[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Diplomacy problems and ideas (PR#8394)

["Per Inge Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=8394 >

On Thu, 20 May 2004, Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> I took some time to read the archive and I am glad you are also not happy
> with your original model. An alliance with an all-powerful leader is a
> pain to be in.

What about a named alliance with votes before war is declared or anyone
else is allow to join? Would this also be a pain?

> Notation: A and B are in alliance. C is another player.
>
> Rule 1: Alliance is a mutual protection agreement, nothing more.If C
> declares war on A it will be immediately at war with C as well (through no
> additional reputation loss to anyone).
>
> Rule 2: If A is at war with C and B is not, A has a right to ask B to
> declare war or nullify the alliance.If the second option is chosen by B,
> it is B who suffers the penalty (later on technical implementation).If B
> chooses to declare war, there is no reputation penalty (or even a bonus?).
>
> Rule3: If both A and B are at war with C, (a) B may agree on a cease-fire
> with C, (b) B may sign a peace treaty with C, but with a certain
> reputation loss, (c) B may not enter into an alliance with C.

Minus some of the reputation stuff, this is pretty much as the code stands
today. The cascading war declarations is a problem, though, so at the very
least they should not push an existing alliance straight into war but stop
at peace. Eg if A&B and B&C and A declares war on C, B now declares war on
A to honour its alliance with C, to give him a chance to decide which side
he wants to be on.

The cascading war stuff is in general pretty non-transparent and
frustrating. So I think we should drop it, and instead only cascade
alliances into peace treaties to avoid the dread love-love-hate triangle.

> Optional amendment: The penalty in rule 3(b) is aimed at preventing people
> from formally fulfiling their obligations to an ally and then stopping the
> war right away.Instead, we can create a "deferred penalty": if B
> declares war on C either through aggression of C or through a request from
> A, it suffers no reputation penalty unless he stops the war too soon.
> This "deferred penalty" slowly decreases to zero as the war goes on.
>
> Technical note: How to implement A's ultimatum in rule 2?  Simple, no
> need for dialogs, A just puts B on a countdown. In X turns B will
> automatically declare war unless he denounces the alliance (and suffers
> the penalty) or A removes the countdown manually or by stopping the war
> with C.
>
> So basically it's the same as Per's ultimatum but without much GUI and
> withsome time to think.

It is very complicated, not transparent and extremely hard to extend to
further forms of diplomacy. The AI pretty much does the above already by
keeping track of patience towards other players and having its own concept
of alliance leaders. It am not very satisfied with it.

The goals of the original patch was not just to fix love-love-hate (this
was already fixed), nor just to fix cascading war declarations (cascading
peace treaties can fix this), but also allow in-game creation of teams.

While I think the original patch now is pretty flawed, I still do not
think Freeciv diplomacy model is very good (esp not for single-player).
Please look at the original post in this thread and comment on that
proposal.

  - Per