Diplomacy is broken

~unchecks Tech Trading~

Ok, problem fixed.

I'm not sure what difficulty you play on, but on Obscene, it isn't that easy to make trades for things like that. Usually their research is so ahead of mine is some areas, it limits what I can trade to them.

Also, to stay ahead militarily, I rarely have a lot of cash on hand until perhaps mid game, so it's difficult to trade large sums of dough for techs/planets or to make war. With some races it's easier (drath, terrans), but usually it's fairly expensive.

I se the OPs point. I've always sort of said this baout this game. Diplomacy is such easy cheese in this game, I've never understood why brad didn't focus a little more time to it. It is so simple to get the AI to do your bidding for peanuts. The overall understanding of what has value needs changing.

Th AI undervalues its planets.

It completely undervalues what it should get as a reward for going to war... my god this should be much harder to do but on a dynamic scale depending on your friendly history with who you are asking and how much they despise the other race AND relative powers of those involved in the war already; all of which is calculable relatively simply in a mathematical formula to devise a weighted quantity of sorts to use in the diplo algys any way you like.

The AI undervalues techs... oh it undervalues them badly. A simple addition it should have is to check out the predominance of weaponry/defenses of its enemies and itself and NOT share defenses for the weaponry line it is developing deepest for anything but some serious cash/techs in return. Stupid stupid stupid.

AI STILL doesn't get ship power! OMG I put forth a pretty simple solution before for the AI to understand *true* powers of the fleets out there- at least on a stretgic basis if not tactical, but the fake power fleets it thinks people have is really unbalancing and yanks the fangs right out of the AI's mouth when they are (sometimes) powerful and capable but think they aren't versus the player's paper fleet.

That's why it's called diplomacy.

The only real problem I see with the AI is that it isn't tactical enough.

The only time I demand planets from the AI (or have ever been able to) is when my military power is 10x greater than their military power. That sounds pretty realistic to me. And it's real power too.

I have seen the point about going to war. Usually it only costs a few thousand BC.. but maybe the AI wants to go to war in the first place and just needs a reason?

Concerning weapon techs.. In my games the AI is pretty prudent about trading weapons/defense techs with me if I'm being aggressive.

I'd be interested to hear more about the paper fleets you talk about (and some examples). I'd like to learn more of what you all are seeing so I can get a better understanding before I start just disagreeing.

Thanks!

One example of a paper fleet is:
a fleet with just weapons installed built in such a way to maximize the total off/def of your entire navy without concern for weapons that could actually damage the enemy (rock/paper/scissors, right?). The AI doesn't appear to take this into account at all. it also doesn't take into account hull size influence on staying power, from what I can see. Larger hulls should count for more.

Or a few hundred 1/1 fighters under a military starbase array. They could gut anything that attacks them, but only in the array's area of effect.

DarkMadMax is right. Diplomacy is unbalanced and should be tweaked. AI is quite strong when trading techs (some techs are priced very high, others are not) and when trading resource starbases (which are NEVER for sale and that's realistic because they are really valuable).

However, when negotiating wars and selling planets, AI is very weak. For a few techs, AI (especially Drengin and Korath) is willing to attack multiple civs at once, which in 20-30 turns can completely wreck its military. Even a war with good odds usually creates a lot of damage, many expensive ships are lost and few techs surely don't compensate for that.
The other weak AI spot is trading high-quality planets. For a few techs, AI is willing to sell PQ>20 planets, just because they are temporarily underpopulated and non-developed. Such planets have the potential to become AI's main strongpoints in 20-30 turns, but obviously AI is not programmed to take that into trading calculations.

Disabling tech-trade is NOT a solution. All 4X games have tech trading (since Civilization I) and without it, game loses a good deal of its appeal. Increasing difficulty levels to Masochistic or Obscene is also NOT a proper solution. AI diplomacy needs to be tweaked, not alleviated with huge bonuses.

I play on sucidal, with custom yor (only +40 diplo at creation) -not exactly the best diplomats around . Strat is very easy - translators, and then research technologies which are +diplo and those which you can get good trades for. Build galactic bazaar and then game is done.

