After playing MTWII i noticed one thing that could possibly added to BOTFII to add a little spice and variety and is probably essentially just a more complex random event.

In MTWII as most people may know you can get requests / orders from the Pope or council of Nobles to do certain things, blockade certain towns or capture them. or Try and get peace with a certain nation etc. Also one of the more funnier ones was to kill a rival factions king which was a request from his younger son the Prince .

Anyway i wonder if some simple system could be implemented into BOTFII. I understand that it may need some tweeking as you are essentailly "GOD" and getting a request from the federation council to do something like blockade a planet isn't essentially canon but that an always be worked around

regards Wolfe

Does MTWII refer to Medieval: Total War II? If so, I was just looking over some screenshots for that game the other day, and I really like the diplomacy system. Any chance you could write up a report on all that it's capable of?

Yep Medieval Totol War II

Diplomacy

Though not as "fleshed" out as i would have liked it's not too bad in MTWII.

Diplomacy can only be carried out by certain units in game, simulating the circumstance of not having global communication satellites i guess . This has one interesting advantage in that each unit be it Diplomat or Princess have a
diplomacy rating which aids in whetehr any negotiations succeed or not. obviously the higher the better.

When you are first greeted with the diplomacy screen you have several sections.

Details & Behavior

with the following subsections:

Relations: Relationship with othe nation ( ie So-So )
Reputation: This factions reputation throughout tha World ( ie Dismal )
Power: Factions total military might ( ie Supreme)
Wealth: Factions money situation ( ie Bankrupt)
Priorities: Insights into what that faction might want from you at this moment ( ie Peace!!)

Some of these are useful was others not so, basically because MTWII does not employ any real intelligence / Espionage portion on the levels BOTFII might. so where the game may need to show you the other nations Power in BOTFII i would assume this not to be added to diplomacy because you wouldn't necesarrily know this unless your intelligence finds it out.

I like the idea of reputation though seems it has the ability to be expanded into something more wholesome.

Next diplomacy is split into two other parts below: Make Offer and Make Demand

Which includes within them:

Ceasefire/Alliance depending on situation
Attack Faction
Give/Demand Region
Make single Payment
Regular Tribute
Map Information
Trade Rights, which is simple trading increase i guess

When making an offer there is also the ability to see what the "computer" thinks of it, ie is this a generous offer, or "Demanding" offer.

It's a very simple diplomacy system, which to be honest doesn't work to well in game .

All of the above is what is displayed for yout diplomat, the opposing diplomat contains the details & behaviour portion, it's allies and enemies and current treaties with you.

One thing i do like about the system which may be able to be added to BOTFII is the demenanour part.

Demeanour

Basically the reaction of the diplomat you are negotiating with. It starts off with there first reaction to you, so if you've just sacked there city and you send in a diplomat in to talk his attitude may not be to pleasant.

However his attitude will change depending on the next thing you do. give him a gift and it my improve from "distrustful" to something like "amicable".
With an improving attitude you are more likely to agree to a proposal, obviosuly up to a point. Don't expect bribing him gifts of money until his attitude is "Happy" and then ask him to become a "protectorate" he won't see your point of view

I do like the idea, and in BOTFII each race can have differant ways to affect there Demeanour, Ferengi wan't money so offer it, Klingons like strength and honour, so perhaps showing some sign of strength may improve relations.
Ie they demand you break off a treaty and you say NO! they may think you as more honourable and be willing to tolerate you more who knows, though it does sound a little to complicated .

Anyway there is a brief version, i'am sure the community can come up with a more engaging and complicated version but this one could work if you want to quickly move on to other things in the game.

Regards Wolfe

my plea for Events and Missions to come

Cheers, Wolfe. I may have to snag a copy of the game and play around with it a bit.

Events and Missions

For those who have played MTWII they would have seen what i think would be a great addition to the game, and possibly very emmersive if people are creative enough.

So far we have random events which occur every now and then and thats good but there is also another thing that can be implemented.

In MTWII you can recieve missions from something called the council of nobles or the Pope or Even Guilds. I don't see how this can't change into something like Star Fleet or the Tal Shiarr, however it seems pluasible it can come from a variety of places, other minor spiecies or even made up guilds

In these missions you are given a task spaced over several turns to complete. Ranging from the simple, speak with such and such faction, to harder ones. ie prince asking you to kill his stupid father so he can become king.

With each mission is a reward or penaltie for not completeing it. Rewards obviously can range and if implemented is only subject to your imagination. but normally units or money or and increase in reputation with the faction or guild.

I thought that it would make for an interesting story driven element for BOTFII, some poeple like the idea of command ships and obviously enjoy the whole exploration/mission element of the Star Trek series so why not add a small part of that in game.

Example: Missions centered around a Ship like enterprise, you could be tasked with exploring a certain region of space, with a reward of research points. Or tasked with trying to improve relation with a "Minor Race" you have to escort the ship to its homeworld, with a reward of increased reputation with the specific minro race.

It could also be possible to have a series of "linked Missions" which are a simple story driven exercise.

ie: Star Fleet intelligence ask you to explore some system. mission 1, you explore and find something. Later in the next mission intelligence decodes a transmission from this object and asks you to further investigate it etc etc.

Make for some interestin play between managing the empire and it would not seem to hard to code i think. generally just Mission and Reward of which they can be simple and arbitrary to begin with.

