PAP Colocation

[WKE235]

I agree that additional (and ahead of time) notification of rule changes being worked on due to bugs or issues would be helpful (another item on Pete's overloaded work list). But please no votes. I prefer that RTG make the decisions based on their knowledge of the game and how any change will impact it. Folks could set-up votes if they wanted to gather information on how people feel about something. But any results should merely be information for RTG to use along with the emails they get and any threads discussing a topic.

 

As to this thread and Colocation, I've viewed the PAP order as an INTERNAL order. IE .. it sets up internally in your empire who you view as an enemy or ally or what-ever. Then based on this internal setting you can set the Rules of Engagement settings for fleets to carry out your orders. In other words you are setting the policies that your empire will follow in dealing with other races. Under this view of the PAP order, Colocation makes no sense. Why should you have to wait to set your internal policies towards race "X" until you have Characters actually meet?

 

LETS Assume that the PAP order requires Colocation. Now, there is nothing in the rule / process that forces the empires to do the same orders. This could lead to some interesting problems. Let me toss out an example. Lets say under Colocation, your and player "X" meet on some planet. After some mails you agree to PAP each with a Non-Agression the next turn. The turn comes and you PAP Non-Agression. Player "X" decides to backstab you and PAP's a declaration of war, and removes his diplomat from the planet. NOW what do you do? YOU have a declared Non-Agression. Nothing in the PAP rules indicates this will change if Player "X" attacks you. Unless you can track down one of his diplomats and hold him to the ground, you can't change your PAP. Sure you can set your fleets to ROE Zulu (Attack any alien) for any ships used to attack Player "X" .. but this means being careful to not cross the path of any friends with that fleet. You probably have to set the ROE of the fleet to Zulu once it's close enough to the enemy lines, yet far enough away from other allies. And it sort of eliminates the whole complexity of ROE that the PAP is supposed to support.

 

Another example. Say both players agreed to an Alliance and actually did Ally with each other. Now, several turns later, you decide an Alliance was wrong, having all of those other players pathfinders exploring your systems was not what you expected, and you want to get out of it. Sorry -- unless the other player agrees and gets a diplomat to the same location as one of yours, you can't change the PAP. Allies forever, no matter what you want to do. Again you can always set fleets to ROE Zulu and blast away. But why should you have to do that?

 

All in all, I do not think Colocation is a good idea. It can actually reduce the ability of the players to fully utilize the various ROE for fleets. And it limits your ability to react to changes in the game.

[Shade]

Well, before I give my opinion, let me try to throw some input in as to how it is formed.

 

If the order isn't really being used to create a condition requiring agreement between 2 parties then I see no reason why the 2 parties need to be located with each other. Even when the co-location was required, the order didn't require a corresponding confirmation order from the other party. The order is simply to tell your own fleets who to not fire at, as RTG is saying...it is only for ROE purposes.

 

Things aren't so simple as that though really....it also makes no sense that you can tell your fleets not to fire on fleets of an empire you have never met. The comment about our civilizations allowing communication is not very well thought out. Radio waves travel at the speed of light and star systems are years apart at that speed. While there is no tracking of time in this game (how long is a turn supposed to be?), sending a radio message to another player would take who knows how many turns. However, the game does allow messages and other forms of communication as long as you know the empire # of another player. Yet, the only way you can get that # in-game is by bumping into something of that player's, which supports the idea that communication depends on co-location, at least initially. The PAP order requires the empire # as well. So, the general idea is again that these "agreements" are to be with empires you know of. The problem is, as others have stated, is that out-of-game, people can share empire #s even if they have not bumped into each other in-game and set up these agreements.

 

Co-location requirement seems to be RTG's way to stop this, but it doesn't make sense, since PAP doesn't really require "agreement."

 

I would suggest that the way to handle this is that the PAP order (and any such communication orders requiring another players empire #) requires that you have retrieved the empire # in-game by bumping into something of that players. This then prevents the out-of-game unrealistic alliances and maintains the idea that you can't know someone without bumping into them first, but also doesn't require co-location to change how you want to treat that empire via ROE, which as has been said is pretty silly.