Some races are harder to trade with than the others (iconian,drath and humans) but it is still doable. Heck I traded all their treaties for a bunch of techs .




Exactly. Might as well remove diplo altogether if going this way





And on the other hand AI wont trade high pop planet even if I offer everything I have and surrender on top of that! The trading values and algorithms should be rebalanced. Planets should be tradeable - but mostly for other planets only (or for A LOT of techs, cash and ships). Same with ships and starbases -you should be able to trade them if you offer similar things in return.

Tech for tech trading is generally fine (albeit I think AI overvalues some and undervalues other techs- unique techs should be a lot more valuable, while the planetary invasion , warp drive and such should be more tradeable) .

Also anyone ever able to trade for influence? - Was always a completely broken option since original game and trough 3 expansions.

I do alway trade for some IP in any trade with AI, to grab anything but the last bc to the AI, but it never had any influence on voting power or so, in every Gal Civ version (I and II)

However it helps reducing how much AI is asking for cash for things if you are willing to trade some of your IP.

Huh? Usually if I want a planet from the AI even if I offered almost every planet I own, along with all my fleets, techs, gold, influence etc., they'd still say no. I would agree that it's quite cheap to make them go to war with each other, but equally they can end the war fairly soon as well.
Also I don't see much wrong with being in a strong position if you can get all the diplo techs, the 2 diplo wonders, and on top of that manage to stay ahead of the AI technologically.

My only real issue is that race specific techs can be traded, which is why I end up having tech trading off in pretty well every game I play .

It all depends on the population of the planet/how long they have had it. A newer planet they won't be attached to yet and can be bought for a song.

My personal favorite way of exploiting that is to ally with the Korath, then encourage them to spore every planet in existence. Planets with no population can be had for 1000-1500 bc, and since I'm allied with them, I can talk to them every turn.

Well, IMO, Civ has the same problem. A lot of players beat high difficulty mostly by cheese like tech whoring and manipulating other AI deficiencies.

I think the tech brokering option in Civ IV helps with the tech whoring a little.

Apparently in gc2 AIs value planet population instead of potential and that just seems dumb. You'd never trade away a PQ10+ planet for less than a testicle or to avoid extermination. For PQ20 it'd be like give me ALL your tech, all your money, a lesser planet, and all your ships - and a testicle.

See, I think the tech trading sounds good in principle but players (and AIs in GC2) abuse it into the ground to the point of it not being fun. There has to be some kind of practical limit. Civ does it a bit witht the "you're becoming too advanced thing" and limits based on how much they like/hate you. GC seems to lack this.

But there's other severe cheese factors too in GC2 - like utterly abusing minors in every conceivable way then taking their juicy planets with ease.

I just bought 7 PQ12 planets and 2 techs for 8000 credits. I am playing terrans with a pretty good diplomatic rating but come on. Also the Torians declared war on me almost immediately but will not accept a peace treaty unless I give them all my techs and all but 1 world. I have now taken 9 Torian worlds through invasion but still they refuse a peace treaty. I would have to agree that diplomacy needs a little work. Disabling tech trading will not resolve buy half an empire for a few credits. Just my 2 cents.

I also support an improvement of diplomacy. In fact I would even buy the new expansion if diplomacy is improved in a future patch. Not only does the Ai have to improve in judging trade proposals, but it would also be awesome if you could offer non-aggression treaties.

Well to be honest, all 4X games have broken diplomacy too. I won't even talk about Civ1 and Civ2 since they're too old to have benefited from decent hardware, but in Civ3 each iteration had a diplo problem that was fixed in a later upgrade, but unfortunately that later upgrade added another diplo problem.
Examples:
- gold per turn. Get a tech from the AI in exchange for gold per turn, then declare war and tadaa! You got a tech for free!
- the Pope strategy. Set your research to 0, earn tons of gold, and buy all the techs for the AI
- strength valuation: early in Civ3 the only thing the AI looked at was your number of units, not their actual strength. So having 25 warriors was 25 times better than having a tank


So yes, AI diplo in Gal Civ needs to be tweaked (particularly regarding trading planets), but as someone who plays a lot of Civ and Galciv, I will say that the diplo is much better in Galciv than in Civ.