Cannot understand AI attitudes

[cuendillar]

Attitudes makes such a great difference for diplomacy, but there's nothing in the game explaining what affects it. Some of them, I think I get - but the rest are a mystery to me, especially what I can do to affect it. The wiki describes pretty well what the different attitudes mean, but it say nothing about what determines them.

Cossacks let me change my own attitude, but haven't noticed exactly what that accomplishes except for 'threatened' being useful to set up alliances with their rivals.

The ones I understand to some degree:
Rivalry - AI put me as rival, but sometimes it's quite unclear why.
Loyal/Disloyal/Rebellious - whether the vassals liberty desire is below or above 50/100. Subject interaction changes this directly, so it's straightforward.
Outraged - they're in coalition territory (your AE is 50+ and relations are negative) but may not have joined due to being in a truce. AE decreases over time, getting relations to positive would also change it.
Unknown - They haven't discovered you yet, send a unit to them and it'll change. I presume.


It would be incredibly useful to know what to do to make a neutral nation friendly, or a hostile one to change to non-hostile. Even if it's random, there should still be factors changing the probabilities.


Anyone can help me out with this?

 

[Balkri]

For a nation to stop being hostile to you they need to change their attention to someone else and sometimes it will change when a rival of your nation start threatening them.

Think something like the French-england rivalry across most of the "modern age" that just started to disapeared in the time of Bismarck and the unification of Germany (although they joined a few times earlier to stop russians ambitions over the crumbling Ottoman empire)

For example in my Mamluk game Qara Qoyunlu were hostile to me after I took some provinces that they whanted in Iraq (mostly Bagdad, Al Raqa and Mosul), but as soon as the Ottomans and Persia (not in alliance luckily) started threatening them, they changed their status from hostile to threatened because I was no loger targeting their provinces and my rivals became the new threat to them.

They still feel threatened by me because I was bordering them and my army was way stronger than their army. But to survive the ottoman and Persian threat they accepted my "protection".

Of course this was posible because I only took provinces that they wanted, if I had taken cores from them... well you need like 150 years after their culture there is gone to make the core disapear, until then the outraged will remain.

 

[estile606]

I am not 100% sure what causes hostile, other than taking their land, or domineering, but im pretty sure both are affected by relations. The hostile ones, and I think the domineering ones also turn neutral when you get to 100 relations

 

[DanubianCossak]

It would be incredibly useful to know what to do to make a neutral nation friendly, or a hostile one to change to non-hostile. Even if it's random, there should still be factors changing the probabilities.

A number of things.

-Distance: there is a distance that modifies AI interest in you; if you are beyond that distance, they will pretty much always be neutral to you, unless, i believe, your annexation of land spreads to them in which case they might go outraged and coalition.
-General AI strategic overview. AI has a number of mechanic that allow it to assign its immediate surroundings under various states; you have rivalries that can chain, so for example if AI A rivals AI B and AI C also rivals AI B, there is a very good chance AI A will seek to befriend and ally AI B. Friend of my enemy is my friend. There is also that relatively new powerbalance calculation, which i have no clue how it works.
-AIs generate a list of tasks they want to perform, this mostly comes down to provinces they wish to conquer. They have primary provinces (to go after) and utility provinces (provinces they will grab mostly from secondary war participants if they can). AFAIK these provinces are always neighboring their own (also includes 1 sea province away), but maybe there could be exceptions with missions/decisions that require conquest of provinces that are overseas, not 100% sure. But if you are next to Ottomans and your province ends up on that list - and it most likely will - there isnt really anything you can do about it in practical terms. Note that it seems (unless this was changed) that rivalries modify the conquest wish list in that AIs will always annex land off of neighbor rival, whether it falls into their wish list of strategic interest or not. If AI has a country set as rival it will pretty much try to literally destroy it (either by releasing stuff or annexing it eventually).

 

[qwertzuiop]

Cossacks let me change my own attitude, but haven't noticed exactly what that accomplishes except for 'threatened' being useful to set up alliances with their rivals.

If you have a vassal bordering another country (but you don't border it), setting them as hostile and marking one of their bordering provinces as vital interest is useful because it will make your vassal fabricate a claim on them (though I'm not sure whether both hostile and vital interest are even needed for that, one of those two might be enough already, never tried that).

Hostile is also useful to tell one of your allies that you would join an offensive war against the other nation. Friendly is extremely useful because it does the exact opposite: it indicates that you don't want to join an offensive war against that nation. In theory, if you micro-manage attitudes a lot, you can completely prevent unwanted offensive call-to-arms from your allies without even having to untick the "join offensive wars" box in the Diplomacy menu.

There are just three downsides to that approach: 1. as already mentioned, it's a lot of micro-management if your ally borders a lot of other nations, 2. it doesn't work if some of the other nations are your rivals (as you cannot set your rivals to Friendly) and 3. sometimes you actually want to get called in to gain favours with your allies (though that's situational). Apart from that, it works perfectly.