TLDR This is in kind of a rant form and i apologize, but basically my suggestion is: "only reveal these statistics once you are allied with somebody (or peace if the devs prefer that): Dust, Dust per turn, Strategic/Luxury resource, Technology, Owned(tradable) Systems. Racial point allocation also should be visible in the lobby, i feel, but that isn't much an issue.



i really don't know why most recent 4x games do this, even the original civilization and civnet did not let you see a players technology or treasury untill you allied them.



as it current stands with diplomacy (specifically MP, which in this thread/context is all i care about), you can not openly trade dust or technology with non peaced players (which i find odd - but okay.), but from the MOMENT you make contact with a faction, you can see their available strategic and luxury resource, their systems, their technology and even their dust treasury, and even their INCOME for god's sake, what the hell? do these tier 1 scout ships carry non encrypted databases of their faction's treasury data? this may seem like a rant but im going to be completely honest, this breaks MP for me in a lot of ways, i can see peaceful or allies seeing these stats but not people who you are at war with, not people who send a single scout ship to one of your star systems, then can look in the diplomacy screen and see all what should be confidential data.



On a less ranting note let me use one game as an example of how this kind of omniscience completely ruins the mp metagame and gameplay experience for me:



i play amoeba based aggressive nations generally, seems od d but i enjoy the awareness i get (So seeing peoples system count in the diplomacy screen doesn't matter, but its still a little silly, score should be the only public visible statistic). in one of my games tonight i played on a huge system with 8 players, 3 left early on and by the 70th turn my aggression forced myself into a deadlock 3 way war, i was alone versus two alliances of players, i had a tech advantage and huge overall fids advantage, and started to mass up around 100 cp in ships, and i was able to pick perfect targets every time, because i'd check the diplomacy screen each time before a invasion to aggro a player, once one players treasury dropped below 1k or so, i knew they couldn't really buy out ships to counter my large fleets or actually break a blockade. i repeated this process for like 50 turns before we had a desync on one of the craver players and then i just overtook the game.



this is one example of how i just used the visible dust data, another great example is resources, sure this could be argued that you can just look on the map, but the map INTENTIONALLY hides the population of planets so you don't know their fids range - you shouldn't be able to look at a readout and see exactly how much of x resource they have, because then it becomes so freaking easy to just prevent an abundance or cause a shortage.



my point is this is silly, while desyncs, lag and a lot of other design flaws exist in this awesome moo inspired game, i feel that this was not only an oversight by the dev team, but a complete disregarding step in the wrong direction - from looking at the readouts asthetics, i feel like a dev put it into the game just because they wanted more data available on the diplomacy page, to make it look shinier, completely overlooking severe issues it creates in the multiplayer midgame interaction. if im wrong on this, can anyone please provide a reasonable counter argument as to why you should be able to see peoples EXACT treasury, dust per turn, technology and resources IMMEDIATELY after having contact with them, even if you haven't even discovered a SINGLE system of theirs, and REGARDLESS of what state of peace you are at with them? i mean hell, if you really want factions who are at war or cold war status to see this kind of data, add in an espionage system exactly like MOO has.





on the tech side Civnet did something interesting no other game has done, if you were at war, neutral or peace with somebody you could trade them anything , on the tech trading screen, you could not see what techs they had that you didn't, only a list of all your available techs, and you could even offer techs that others already knew, and if you had an alliance all tech and treasury information was revealed - this was a truly good implementation of MP interaction. the only other way to see someone's treasury or tech level was to actually build a diplomat and spy on them. and for the love of god somone tell me who thought of those periodical "worlds most rich civ, most productive civ" game wide readouts. the older civ's revealed arbitrary public stats such as population, happiness and wonder count, not strategic information, rofl.. sorry /rantover

On a similar rant - when you quit the game (after for example saving a multiplayer session) you get to see an extremely detailed breakdown and comparison of all players. This can be quite off-putting to players who are far behind and make resuming a game more difficult later on. It also reveals too much of someone's strategy. I'm not keen on this being so available during MP sessions - the odd bits and pieces of info given to all players through a "GNN style" (moo2) news broadcast is fine and even adds ton of immersion but don't give it all away on quitting please.

Yeah the broadcast thing i can live with, its quite silly and doesn't do anything for the immersion for me, but i respect it - but yes, i haven't resumed a MP game yet so that's a very good point, that is just as game breaking.



And to the devs who (possibly) read this, i'm sorry that im voicing such a small minority of the already tiny playerbase that is 4x fans, the players who are hyper competitive. i'd like to see ES give a little more support to those who take their game experience seriously. i mean, if you were building an empire, how would you handle it if some god gave away your strategic information to your enemies: you'd probably blame someone for it, and then execute them for treason. my point is: something like this destroys my immersion.

Thats true, I think, it would be a good thing to be able to choose what information you want to give to another player, so you can trade.

Another thing would be to know things because you spy on someone before, maybe as an ability of your hero, what maybe would make it usefull to buy the spy heroes.

It´s like the thing, that you know before asking, what an AI will do with your trading proposal. So you can make the best deals with them everytime... Is that usefull?

So in short: Yes, you are absolutely right

Yeah, even with this shitty system, with out putting in an espionage system, all you need to do is allow adventurer heroes to have some kind of espionage perk and at least one way to counter it, problem solved.

Good points i could agree. Never knew how to use the shady adventurer heros to get intel on other empires. They are not needed currently as i really could see all i want to know from the diplomacy panel.



How about having the same end-game-stats as ingame one, but only filled with information you get from your allies or when you send out your spies hero for a mission to get intel?