Just a basic summary here, haven't played very much yet.

what I noticed:



-Races automatically are suspicious to you when you have borders-links (wormholes,) to them, which is fine as it makes sense in a way.

Sophons immediately (3 turns) attacked me when they discovered me and invaded one of my systems. However, once the possibility came available they offered peace and stopped invading me system.

I found this weird. It is ofcourse possible to have peace and be suspicious but to go from invading to peace is not very logical (definitely given the fact that they only needed 1 more turn and I had no army).

Is there a modifier that takes ongoing invasions and battle into account? because I feel it might be useful to add that.



-I'm very happy that the trading with the AI is now based on the amount of research points of the trading tech; fair deals now



Expect more tomorrow, when I'm further in the game. (I believe I will have more useful notes then, as I'll have met more races and maybe have made an allience and a war.)



Savefiles are included, incase you'd be interested
ail.rar

The described behaviour of the Sophons indeed is strange. Attacking after 3 turns is normal. The AI always does that, when it can, regardless of the mod.

But when it comes to making peace while invading, I wonder how they could.

Because when I invade a system of an AI during cold war and then want to make peace cause they retailiate and stuff, peace stays greyed out for me to offer. So I really don't know why it happened. Will probably try to find out.



There is no modifier for ongoing invasions, only one if you succeeded with one. Also there should no modifier be necessary for that because, as I said, usually you cannot even offer peace while engaged in an invasion.



The fair deals actually weren't even originally intended. They were a positive side-effect from fixing the issue that the AI's wouldn't go to peace with eachother by removing the "Priceoffset", which I then did to all the other deals aswell. In my test game this has caused the AIs to go really cracy with offering trades. And the cool thing: All of the trades they offered were actually reasonable and fair!



As I also continued playing with the mod I've noticed some things aswell. Getting an alliance with someone you have no border with, is peace of cake. This makes trading much easier as you don't have to manually discover their systems and get a complete view on all of them. I feel the AIs to act much more dynamic and less sitting-duck-alike. They always are up to something and are not hindered by "Attitude".

They want an Alliance? They make one.

They are in position to attack someone? They do it.



I find it somewhat strange that after drastically simplifying the diplomacy-model, it seems so much more natural and fluid.

Their peace offer was probably a bug then (?), I'll see if it happens again.



I agree that the AI now handles with more logic then before and is taking actions with valid reason and without lots of detours. And indeed; when not sharing borders you have to try very hard to get them to hate you (declaring war aside.)

The fair deals actually weren't even originally intended. They were a positive side-effect from fixing the issue that the AI's wouldn't go to peace with eachother by removing the "Priceoffset", which I then did to all the other deals aswell. In my test game this has caused the AIs to go really cracy with offering trades. And the cool thing: All of the trades they offered were actually reasonable and fair!

Talk about a positive side effect

adder wrote:
And indeed; when not sharing borders you have to try very hard to get them to hate you (declaring war aside.)

You can try all you want. There is just no way to get them to hate you other than declaring war or colonizing/conquering a system next to them.

The only remaining Approval-Mods I left in place are:



Long Term-Peace (+30)

Warp-Link (-45)

Wormhole (-45)

War (-200)

Cease-Fire (Reset to 0)

So far I'm very happy about the mod!

Tension is what happens when there is a border between two empires. Peace and Trading are still possible in that state. But there also is the chance that the stronger empire declares war on the weaker.

The chance is rather high, and even when they are not stronger they'll likely declare war.

Once I made an alliance with the Automations the Sophons went to war because they where getting sandwiched between us both. I think without the Alliance they wouldn't had declared war (or at least later, because they where not really ready for it.)

Looks like a fantastic mod, Ail - thanks! Sounds like you've restored tech trading as well. I will definitely have a look and report my findings.



Edit - quick update: The mod definitely has the AI going straight from invasion to peace. I just had a peace offer (and accepted it) from the AI that had begun invading my system on that same turn.

adder wrote:
even when they are not stronger they'll likely declare war.

Once I made an alliance with the Automations the Sophons went to war because they where getting sandwiched between us both. I think without the Alliance they wouldn't had declared war (or at least later, because they where not really ready for it.)

That's strange. Are you sure that the Automatons had not already been at war with them and you got just dragged into the war by allying?

