Gameplay idea: Blind Diplomacy

Even the addition of a yellow, 'maybe', middle area would cloud the issue. It's absurd that you can tune deals *to the dollar*. If there was a -/+10% yellow area, you could at least try to push your luck a little bit.

Then again, maybe it's an abstraction of a longer negotiating phase, and not just 'here you go' 'oh I knew you'd accept that'.

Yea, and ideally (though this would likely take a significant amount of work for the devs) I would be forced to pad my offers a bit for fear that I would offend the AI with a crappy offer.

With so much awesome effort put into making the AI respond realistically to everything else in the game, the trade/diplomacy is just too black and white.

A what you would like for this option would be good too

I actually like the way they do it. I hope that they don't change it to the way you suggest.

As an extension of 'what would seal this deal', I'd like a way to find out how the AI is weighting your techs. Some things are always valuable (habitat, miniturisation, etc) but some things are important to people when they're behind. It'd be neat to find out what they really, really want so you could price-gouge them on it.

Ugh. Now instead of just getting raped at the trades table you want to make it more frustrating, no thanks.

Yeah, because the trade system isn't oversimplified, too easy, and fiddly! No sir. You must like clicking + to get the exact maximum dollar value out of each trade.

If they eliminated the green/red options, wouldn't that simply end up with people trying every incrimentally greater offer until eventually they hit the acceptance zone? That's what I've ended up doing in prior games. This seems to be basically the same exact thing, only streamlined.

I suppose you could impliment some sort of penalty for making offers, but for those who want their negotiations over interstellar boundaries with hive mind insects to be as realistic as possible that would represent a sacrifice. After all, a negotiation is a series of offers back and forth (sometimes for days and weeks) until you eventually hit on something that someone wants. Reactions for insultingly low offers could certainly fit, and for flatteringly high, but you would actually be sacrificing realism if you penalized haggling. Like I said, this seems to just streamline that process.

IMHO.

I always wished they out put a button that says "max" or something so I don't have to fiddle with the friggin slider. It gets very old when you want to sell a tech to 8 different races.

--Brad

the everlasting discussion between realism and playability

My opinion : it's a game dammit! Make it fun

BTW for the realism freaks: in real life, nations rarely research techs or own any of them, and they certainly don't sell "technologies"

But why couldnt they do both? All I am asking for is an option to have blind diplomacy. If they want the AI to be close to being as good as a player, we need to have the option to not be able to read their minds. Along with this, they would have to get annoyed with you for offering bad things, otherwise you would just run into the issue of people picking the option, and just reoffering 100 times in a row with slightly higher incremental offers.

I wouldn't want that personally. It's annoying enough having to deal with that slider when you have 100 trillion credits to work with. Look at it funny and your offer goes up a few trillion credits.

On the other hand, how about I initiate the trade, but then they do the haggling. Like... I want a certain tech they have, and they tell me what they want in exchange for handing it over. Or I offer a trade good/tech and they tell me what they'd pay for it. Just like when they initiate the trade. Save me from having to offer a tech, remove a tech, offer money, remove money. And on and on and on.....