Let me preface this by saying I'm not that advanced a player yet, but that I have played many, many similar games extensively in the past. I also have never played pre-Dysharmony.



That being said, the AI, from a diplomacy point of view, is capricious and quite possibly psychotic in this game.



I'm on a 4-empire game in a 4-Spiral galaxy with the Pilgrims, Sowers, and UE. I'm on around turn 170 or so, and doing quite well, winning a two-front war against the Sowers and UE together.



The Pilgrims have been my allies since about turn 50. Sort of...



Every so often, they break their alliance and all trade agreements with me arbitrarily. No event seems to have caused this. Then, a few turns later, they re-propose the alliance and a bunch of trade agreements (usually the exact same ones), again seemingly without any cause at all. If this happened once, I'd call it a fluke, or maybe a response to something I didn't realize I did. But it's happened seven times. That, to me, is... maybe not a bug, exactly? But an AI routine stuck in some kind of quirky, complex looping behavior.



Is there any sort of coding in the diplomacy AI that discourages the AI from breaking deals unless a certain unhappiness threshold is breached? If not, maybe there should be, to make them seem a bit less random and... off. If so, maybe it should be tweaked up just a bit?



Then again, this is based on a single game, and a single empire, so I may just be reading too much into it, or failing to understand what I'm doing to piss them off. (They're at war with both other empires too though, so I doubt me attacking them would anger the Pilgrims).



On the other hand, twice now the UE has attempted to sue for peace, then after 10-20 turns, declared war again. This... could be a function of the same glitch. But it could also be sound strategy. Sue for peace to give yourself time to recuperate and rebuild, then in a couple of decades when the new generation is ready to go to war, go back to "finish what they started" (and get their asses kicked harder, not to mention, I'm not falling for their trick a third time)

The diplomatic behaviour was completely redone in disharmony.

It is a lot more interesting than before but certainly looks a little strange at times.



The old one was very easy to understand, as it was purely attitude-based. But now a lot of other things besides the attitude play into it.



Maybe it's a loophole like that:

"This guy is too strong, I cannot assist him!"

"I need a partner for trading, let's ask this guy!"

Maybe the number representing the urge to do the one or the other are very close and whenever they have one thing, the other gets the upper hand.

I noticed this as well. The AI tends to declare war to you out of the blue or break agreements for no reason.

They also like to attack just to flee in the first round, even if they are stronger than you. It's very odd.

I think many trade agreements are already broken automatically after the 20th turn, although it would be nice if the game was more explicit about such things. Also, I've noticed that the A.I. will declare war without provocation sometimes if their military is massively stronger than yours, even the "good" aligned factions.

Yeah, I've noticed this too, Diplomacy needs to be the next thing they work on. Personally I think they should add a "loyalty" system which helps override things like stats and numbers and other weird things telling AI factions what to do. If you've had 250 turns of peace, open borders, trade and tribute to a faction, and helped them when they needed it, they should be "loyal" to you as a friend and take dealing with you very, very seriously, and not cancel deals and break alliances for no reason. It would also be nice if races could "mediate" with other races, attempting to convince them to do things, like sign a ceasefire with each other.

Yeah diplomacy can be a bit tweaky. I wish they'd take a look at tech trading priorities. Right now its redicoulously hard to do a tech trade that's anywhere close to being fair, yet they'll give it away for open borders and cooperation treaties. I actually consider that a good thing as I've made deals because of free tech that I wouldn't have done otherwise, which means thery're bribery is working



Yet when I'm offereing a 2 to 1 or more tech deal with someone who's "very close" they still won't accept it. I understand if they don't want to trade higher tech for multiple lower techs, but they won't do it even when its even tech level wise.

Lord_Proteus wrote:
Yeah, I've noticed this too, Diplomacy needs to be the next thing they work on. Personally I think they should add a "loyalty" system which helps override things like stats and numbers and other weird things telling AI factions what to do. If you've had 250 turns of peace, open borders, trade and tribute to a faction, and helped them when they needed it, they should be "loyal" to you as a friend and take dealing with you very, very seriously, and not cancel deals and break alliances for no reason. It would also be nice if races could "mediate" with other races, attempting to convince them to do things, like sign a ceasefire with each other.

This is a very good and realistic idea. The longer people are friends/allies, the more weight their opinion hold, and the less likely the AI will change their stance on them. Also, whoever breaks the alliance should get negative points equal to the number of positive points they had for the alliance. Not just with the person they declared war on, but also with their friends and allies, and in lesser amounts with all other factions (nobody like traitors, not even traitors).

I've had a similar experience to the OP. In my game, it was the Automatons who kept on leaving my alliance only to invite me, several turns later, to an alliance. I could never understand what was triggering them to leave the alliance in the first place.



Sometimes they would leave my alliance, and then a couple of turns later they would show up in the diplomacy wheel as allied with the weakest faction in the game. So they left an alliance with the two most powerful factions, in order to hook up with the guys who were on the verge of extinction? It really is super weird.



I've also seen the behaviour reported by Neowitch where a stronger enemy fleet attacks me, and retreats in the first round. And by "retreat", I mean move straight past the system my fleet was supposedly guarding and deeper into my territory, which is ... umm ... yeah.

direvus wrote:


I've also seen the behaviour reported by Neowitch where a stronger enemy fleet attacks me, and retreats in the first round. And by "retreat", I mean move straight past the system my fleet was supposedly guarding and deeper into my territory, which is ... umm ... yeah.

Let me guess... they retreat when their fleet is bigger but they never retreat when they would lose, right?



Just found this thing in the Beta of the next patch... And I find it disturbing that you are one of the only players to have reported that.

It's clearly a bug and it is even easily fixable because it looks like they had forgotten to remove some weird stuff from the XML-file that is controlling the AI-Card-Picking behaviour.

Ail wrote:
Let me guess... they retreat when their fleet is bigger but they never retreat when they would lose, right?



Just found this thing in the Beta of the next patch... And I find it disturbing that you are one of the only players to have reported that.

It's clearly a bug and it is even easily fixable because it looks like they had forgotten to remove some weird stuff from the XML-file that is controlling the AI-Card-Picking behaviour.

That explains why I've found those scouts to be a thousand times less annoying lately!

If you wanna fix it for yourself go to:



c:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\Endless Space Beta\Public_xp1\AI\Parameters\AIParametersBattleCard_Xp1_Locales.xml



And replace that:





























by that:



























and that:





































by that: