If your not going for a diplomatic victory, is researching and making alliances ever worth the effort? Thanks in advance.

It all depends on your situation in the game, if you're next door to a rampaging Necrophage player or something and you'll need allies, definitely go for it. I always go for the "offer peace" tech though, starting a war you can't finish obviously isn't the best idea



Word of warning, I've been locked out of the market by an AI Roving Clans that I was allied with before. Not sure how often this sort of thing happens with other factions, maybe it was my fault for trusting those devious merchants...

DivisionDTD wrote:
Word of warning, I've been locked out of the market by an AI Roving Clans that I was allied with before. Not sure how often this sort of thing happens with other factions, maybe it was my fault for trusting those devious merchants...

Ugh, I hate this. Factions often seem to stand on their pulpit, call you evil as do silly things like this. I often end up killing Roving Clans AIs as they use this so ridiculously. Actually, I've recently avoided adding them to games because I'm sick of killing them. But other factions have their own less annoying versions.



Turn X: "Oh hi, it's nice to meet you!"

Turn X+1: "War is the cost for your attitude!" or "Billy is our Ally too, I hope you treat him better than you've treated us!"



Oh.



Or perhaps you paid them for opening their borders, there is nothing to stop them revoking that privilege one turn later. To bring this back to the OP's question, I never assume that AI will consider past actions or deals, so I generally keep everyone at truce/cold war. I want the ability to kill them if their behaviour becomes absurd enough.

While I have never bothered researching any of the diplomacy technologies, I've been positively surprised by the AIs willingness to ally on the harder difficulties. Multiple times I have also witnessed the AI offering me the technology required for a diplomatic deal as part of the peace-bargain. In my current game the Wildwalkers had begun rising considerably higher than everyone else on the score screen. Soon after the Roving Clans who were on the opposite side of the world, and second on the score list, offered me an extremely generous Alliance-proposal which I assume to be an attempt to use me as a bulwark against the ever expanding elves.

Let's just all agree that meaningful diplomacy doesn't exist in this game currently. Diplomatically, the game is slightly better than ES and slightly less bipolar that the Warlock series, but yea.. there is no real diplomacy to speak of. Why would the Cultists and Necrophages be terrified of you?

Nasarog wrote:
Let's just all agree that meaningful diplomacy doesn't exist in this game currently. Diplomatically, the game is slightly better than ES and slightly less bipolar that the Warlock series, but yea.. there is no real diplomacy to speak of. Why would the Cultists and Necrophages be terrified of you?

I agree 100%. Have they mentioned anything about future plans for diplomacy?

I've had a trade war with the Roving Clans in my yesterday's game. Apparently they banned me whenever they could. I then had a Market Ban Nullification plan cycle in addition to my Empire Plan cycle. When it became almost unaffordable they decided to drop that silliness by themselves and remove the ban. Pleasantly surprised really.



In general:



Each faction should have its own personality which is also expressed by having their own texts and variations of them. Moreover there should be a proper casus belli system. Not just something based on "my attitudes". If they want to declare war they should have a good set of reasons and not just make it a final coming face-to-face with my so-called attitude. Heck, they may even not be upfront about the reasons, they may just dislike me or regard me as nemesis but it should be more assessable. By that I also mean "higher global score" needs to go, that is not a good reason in diplomacy and certainly killing immersion.

Raven wrote:
I've had a trade war with the Roving Clans in my yesterday's game. Apparently they banned me whenever they could. I then had a Market Ban Nullification plan cycle in addition to my Empire Plan cycle. When it became almost unaffordable they decided to drop that silliness by themselves and remove the ban. Pleasantly surprised really.

Interesting, doesn't that cost you far more than it costs them though?

Yeah, it was confusing, they could have kept it up ad infinitum forcing me to actually resolve this through some proper swords and arrows play. They probably saw my military score and had serious concerns.