Some ideas for other places favours could be used in the game.

[Pancakelord]

Favours are interesting, but they don't really tie in to a lot of game systems. Here are some ideas of where else they could be integrated into:

1. Remove non-hostile AI claims against your territory - friendly AIs just never relinquish their claims on you. Favours could get them to wipe out some claims.
   • 1 favour for 1 claim
   • Either the AI picks which ones it wants to remove (e.g. oldest first),
   • or let players specify (this could work against enemies too, so if you and an Ally both have claims on a 3rd nation's system, you could get them to clear their claims for a favour, instead of you adding another claim on top)
2. Postpone integration as a vassal ("Agreement of Self Governance")
   • 1 favour postpones an in-progress integration by X years
     • (or is used to sign an agreement with your liege that they wont integrate you for X years, scaling with number of favours used)
     • E.g. 1 favour = 1-2 years postponed integration.
3. Convince 3rd parties to join/vote against wars for favours. Right now AIs cant be persuaded to join a war at all, either they're all in, or they are not.
   • This could be applicable to both federation war votes and votes outside of federations.
4. Convince a war leader to white peace. Sometimes you get dragged in to a war and cannot get out of it, locking you out of other diplomatic choices.
   • Add a vote system for white peacing when there are multiple factions on a side.
     • So all war participants on your side can vote Yes or No to white peacing out, when the enemy would accept it. With yes/no scaling with diplomatic weight.
     • Favours can then be used to bias AIs towards agreeing to /rejecting making a white peace offer.
5. Let us (And AIs) not honour defensive pacts/independence guarantees. BUT at the same time, if you choose to honour a defensive pact/independence guarantee/support independence (e.g. for protectorates), you will gain favours from the nation you supported.
   • They will owe you for honouring an agreement, rather than forcing you to always honour agreements.
   • Breaking a defensive pact/independence guarantee would add a "Dishonourable" national modifier making militarist pops angry.
6. Fallen empires that like you (e.g. due to events) could "gift" you favours,
   • These FE favours could exclusively be traded back to them for resources, effectively turning them in to coupons for "good" behaviour.
7. For loyal vassals that we have envoys with, we could use favours to "obligate" them to change their internal policies. e.g. banning slavery for X coupons.
8. Tell a megacorp to found branch offices on planet X within Y years for Z favours ("Foreign direct investment deal"). Sometimes AI MCs just will not put branch offices down, a deal like this could make a BO a priority/ make the AI set aside a special EC reserve for founding the branch office.
   • (provided you have a commercial pact / pop count on planet X is high enough to permit it)
   • Your favours are only awarded to them once they found the branch office, not on signing the deal.
9. Convince AIs to abstain from an on-going vote in the GC for X favours
   • provided that if that vote passed, it would not leave them in-breach, if it would, they'd always reject your favour/abstain offer.
10. Convince AIs to retract their proposal from the GC queue for X favours
    • provided it isn't already in the, say, top 3 positions of the queue already.

Thoughts?

 

[Freyby_D]

I was thinking about this again recently and one thing I thought might be interesting would be the ability to trade favors with a third party (I.e., Empire A owes Empire B a favor, B trades it with Empire C for something up-front, Now Empire A owes Empire C a favor).

I'm not sure how well this would work in terms of the AI valuing it (though I don't really see why they couldn't evaluate it as if they were getting a favor directly), but I think it might be an interesting concept (although I'd probably gate it between either a tech-and-policy on having your favors be transferable, which would increase their value, or else behind a GC resolution)

Maybe add like special building in certain cities? Like Pyramids or Genua Walls

 

[GOLANX]

Maybe add like special building in certain cities? Like Pyramids or Genua Walls

How is this a response to that quote, you post in the wrong forum again?

 

[Freyby_D]

How is this a response to that quote, you post in the wrong forum again?

Oh, sorry if it's wrong forum
Thought it's about CC3 forum. Can you share link for correct forum?

 

[DaRealJaymc1130]

I've always felt like this was the case since Utopia and simply was never able to formulate the words and sentences to describe that feeling. This post described that feeling I have perfectly. Brilliant suggestion.

Edit: Oops, wrong post. lmao.

 

[Echo Candor One]

I think with Overlord out, favors could stand a second look, and this thread was really good, so I am bumping it rather than trying to regurgitate these ideas

 

[Lazerus Artificial]

Another thing i would love to see would be a way to "buy systems". We had that once, but it was removed due to AI issues.

using favor to "claim" a system could help with that. a system could have a certain value based on planets, resources and distance. so you would need to spend a certain amount of favors to convince the AI to sell you a system. you would still need to pay for it.

 

[klopkr]

I'd like to use favours to make an empire not sell its mercenaries to your rivals.

 

[Pancakelord]

I think with Overlord out, favors could stand a second look, and this thread was really good, so I am bumping it rather than trying to regurgitate these ideas

Yes there are also now ways to issue trade deals that have complex effects but it does not look like it's possible to restrict acceptance to also trading away certain things in the trade agreement.

I've been doing a quick test with trade deals to abolish claims on you.

Below the empire of Alvus/Korinth Mandate has a claim on the bugs (dont worry about the ui glitch in the second screenshot showing the same empire twice, thats from console swapping countries)

Maybe there is some way to force it in the AI weight field, but there is no "You must also have X in trade agreement" check. which would probably be needed to make it favour-only driven.

trade_action_mod_release_claims = {
    # instant_action
    fire_and_forget = yes

    potential = {
        # the person you send this to, has a claim on you
        From = { has_claim = root }
    }

    on_traded_effect = {
        # the person you send this to, removes all their claims
        every_system_within_border = {
            limit = { always = yes }
            remove_claims = { who = root.from num_of_claims = 10 }
        }
    }
    # no clue how this translates in to AI acceptance
    ai_weight = {
        weight = -500
        modifier = {
            weight = 100
            num_favors = {
                target = root
                value >= 1
            }
        }
    }
}

You could make it so these only appear via event popup, periodically, an ally or whatever once every 5 years will contact you and say hey you have X claims on us, we will give you X favours to drop them.

 

[Spaceception]

Tell a megacorp to found branch offices on planet X within Y years for Z favours ("Foreign direct investment deal"). Sometimes AI MCs just will not put branch offices down, a deal like this could make a BO a priority/ make the AI set aside a special EC reserve for founding the branch office.

• (provided you have a commercial pact / pop count on planet X is high enough to permit it)
• Your favours are only awarded to them once they found the branch office, not on signing the deal.

This is especially useful if you know there's a criminal heritage megacorp, and you want to make sure they don't get the chance to put down any offices.

I've had this problem, had a commercial pact signed and everything because I noticed a criminal megacorp, and my planets sat without branch offices for years until... oh, wait, a branch office notification! Aaaaand the criminal megacorp beat them to the punch.

 

[Senevis]

One thing I'd like to do with favors is cancel out favors. As in, "I owe you one, you owe me one; let's call it even".

Until I was hunting down some GalCom achievements, I probably couldn't have cared less about such a feature, but it would have saved a very friendly and cooperative civilization from "diplomacy by other means" if I could have just pruned the favors they kept getting from their Improve Relations envoy.
Then again, I would have missed out on the laughs for being outvoted with 500k+ diplomatic weight, something like 80% of the supposedly "total" votes.

Reworking how favors work on resolution votes might prove to be the better approach though.

 

[TheRevanchist25]

fantastic ideas!