 

Part of the problem here is that the establishment of diplomatic agreements really SHOULD be something more than a one-sided decision on your own part as to how to treat someone via the ROE. The word "agreement" indicates 2 parties have to agree obviously. By agreeing on a certain diplomatic status, there should be some in-game benefits or abilities conferred, making Diplomacy a more interesting aspect of the game. In such a situation, co-location would then be required, or at least same-system location so that communication could occur, and put some extra use to the diplomat characters. That's a different matter though....

[Krelnett_of_Kraan]

I would suggest that the way to handle this is that the PAP order (and any such communication orders requiring another players empire #) requires that you have retrieved the empire # in-game by bumping into something of that player's.

The problem with this is that there is currently no tag set in the code as to whether you've encountered X empire # in-game. And we would think it would be somewhat difficult to create one.

After reading Mewtwo's well-reasoned arguments, we have changed our mind. Co-location doesn't seem to be necessary for the PAP order as it currently exists.

[PhaseDragon]

One point that has not been brought up should be the most obvious. That is when combat involves more than 2 empires. Who sides with who? The PAP order would address that to eliminate mistakes with having the computer decide which empires favor / dislike each other in a 3+ empire encounter.

[Paradigm]

But please no votes. I prefer that RTG make the decisions based on their knowledge of the game and how any change will impact it. Folks could set-up votes if they wanted to gather information on how people feel about something. But any results should merely be information for RTG to use along with the emails they get and any threads discussing a topic.

Why shouldn't RTG poll the players to see what the majority wants? They are running a business. Players have the final vote in whether they play or not. Why not try to keep the customer happy if there is something a clear majority wants? RTG isn't microsoft. There are other forms of entertainment.

[Eldred]

Just one last observation...

 

At present diplomats are of very little use (ok, they can positively influence DIP orders on neutrals - but there is apparently no tangible benefit in capturing neutrals by diplomacy as opposed to capturing them by force).

 

Surely if no colocation whatsoever is required for PAP orders, then an empire would only need one diplomat. As your leader is a diplomat then it effectively renders all over diplomat characters useless. Is this what we really want?

[WKE235]

But please no votes.  I prefer that RTG make the decisions based on their knowledge of the game and how any change will impact it.  Folks could set-up votes if they wanted to gather information on how people feel about something.  But any results should merely  be information for RTG to use along with the emails they get and any threads discussing a topic.     

Why shouldn't RTG poll the players to see what the majority wants? They are running a business. Players have the final vote in whether they play or not. Why not try to keep the customer happy if there is something a clear majority wants? RTG isn't microsoft. There are other forms of entertainment.

They could poll if they want to get the feel of the players on some issue. But the poll shouldn't be a binding vote (majority wins). Just info they can use in their decision. Remember not everyone would vote. Some players are more vocal and visit the board far more often. So even if 80% of folks voted for some option on a poll, that might only be a fraction of the actual players in the game, and not truely represent whats best for the game.

[Paradigm]

They could poll if they want to get the feel of the players on some issue.  But the poll shouldn't be a binding vote (majority wins).  Just info they can use in their decision.  Remember not everyone would vote.  Some players are more vocal and visit the board far more often.  So even if 80% of folks voted for some option on a poll, that might only be a fraction of the actual players in the game, and not truely represent whats best for the game.

I wouldn't expect a binding vote. Especially in instances where players have incomplete information, the majority might make a decision that is not in the best interest of the game in the end. But your point seemed to be that RTG should never poll the players directly. So perhaps you miswrote or I misinterpreted. It doesn't matter which as we now seem to be in agreement.

 

A binding vote wouldn't work here for several other reasons. People could stuff the ballot box on this BBS by registering multiple accounts. Not every player reads this board. Etc. If RTG really wanted to do a fair vote, they could do something like add a VOTE order and give everyone 1 free order block to vote with on an issue that's announced in the preceding turn results "Notes from the GM" section, or something along those lines. That would also retain anonymity. It might be worthwhile for a major game decision.

[Azuth]

IMO, I think part of the issue here what is the usefulness of having a Diplomat? What are their benefits? So far Diplomats:

 

- can solve Labor Disputes thus increasing resources numbers

- can help win over a Neutral race. But what are the benefits of this compared to capturing a Neutral race by force? Does winning them over peacefully increase their production capability or give the empire some kind of bonus? If not, then the diplomacy part is useless in this regard.