Or maybe even the alliance proposal from the Automatons was a direct reaction on a war-declaration from the Sophon?

Because if none of this is the case, then it would mean that the variables available do not act as intended.



@Apheirox or for that matter anyone who recently played the game without the mod aswell:

Is it save to say that that behaviour is NOT present in the normal, unmodded game? Because I'm really not aware of having changed anything in that regard so I wouldn't know why it would act differently.

Well I might be wrong, but your Mod seems to be the issues for the problem Apheirox had - at least it never happend to me without mod.



Btw: Smart move with the negative values, indeed!

Do these things happen after reloading from a saved game? I find that if the AI is in the process of an invasion when I save, quite often on reloading, they will all just leave the planet they are invading immediately on loading.

Update 2012-12-30:



Version 2.4.0:



Made some significant changes.

In order to avoid abuse, you can no longer trade the following things:

Dust, Technologies, Ressources

The alliance-treaty has also been removed, since alliances always tended to cause glitchy behaviour.

I have also made new designs for the standard-starting military-ships, so the AI (as well as the careless player) no longer build those things that only use 65/100 tonnage.

Default will be 10 Kinetic-Weapons and 5 Kinetic-Defenses.

This slightly differs for Craver, Hissho and Pilgrim as those either start with a weapon or have less tonnage than the others.



Update 2012-12-19:



Version 2.3.0:



Since the AI is now able to retreat, I gave back the corresponding cards.

I also removed several changes from 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 as I could convince Meedoc to include them into the patch.

Namedly: AIS-issue, scrap-order, food-requirement-formula.

However, I told the AI to not go for the Wonder-Victory anymore because for scenarios where that victory type was disabled or already fullfilled, they still would build a lot of thos extremely expensive things.

Note: Change the starting line to "+mod PolarisDiplomacy". Savegames are kept compatible as only the name of the folder changed, not the actual name of the Mod, which still is "Diplomacy Mod"



I will most likely start working on a "real" mod soon, that actually changes some things instead of mainly doing workarounds for things that in my opinion should have been that way in the first place.



Update 2012-12-06:



Version 2.2.1:

Order in which AI scraps stuff reassorted to scrap ships before infrastructure.

Increased the Approval the AI aims to get to 80.



Update 2012-12-01:



Version 2.2.0:

The Advanced Industrial Systems no longer steal the food from your growing population and now can be built without the fear of stoping your growth.

Several workarounds that made sure the AI won't build the A.I.S. before it had Supercities were removed.

Repaired Food-Need-Formula for Governor and AI to work like before 1.0.38 (formula is once again "MaxSystemPopulation²*FoodPerPop/Population" instead of "MaxSystemPopulation*10")

Fixed a modding-bug with restoreable Wonders (this will require to start a new game in order to work)

Reduced the AI's love for the Wonder-Victory-Building from 3*Everything (total of 12) to 4 Approval so they shall not block all of their systems with a building that has little purpose besides making someone win.



Update 2012-11-28:



New Version for 1.0.38:



Removed Workaround of old cheap maintainance for Bankrupcy-Issue as this is supposed to be fixed in 1.0.38.

Redid HeroAbilities.xml to create Non-Hybrid-AI-Heros with the new patch.

Did some changes to War-Fatigue.

Removed unneccessary things from the mod after understanding more about how mod-loading works.



Update 2012-11-16:



Removed timer before AI could declare war. (They might now declare war as soon as you meet)



Alliances now drain 1 approval each turn down to -45 so they can get broken and are not permanent anymore.



Reintroduced War-Fatigue per turn for AI, so they can make peace with someone whom they could reach in the past but cannot reach anymore.



Update 2012-11-06:



Hopefully fixed an issue were the AI would make peace even when it had an invasion going.



I know I've linked it in other Threads, but I'd like to have a separte threat to discuss it and possible improvements.



This mod includes the changes from the All-AIL-Mods-Mod, has the old Upkeep-values and adds something completly new:



A rework of the diplomacy model.



Here is how it basically works:



Instead of having a wide range of "Attitude"-Values an AI can have for any other Empire in the game, I have kinda replaced how that worked by a different approach.



There are now only 4 "states" the Attitude can have. Most of the stuff that affected attitude before now does nothing.



