[Freeciv-Dev] Re: New diplomacy model (PR#8394)

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

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

On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Mike Kaufman wrote:
> responding to a request, I propose two axioms when dealing with diplomacy or
> other stuff:
>
> 1. Nothing should ever delay or extend a timeout during a turn.

As long as we have concurrent movement, we may have to, to solve difficult
diplomacy issues and/or to solve end of turn double moves. I really see no
easy way around this.

> 2. A player should never have to respond to a diplomacy request.
>
> N.B. 2. does not mean there won't be consequences to refusing the request,
>    it just means that diplomacy need not be modal.

Note that in the emissaries proposal, meetings with emissaries is modal,
but you do not need to meet, you can ignore them, and the results of this
is the same as if whatever proposal the emissary had was rejected.

We discussed on irc the possibility of disabling AI diplomacy when the
game is running in timeout - however, this would mean that AI diplomacy
goes by other rules than normal diplomacy, which we so far have been
unwilling to do. It also does not solve the problems for diplomacy in
general. A real solution to the timeout problem is to simply ban diplomacy
in timeout games, but this is draconian.

I think we are stuck here. It does not seem possible to gain any consensus
on how to proceed on this issue, and the problems are real and any
solution will be painful in one way or another. As long as this remains
the situation, I am not going to do any further work in this area, as such
work seems likely to go the way of the named alliance patch, ie nowhere.

That leaves open the question of what to do with the cascading results of
war declarations. I am open to removing the automatic declaration of war
that happens from a player's allies on his attackers and instead just
disband alliances into peace treaties, but anyone who wants to allow
allied-allied-war again, had better turn up with a bulletproof patch to
solve same the issues banning it did. (To see what these issues were,
prepare to do some mail archive diving. The actual ticket, PR#4202, is not
very informative.)

  - Per