Diplomacy - the futility of negotiating trade sanctions (wars?)

[MartialDoctor]

I've been noticing a trend in my games. I'm not sure if others have been experiencing the same things.

Basically, negotiating other races to start trade sanctions against a race, or negotiating an end to trade sanctions another race has on you, is futile.

In all situations I have encountered, if you negotiate an end to trade sanctions on your own civilization, after giving the other race whatever they desire to satisfy them, they remove the trade sanctions.... and then 1 month later, reinstate them!

If you negotiate another race to start sanctions against said race, and pay them whatever they want, they will start them... and then 1 month later end them!

This is pretty much ridiculous and makes diplomacy around this absolutely worthless. Have others encountered the same situation with this?

And races constantly start and stop trade sanctions with me... so that I constantly get pop ups notifying me of this. It's very annoying that they don't either start them, and keep them, or end them, and really end them (at least for a time period).

I'm not sure if wars are like this or not as I've never negotiated other races to end wars or to start wars. Have others experienced similar experiences with negotiating wars?

[Fishman]

It's a communication difficulty. You're using bad communications equipment, which causes you to be misunderstood. Protip: Phasers are universal communicators.

That aside, I've seen some pretty funny diplomacy exchanges:
Me: Okay, let's stop the war.
Them: No.
Me: Okay, how about we stop the war if you become our slaves?
Them: Okay.

Them: We want to stop being your slaves now.
Me: "No, you must remain our slaves."
Them: "We are sad about this."

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why I would ever agree to have them NOT be my slaves...they whine a whole lot less about stuff this way. All the empires that I've made my slaves are merely ANGRY or even ANNOYED with me rather than FURIOUS!

[ASHBERY76]

That is because trade sanctions is just based on relation level.I suppose you should bride them to better relations in that month time scale or just not bother ending santions.

I see no solution with the present system apart from enforced treaty lengths.

[Fishers of Men]

I have noticed these problems for quite some time. Actually, they were always there from the time of DW release. I certainly am very frustruated with how this works and do not use the trade sanction requests anymore. It seems the other empire should be paying me to stop my sanctions against them, not the other way around. Also, it seems a waste of credits to pay another empire to start trade sanctions against another empire only to see that shortly they have lifted those sanctions.

The whole diplomatic part of the game needs a lot of work. The subjugation part comes to mind. I am hoping this will be addressed before too long because it takes away a major part of the game, for me.

FoM

[Fishman]

The subjugation dialogues are some of the best I've ever heard, though. I mean, come on: "No, you must remain our slaves."

[MartialDoctor]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

That is because trade sanctions is just based on relation level.I suppose you should bride them to better relations in that month time scale or just not bother ending santions.

Well, my thoughts would be, in the very least, that negotiating an end to sanctions would automatically do that. You typically have to pay a lot just to get a negotiation to occur.

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76
I see no solution with the present system apart from enforced treaty lengths.

That would be one idea. Another would be that to have a "peace treaty" length of time where, if it were to be broken, a huge diplomatic hit is suffered (as in EU3).

[MartialDoctor]

ORIGINAL: Fishers of Men

The whole diplomatic part of the game needs a lot of work. The subjugation part comes to mind. I am hoping this will be addressed before too long because it takes away a major part of the game, for me.

FoM

I totally agree. That's why I'm bringing this up! [8D]

[Gareth_Bryne]

An idea is to make a treaty unbreakable for a certain minimum amount of time, which goes up depending on your general reputation, relations with race in question. The lower your reputation, the shorter the treaty lock duration time, but the less chance you will be offered it at all.
Another option is to make the treaty breach influence your empire happiness. Wouldn't it be interesting to see several rebellions sprout all over your empire as a result?

[ASHBERY76]

A new Diplomat character for next expansion that obviously would be needed to conduct deals..This would put a hold on the spamming treaty issues and put a natural time limit on said issues because he would work like an ambassador.

[Gareth_Bryne]

The ambassador could do that, just in that case there should be more of them...