The 4 states are:



1st: Neutrality

2nd: Good Relation

3rd: Tension

4th: War



Neutrality is the state where it starts with and goes back to when signing a cease-fire.

Good relation comes automatically after a few turns and when there is no border connecting the empires. All positive deals are allowed during good relations.

Tension is what happens when there is a border between two empires. Peace and Trading are still possible in that state. But there also is the chance that the stronger empire declares war on the weaker.

War, as I said, will now never be declared without a border and the AI will try to not get into another war while it is involved in one.



The overall purpose of that is to create much more logical behaviour.

AIs now will try to conquer their weaker neighbours while having good terms with other empires. This basically imitates most human players playstyle when going for a militaristic victory-type.

Staying completely out of trouble shall be almost impossible with this mod. Sooner or later conflict will be unavoidable.



So, I'm now looking for volunteers who try it out and report back if it works as advertised in this thread. ^^



Installation-Instructions:

• Unzip into (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding. This will create a new directory (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding\Diplomacy containing a file index.xml and several subdirectories.
• In the main game menu, click the MODS button, find the mod "Diplomacy", select it and click load.
• To keep the mod loaded: find "Endless Space" in the Steam Library, right click, select properties, and click the "set launch options" button. Add "+mod PolarisDiplomacy" to the game launch command line.
  
  

I think it was coincidence then. My war-term does not include looking for allies so they might have thought they can beat you alone but did not even consider your allies.



This of course is a flaw in the term. I could modify it so that it won't declare war on an alliance unless it has one itself. But then again that could be bad if they would be stronger than the allies alone and there's noone left to ally with.



Actually I would need to compare the military strength of a whole alliance instead of just an empire.

I think I found what causes the "peace even while invading issue".



"- HaveWaitingPeriod : Check if empire has a waiting period with the other empire (value boolean)"

It seems to do exactly the opposite of what the value suggests.

It is set to



in the unmodded XML.



To me that meant: It doesn't do anything anyways. But apparently having it set to "False" is exactly what prevents them from making peace while invading.

Also this seems to be new in 1.0.30 so my mod which was based on an older version did not include it.

Seems indeed weird that "false" prevents them from peace when invading. good catch.

Actually I would need to compare the military strength of a whole alliance instead of just an empire.

Would this be much work? as I feel it would increase the quality of the mod even more

I just uploaded an update to the mod. I changed it to use this value but if it really was a good catch can only be found out by further testing. ^^



I can't compare the military strength at all. You cannot really access other empires.



There's only the built in variable: "BetterMilitaryPower : Check if i have a better military power than my current enemy (value boolean)"



With "I need to" I meant that at first Amplitude needs to provide me with a way to. ^^



I mean they kinda know what other stuff I want to have for diplomacy... like knowing which race I am or if I have a border. (Stuff like that would allow to keep the Attitude-model in place while having different races act differently. Like having an additional race-specific war-term where the Cravers wouldn't care for Attitude but the Pilgrims or so would.

Ail wrote:
... I mean they kinda know what other stuff I want to have for diplomacy... like knowing which race I am or if I have a border. (Stuff like that would allow to keep the Attitude-model in place while having different races act differently. Like having an additional race-specific war-term where the Cravers wouldn't care for Attitude but the Pilgrims or so would.

This Attitude Stuff seems to be a nice idea, it would make the game more realistic to me

Since testing brought up some sub-ideal issues, I have made some adjustments:



Removed timer before AI could declare war. (They might now declare war as soon as you meet)

Alliances now drain 1 approval each turn down to -45 so they can get broken and are not permanent anymore.

Reintroduced War-Fatigue per turn for AI, so they can make peace with someone whom they could reach in the past but cannot reach anymore.

The new version is pretty funny. The AI declares war almost immediately and it's really hard to fight them off on small maps without wormholes.

Is this an open mod? I get taken back to the login screen when I try to download it.

Had this problem before too... Seems to be some problem with the forums-software or so. At least I did not alter any settings to make it not open.

I really wish everybody who attaches a zipfile to a post would include the following workaround.

1. Log out of the forum and log back in.

2. If that does not work, use a different browser (IE vs firefox, etc). There is some problem with cookies being stored.

3. If that does not work, clear your browser cookies.



Most people find #2 works.