- determine the ROE settings for the empire

 

And that's it as far as I can tell. They don't give you any other bonus, which I think makes them weak. The Diplomat should be one of the more important characters an Empire has. They should be used to negotiate trade agreement where both sides gain a bonus of some sort. When creating alliances, some kind of bonus should be given between the empires, such as sharing fleet battle reports or something. To me the Diplomats need to be beefed up a bit. If they were given these extra abilities then I say colocation is a must in order to gain such benefits. But as it is, this is all they do that I know of, and since there is no "written" description as to what other abilities Diplomats (or the other characters) have it makes them seem pretty weak.

 

Now please do not take this statement as a compliant, it is just constructive criticism. I love the game and I think Pete and Russ are doing good job trying to keep us all happy (which requires 8th Generation Life Science, Social Science, and Pyschology).

 

Ok, I'm off to a StarBar.

[Lord Xaar]

I'll start by saying that I spent about four turns and probably more than 10 orders getting an Imperial Ambassador into a system, only to find out that turn it wasn't necessary. :lol: I didn't really care - I got a 'free' PAP next turn since my neighbor hadn't been able to also move in a Diplomat.

 

There seems to be an obvious compromise in here somewhere. The concerns about abuse of non-colocation and some of the realism questions have a lot of merit; as do many of the contra-arguments. Spending four turns to get to the point where I can define my PAP settings seems silly.

 

But being able to Total Ally with an Empire that is fifty systems away (even if TA status confers no advantage) just feels wrong.

 

It's a bit arbitrary, but the idea that Ally and TA should require colocation with a Diplomat while the 'lower' level agreements could be done at any time provides a good deal of flexibility, preserves some realism and reduces the outright chance of abuse that many fear. But, it seems that the high level agreements should provide more of a benefit than enabling one's ships to move past a 'X' or 'Y' ROE fleet. Perhaps shared battle reports as someone suggested? There should be something. Maybe you cannot declare war on your TA without first downgrading your relationship? (giving a little warning that something might be amiss - from a realism standpoint you could say that your diplomats have detected frostiness in their meetings or your military suspects there are abnormal troop movements, etc)

 

I clearly missed quite a thread this week, but it seems there are solutions that would keep a lot of us (at the very least) content, preserve game balance, and hopefully not create tons of extra work for RTG.

 

LX

[hobknob]

I would like to see the various diplomatic agreements be beefed up in general to have a greater effect than to just set ROE for fleets. There are likely a great deal of things that TA's could do for each other like fueling each others fleets that would be nice to have. For these types of actions I would want to require diplomats to be involved and for the colocation requirement to be in effect.

 

And as long as we are making wishes;

 

I would like some sort of summary that indicates all agreements that the empire has entered into, or atleast an order where yo can check once in a while. I also think that agreements need to be bilateral. I could go with the idea that you would have to be within one level of the other empires agrement level too. As long as each side is required to have an agreement.

 

War and Peace are something else entirely. War should not require any other agreement, should nullify all other agreements and should be binding for a certain length of time before you can change it. Peace should be something that is offered and both sides have to agree to it before it is effective.

 

As far as the usefulness of diplomat characters, they seem to belong to the group of somewhat useful in a random sort of way characters. They aren't as useful as scientists or explorers but are more useful than special agents or martial artists.

 

[octagon999]

Maybe if there were two levels of agreement that were divorced from one another, it would be simpler.

 

If it were called DECL (for declare) and you simply used it to inform your fleet what status each empire had with you, that would be straightforward.

 

Then you could use something like PAP for genuine political agreements, requiring more involvement, investment, etc.

 

Since PAP already exists, use it in place of DECL, remove the co-location, and view it simply as a unilateral way to instruct your fleets (in conjunction with ROE) how to behave when aliens are encountered.

 

Then, start planning on some other stage of diplomatic activity, perhaps in conjunction with the covert additions to the rules, using "special" agents and diplomats. You could even expand the merchant rules, in conjunction with this expansion, to allow them to take "offensive" or cooperative relationships with other empires. Administrators could be considered lawyers, and perhaps they also could play a role as well. (I'm thinking of Call to Power and some of their later iterations).

 

But for the moment, lets just "fix" the ROE/PAP so that the first level/basic rules are in effect, and when time allows, then worry about the more involved diplomatic/covert/economic rules. I am all for expanding the possibilities in the future, but more in favor of fixing what I consider broken at the moment.

