I can cope, now that I comprehend it, and you've confirmed I was right. I don't know why I always assumed it mattered about the diagonal. I guess because in planar conquest the recent release a week ago that's a clone of master of magic the diagonals don't count as territory.
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On diplomacy.
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How do the computer players respond to threats and bribes? I almost never use the "threaten" option unless I'm about to go to war anyway. I use bribery when I'm desperate for a peace treaty, but it never works. Stuff like "threaten to break Alliance" just seems stupid to say, it's a needless provocation that can only end poorly. What is the point of all these options? What did the developers intend that we do with them? Do they work the same way in CoM?
(June 15th, 2016, 01:54)Tiltowait Wrote: How do the computer players respond to threats and bribes? I almost never use the "threaten" option unless I'm about to go to war anyway. I use bribery when I'm desperate for a peace treaty, but it never works. Stuff like "threaten to break Alliance" just seems stupid to say, it's a needless provocation that can only end poorly. What is the point of all these options? What did the developers intend that we do with them? Do they work the same way in CoM? There actually is no "threaten to break Alliance" option in the game. There only is "Break Alliance" which breaks your alliance. You can have the same result by attacking them but that carries an additional penalty for attacking despite the treaty. "Threaten to attack" is basically the replacement of "Declare war" which surprisingly isn't an option. If you fail the roll you're at war. If not, you get a free peace treaty (even without having to be at war!) and gold/spells. See http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Play..._to_attack for details. The point of it is to force the AI to decide if they want a formal war, or peace. If they start attacking you without a war declaration, threatening them can make them stop doing that - or start the war. Bribing them with tribute increases visible relation. Since treaties generally factor in military strength and a bunch of other modifiers, offering bribes will only work for making a treaty if visible relation is the only blocking factor (or if you can raise it so much that it offsets the others). This is fortunately often the case, although having overly weak military can be a problem. The problem with using bribes for peace is that peace uses a -200 to 200 variable on top of the visible relation. If you are on the far lower end, the +8 to 16 points of giving a spell will not help much. Also, gold bribes do not affect the peace variable so they are ineffective for that. This is mostly due to the change in how peace works. In the vanilla game you always had the peace variable going up on its own so it wasn't a preventing factor against peace. In 1.50 you need at least 50% of their military for it to go up and the process is slower. It might be a good idea to alter bribes so they have a larger impact on the peace variable - especially gold should at least matter...although I can understand the logic, if they have the force to take your gold away with conquest anyway, why care about a gold bribe? |
