably tell them go get stuffed and you go trade with someone else. So their high diplomacy score acts *against* their interests when dealing with a human.
Personally, I think the best games are ones where the AIs act in their own interests (as they see them - a warmonger has different interests than a pacifist).
How do you reconcile diplomacy with that? Should it simply be dropped entirely, or is there some other way? You'd basically have to have a "diplomacy" attribute that changes the rules of play, but doesn't directly tweak the decisionmaking of the AIs.
Most Galciv2 calls "diplomacy" right now, I'd mainly call trading and bribes. Except for the treaties, everything is a straightforward one-off exchange based on payment or threats.
What we need is some way of actually representing political influence - as a quantity that you can bring to bear for your own or someone else's benefit, and that they can value for their own self interest.
What if the United Planets was a body where the player and/or AIs could actually *pick the issues* to be voted on, making it truly relevant? And what if each race had "political influence" which could sway the vote, *instead of* cultural influence being used? Diplomacy could be a multiplier to political influence. Political influence would then be a valuable commodity which could then be traded. And if you didn't trade it you could try to use the United Planets to your specific advantage (for example, by measures condemning *specific* wars that you don't like, economic sanctions against *specific* races, etc).