Just depends on peoples imaginations of which mine sucks

Regards Wolfe

Medieval total war 2 is out already! IT IS!!! dang what am I going to do...I told my wife I wasnt gonna buy any more video games....oh uhhh mmmm...honey...you know what i want for christmass

Oooh, I like the idea of Missions. It would definitely add a story element to the game, which is good, as BotF never really had a story.

I don't think "missions" of that kind would suit in this type of game. You are the president, council, supreme admiral, dictator and commander of intelligence all in one. There is no one above you to give you orders.

I do agree that some story element can be added. And whilst we are plagiarising anyway, I feel the best way to do this is via influenciable random events, or 'moral dilemmas'. Does anyone know the game Sword of the Stars? It is also a 4X-game like BotF and MoO. It features something called moral dilemmas, which work a bit like random events. Simply put, it's like this: at some periods in the game, whether through action of the player or just at random, an event trigers in which the player is forced to make a dissicion. For instance, you want to colonise a system but after scans it is found that a primitive stoneage civilisation already populates one of it's planets. The player then has several options on how to react to this event, each with bonusses and penalties. They can leave the planet alone, relocate the population, or enslave the population.

You can come up with all kinds of dilemmas this way. In Sword of the Stars, your empire has a rathing ranging from good to evil. Your reactions on the events determine what kind of empire you have.

I think such a system is easier and better to implement than a missions system.

The idea of "Moral Dilemmas" is similar to the events system in Galactic Civilizations II, where the player's decisions over time affect the empire's "Ethical Alignment". We should probably avoid that kind of thing. Since the empires in BotF2 already have a sort of ethical alignment, it wouldn't really contribute anything.

The only reason i thought of it was perhaps it would be simple to implement and add a nice story driven element now and then , it can always be modded in i guess.

Regards Wolfe

As Mike said the empires already have an ethical allignment, and we wouldn't want to change that, however the story thing has potential (perhaps to be added later).

Now, as president I don't want to be given any orders by anyone!!! However I have a few ideas of how a mini sub mission could work....

For example;

"We have received a communication from a Tholian Ambassador. He is due to meet with the Bajorans to discuss a vital trade agreement. Unfortunately, Pirates have been attacking Tholian vessels on route to Bajor, and the Tholians are concerned for the safety of the Ambassador.
The Ambassador will leave for Bajor on turn 456. They have requested a Federation escort to ensure their safety, this deal is very important to the Tholians, and they would really appreciate our assistance".

If successful- Tholian receptiveness jumps 2 levels.


Well, I guess that's perhaps a bit complicated, and there are many variables with a free and open games like this which would be factors. Eg, what if the Klingons wipe out the Tholians half way through this?

That's about the olny type of thing I can think of for story elements.

I agree that in game you are essentially playing GOD, but still there are openings where this can be bypassed as Son pointed out (Nice idea).

In MTWII if the faction dies before you complete the mission a simple letter comes back saying you don't have to do the mission anymore etc etc.

Though i do forsee some headaches with the many unforseen events that can occur with a game which is more complicated then MTWII.

Also i think it allows those people who wanted to have flag ships in game and do Picardesk missions have a little fun

Son of Mogh: what you are proposing is in fact a pimped version of random events. I do think it has merrit and that it can be implemented along with my idea apart from the ethical part of it.

I do have to say that, while it has merrits, it has a bit of a low priority at the time being. Those kind of things can also be added later, let's first make sure we have a working game

completeely agree it is a sort of MOD add on, though i hope the infrastructre in its simplest form may be present so it won't be too hard to MOD for people who don't quite know C# like me *cough* :d

By the way Mstrobel is C# that much differant to C++?

Regards Wolfe

The syntax of C# is fairly similar to C++. I believe that C# got its name from "C++++" (C plus-plus, plus-plus), where the four plusses form a hash (#). Syntactically, it's roughly midway between C++ and Java, though it has some rather slick language conventions that do not exist in C++ or Java. It's generally less complex than C++ because it has a stricter set of rules, whereas C++ is perhaps the most easily abused language ever written.

I hope to have a reasonably extensible system set up for random events, which would (if you're very clever) allow you to come up with all different kinds of missions. Each event would need to supply rules regarding how probable the event is, which civilizations(s) it affects (dynamic), whether it can happen concurrently, etc.

Let's take the example of escorting a Tholian ship. If every event has a set of triggers that it can respond to, and has a way of displaying messages to the player, then this could definitely be done. On each turn, the event manager will query each of the events and let each one perform some calculations to see whether or not it should occur. In this example, if the event gets triggered, it will need to select (and track internally) a human player and a minor race, as well as the turn number by which the player must rendezvous with the ship. In the time up until that turn arrives, it would need to spawn an ambassadorial ship in some sector and have it wait for the player. The ship would not have an owner, so the Tholian AI wouldn't try to redeploy it. Also, to ensure that they ship would not be targeted and engaged in combat, it would have to be removed from the game "universe" when the pre-turn-processing trigger is raised, and then put back after the post-turn-processing trigger is raised. The event-specific "AI" logic would continue to get executed each turn and would check to see if the human player has been keeping up his end of the deal. This will continue until the event logic determines that the mission has been fulfilled or has failed. If fulfilled, the event logic would update the appropriate diplomatic relations variables. Either way, the result would be displayed to the player, and the event would reset itself and wait idley until the next time the event occurs.

Cool, that all made perfect sense to me, and gives us an idea of how this could be added without causing havoc.

As Centaurian said, this is so far from being a priority it's not even funny. Still, I'll think up a bunch of these and post them for discussion anyway. That way we'll have some fleshed out ideas for when the need arises.