Diplomacy needs to be reworked

[Walayimuna]

The current limitations on diplomacy are too restricting, compared to previous iterations of the franchise, the current system is so limited it makes almost no difference to have it in-game.

For example, if I want to trade items with a AI empire, I need to trade them.... one by one.... and I can't select anything else besides gold or mana for it.

The entire system should allow you to trade everything for everything,

- Treaties, like making peace in exchange of provinces/items,

- Trade units and provinces to other empires and city states

- Trade magic spells

- Trade diplomatic status with other players, like make peace or go to war with another player or city state.

- Trade vassalage of city states

and so on

 

[Illustrious-Crap7379]

I think the main reason of dumbing down diplomacy is to fight all these AI abuses from previous AoWs. I still remember AoW Planetfall where you send some scout to spam forward bases somewhere on the coasts far away in the other part of the map and then sell them to random AI players for lots of cosmite/energy, completely destroying their economy, and make them hate each other because all these forward bases now bordering other forward bases of other AI players. Or even worse - form an alliance with AI#1, declare war to AI#2, build a forward base, sell it to AI#1, then let AI#2 capture it, then retake it and sell it to AI#1 again, repeat ^_^

Oh, and AoW3... where you summon mount eggs every turn and then sell them to everyone, lol. All their gold and mana belong to you, while their inventories are filled with useless eggs.

There were some other exploits, but I forgot about them, I think there was something with mana/gold trade related to one-time and per turn and ruler relation towards you in AoW3. Sometimes you could generate resources by literally robbing them, because they love you. May be gift spam to make them love you first, and then per-turn trade or something like that?

The more diplomatic options devs give to players, the more abuses the game will have, unfortunately. May be it can be added as optional settings to map advanced settings for those, who just want to play game and enjoy diplomacy and not abuse poor AI.

 

[Walayimuna]

That's just poor programming on the value of items being traded

Just make it so that, if the AI already has the item, it doesn't want another of the same kind/slot, seems pretty simple.

Limiting absurdly like it is right now feels awful and wrong.