[Bebop Cola]

I'll start by saying I like the idea of having Ambassadors. It makes a certain sense that I should need to maintain an ambassadorial presence with the foreign empire in order to officiate treaties, whether they are trade pacts, alliances, or an agreement to end a war. That said, I'm not really a huge fan of hard-coded time limits for treaties. Regardless if the mechanic is because the time limit is built into the treaty or my Ambassador is just "too busy," unbreakable treaties just feel artificial. It may give my ambassador ulcers, but I'm neither beholden to him or some silly piece of paper when I'm deciding if I want to clear an observation post encroaching on my territory or acquiring a much needed resource node. The ambassador is there to clean up the resultant mess, not to have his secretary tell me, the Emperor of Terra, that he can't come to the phone right now. Breaking a treaty should have a stiff reputation and relationship hit, but at the end of the day I should be able to pick up the red phone and tell the Mortalens, "We're at war. Prepare to suck it."

That said, I would like to see some sanity in the diplomacy system in regards to how Empires interact. In my current game the Teekans and Securans are taking turns warring with the Dhayut. War is declared, they fight for a few months, then establish peace. A few days later they declare war again. Rinse and repeat. Hating the Dhayut is all fine and good, they're creepy bug people after-all, but this constant dance of war and peace is silly. There is already a reputation hit associated with declaring war, but the Dhayut actually have a fairly decent reputation so I'm not entirely sure why the Securans or the Teekans haven't tanked their reputations to hell with these shenanigans. Maybe that reputation hit needs to be stiffened up a bit, or maybe an additional hit needs to be levied for any party declaring war within a certain time limit after accepting a peace deal.

What I think might be required is an increase to the weights placed on empire reputation. The diplomatic penalty associated with reputation usually seems pretty slight, and it often seems like I can overcome it by simply capturing a node for one of the ultra-rare resources and agreeing to trade it. Maybe the willingness to enter into treaties is a bit more complex behind the scenes than the diplomatic assessment belies, but it seems to me that empire reputation needs to have some more substantive teeth to it. Moreover, reputation should be easier to drop than it is to raise. It makes sense that competitors and potential enemies are judged first by threat level. Past misdeeds should be remembered more than how many pirate bases you've destroyed. Meeting mutual defense pact obligations is all fine and good but, while it shouldn't equate to immediately severing the relationship, that one time you said no is probably more memorable than the times you said yes simply because that could be the time that their defenses collapse and their colonies are enslaved. Nothing really bad happened when you helped before, hooray for that and all, but this time something did and you could have stopped it had you met your treaty obligations.

On a minor note, I'm not sure what the reputation buff is for pirate-hunting, but it should probably be negligible. The Mortalen Hegemony, known for bombarding the Atuuk to extinction and forcing the Securans to become pleasure slaves, should not get to be the hero of the galaxy because they simply cleaned up the pirate bases harassing their shipping. Pirate-hunting is simply keeping order in one's sphere, and could reasonably be seen as more of a selfish endeavor than a noble one.

[Fishman]

Well, the reason the Teekans and the Securans keep doing that is because those people have no stomach for war and the the entire "being at war" thing rapidly tires the poor dears out. Since they declare war merely "Because I hate you and my miltary is big enough to try", without any clearly defined purpose for going to war, they fight, get a bloody nose somewhere, and call it quits. Then the war weariness resets and they do it again.

This behavior makes little apparent sense because it is incomprehensible to human motives: Human players declare war for a purpose with a plan and realistic goals in mind, and fight until those goals are met, or they get tired of trying. AI players have no realistic goals and no plan for achieving them, so they just fight for no reason.

[Keston]

I'm not suggesting they are a perfect mechanism, but trade sanctions allow Blockades, which allow shooting against blockade runners, which can escalate to war, just as we might expect. How many games represent border clashes/skirmishing/shooting confrontations and provocations short of an official war? Hurrah for DW.

Regarding on-again, off-again warfare, there are in human history usually a mix of cultural, political, economic, or military motives behind that pattern of conflict, going right back to the olden days of wooden clubs and spears. Many of us in the west and perhaps especially in my country were all too caught up in the paradigm of peace/war dichotomy prevalent in the West from the 19th to the late 20th century with a pattern of total wars and then Mutual Assured Destruction hanging over our heads. Others realized that "peace" is just a continuation of war by other means.

[Sirian]

I think it would help diplomacy if it was introdured the concept of a hysteresis.

In short, that woulod mean to have 2 thresholds for something to happen (trade sanctions, war, etc...) one for rising relations and one for falling relations. If the relations drop to the level where there are trade sanctions, it has to rise up to the other (higher) level where they are lifted again.

This effectively stops on-off sanctioning.