 

Chancellor Kissinger

Chief Biermeister

Grapes of Rathe

[Ozboym]

We've gotten so used to instantaneous communication these days, that we've forgotten the good old days of sail when information was done at the speed of the ship.

 

The game universe this game seems to be set in and the literature it seems to draw on have managed to capture the spirit of that age and returned things to a different requirement.

 

Our ships can travel instantaneously through the WPs whilst radio waves creep everso slowly behind them. Ergo, the messages can only go as fast as the ships.

Umm, how exactly are you communicating with your game pieces spread amongst the stars? If this isn't some sort of instantaneous galaxy wide communication, I don't know what is. If you can use it between your pieces, why can't you use it between empires?

 

For a game to properly capture the spirit of the age of sail you would have _no_ direct communications with anything until it returned to base. No order change, unless you could get another fleet to it, no report on what's happened to it, nothing about what it has seen, not even its fate if something destroys it before it can report.

 

20 years ago I tried running a small postal game amongst some friends that tried doing just that. Keeping track of where game information was and which pieces were aware of it, soon got out of hand

[Shade]

I was one of the people in this thread saying there likely isn't a means to communicate instantaneously with other empires, but you raise a good point about how then are we communicating with our own fleets? I still like the idea that you should at least bump into someone first before being able to communicate with them and issue orders requiring empire #. I can rationalize it by saying communication requires the establishment of comm protocols and equipment that requires initial first contact.

 

Someone made the comment that to setup a means in the code to track who we have bumped into as part of such an approach would be difficult to program. I doubt it, though obviously I don't know. However, the program obviously tracks all kinds of other similar things in our data file such as what warps we've scanned. In fact, I would think one would expect this game to keep track of what empires we have contacted, and list them in a report on our data results PDF like warp points scanned are listed, indicating what diplomatic agreements have been established, etc (or am I going to have to manually keep track of such info when I do eventually bump into people?). With such tracking, it should not be a big deal for the code to check with a comm type order requiring Empire # if that empire is one which we have already contacted. The code checks before you do a WARP order if the warp point has been SURV'd by your empire, it would work in a similar manner I would think.

 

How would one fix the fact that some players already have established agreements with empires they have yet to make contact with? Well, it may hurt and mean some wasted orders for those folks, but I'd say wipe clean and eliminate these "impossible" agreements, or maybe give a fairly short (5 turns maybe) warning and tell these folks they need to acquire the empire # of their "partners" within game somehow (via first contact) or those agreements are going to vanish.

 

Last comment in this post: I fully agree with those calling for expansion on game effects with political agreements and that actual agreements should require diplomats co-located and dual confirmation of diplomatic status. While the diplomats are not useless as the game stands now, they could benefit from more uses.

[Ur Lord Tedric]

Umm, how exactly are you communicating with your game pieces spread amongst the stars? If this isn't some sort of instantaneous galaxy wide communication, I don't know what is. If you can use it between your pieces, why can't you use it between empires?

 

You want a simple game answer - all the fleets are following the orders I gave them when they left the HW! Mostly that means they are part of the Merchant Marine and are on Convoy Routes, or they are in one of my Survey Flotilla's and they are out doing their job.

 

And to get it really together, to take more from the literature - the Interstellar Communications Network (ICN) has been laid out with my Sentinels. Messages are passed to the WP Sentinels by regular radio within the systems and then sent to the next Sentinel in the chain using a Warp capable mail drone.

 

This stays completely within the game environment.

 

Further I echo what several others have posted - the diplomacy angle can be well beefed up. I would be very happy with the need to have diplomats meet only, but at least, once and this establishes an 'embassy' with the other player (which would need to be reflected in the turn report). Subsequently, the diplomatic agreement would be visable to both players. Changes to the agreement would then be allowed subsequently, without meeting (via the ICN as above), but also seen on the other players report.

 

Nothing is precluded, as all real fleet effects are done using the ROE - so if you want to spring a surprise, then nothing's stopping you.

 

And as a further thought, if you have a Special Agent on one of their worlds, their relationships with other empires is one of the things the agents could report.

 

I'd also not be adverse to having an actual installation for this, although there's no reason an Administration Capitol couldn't be used.

 

M2CW

 

Lord High Seneschal to Ur-Lord Tedric