Wizard Pact Territorial Violations

[Seravy]

This was considered but even a spearmen allows you to cast Flame Strike at the enemy army and win the battle. It exists as a feature though : Settlers and Engineers are not considered a violation. This is more player friendly than saying "stacks with calculated AI total force of 15 or less are allowed." How is the player supposed to know the AI's formula for the strength of a unit or stack? Engineers are specific units types so that's easy to remember. They also move slowly so they are inefficient scouts, making it reasonable for the AI to overlook them.

[massone]

and enforced a house rule for my game

I understand but how is the AI supposed to know about that? I can't put a checkbox on the UI that says "I promise I won't backstab the AI".

The best solution would be to apply my house rule as a hard rule barring the player from attacking at all during the Pact,

Certainly but that changes the core foundation of the entire diplomacy system so that's like asking for a different game entirely.

I don't believe a diplomacy system where the AI is free to do anything, nor one where the player isn't, would be fun to play.
If the AI can break the rules, the system is meaningless, it's just for show, it's fake. Might as well not have it in the game, as it does nothing.

If the rules are enforced for the player that's also bad but impractical to implement as well. For starters, every single city curse, including those that target land tiles, would need to have a restriction implemented to fail targeting that AI's cities.
Then, pacts raise visible relation, and visible relation, through treaty rolls, forces the AI to accept the player's further requests at a higher chance. So then then instead of the player saying yes or no they'd be forced to accept or refuse the AI's offer depending on the game's dice roll and rules. And so on, ultimately if we impose the AI's rules on the player, the player will have no choice in anything in diplomacy, the game will decide when and what they trade with the AI and so on.
Again, this is not a viable route.
Of course we can also say the player is free to do anything except attacking the AI but then we're back to square one, the player benefits more from the treaty than the AIs. Unlike the AI the player can and will plan for their invasion, formally break the treaty the turn before the attack, and go through with it. The AI meanwhile cannot do that and has to break the treaty through the game rules allowing it to do so (either through a "move to war" trigger or a "repeated diplomacy warning" trigger)

We don't have to work with absolutes. Like you said, we want something that is fun to play, which means to balance the different issues.

Having the player forced to accept treaty requests is bad--I agree completely here.

If it's difficult to enforce a restriction on all spell targeting, that's understandable too, given the lack of source code.

Allowing the AI to backstab isn't necessarily a bad thing though. There are games where AIs actually do this (Medieval II, for example, and probably some of the others in the TW series). Alliances/Treaties aren't true guarantees in real life either. Sometimes belligerents will actually switch sides mid-war, as happened in WWI and WWII. To make it work though, it would have to involve an AI analyzing opportunity and risk. In a game, that generally means having comparing at least two variables representing weights for maintaining the alliance/pact vs. benefits from backstabbing. For example, a town with weak garrisons but high value, and not many troops near by would increase the benefit weighting, and ongoing alliance wars increase the maintain weighting. A high AI military rating would increase the backstab chance, while a lower relative rating would decrease it. Having other, more attractive targets elsewhere would increase the maintain weighting--but that would require an additional "value" assigned to each "opportunity"/town in terms of garrisons/nearby forces/resource output. I expect this wouldn't be implementable either without source code though.

For the AI's visible relations and accepting treaties, there's another train of thought that again comes from Paradox games. Instead of it only relying on the Relations and Personality, there's a complex set of value weightings for various other diplomatic factors, but critically there are also a few "conditions" which are implemented as either +1000 or -1000 modifiers to abstract "strategic" concerns. So for example, if the AI has marked a town/resource/something as critical, and the player is occupying it, then they become natural enemies and have -1000 modifier applied. If they are pursuing Spell of Mastery, they can get +1000 modifier for maintain peace at all costs (I think you already do something similar here). In this way, it becomes possible to limit certain player actions the AI is not equipped to handle, yet without making the AI adhere to a set of rules that can also be abused. If the player wants the Pact/Alliance, they have to ensure they are not violating any of the AI's strategic concerns.

To a limited extent, such things already exist in a simplified form in the game. The AI will ask me to break alliances with someone they are at war with, and give me a massive visible relations penalty dropping from Peaceful to Unease when I refuse. That's a kind of strategic concern, a price to diplomacy.

But anyways, working within the existing system is a more immediate concern, and the immediate problem is with minor, irrelevant units accidentally violating the territory, especially during multi-turn pathfinding. It sounds like we can solve it only by changing the violation rules, or making it easier to identify which troops are in violation.

[massone]

Just had an idea for another way to solve the problem within the system right now.

Is it feasible to implement something like:

1. Your troops violate the Pact territory.
2. One turn grace period where the Wizard warns you about it.
3. The second turn if you don't move away, the Wizard tells you "My border patrols are growing restless. If you don't move your troops immediately we are likely to have an incident, and we don't want that, do we?"
4. On the third turn, on the AI Wizard's turn end, every square which has a violation gets a new "patrol unit" automatically generated(maybe just a spearman, or one that can't be raised as undead/doesn't cost anything and will disappear after the combat), which immediately engages your violating unit in battle. There are already other unit generation mechanisms so perhaps we can leverage one of them to do this.
5. The combat screen opens up, but instead of an immediate fight, a popup shows up, similar to the Raze town popup. But instead, this one at the START of battle says "________'s patrols are trying to move through this area. Do you want to fight them to hold your ground here? This will break your Wizard's Pact. If you stand down, your troops will be allowed to retreat safely."
6. Then, if you choose to retreat, you get to flee without any unit losses. If you hold ground and win, it counts as you breaking the Pact. If you lose the battle somehow, the pact stays but the Wizard demands a monetary reparation to pay for damages to their patrols.

[Seravy]

A strategy game is not real life. If an AI can unexpectedly attack you that means you have to be ready to fight all enemies at the same time, so you can't use the best strategy against your target.
Considering the game does work with quite a few absolutes, you need to be 100% sure to be able to know what enemy spells (or unit abilities) you will be facing. If you don't, you can't specialize because most strategies have weaknesses.
For example unless I can be sure the Sorcery wizard is not my enemy, I cannot use lots of units buffs. Unless I'm sure the person with Fire Storm is not my enemy, I cannot rely on high figure count, fragile units like bowmen, magicians, sprites, or so on.

The risk/backstabbing comes from the player not knowing the rules and diplomacy formulas, or miscalculating them.

It sounds like we can solve it only by changing the violation rules, or making it easier to identify which troops are in violation.

Indeed, but this is a recurring topic and no one managed to suggest a working solution for that in the past 4 years. At this time I believe such a solution simply does not exist.

As explained in my previous post, drawing a line using "stack strength" for violations can't be done based on numbers because the player can't know what and how much is allowed - stack strength is not an actual visible gameplay metric, it's only used by the AI, so instead it's done based on "these two unit types can enter, the others stay out". In other words this already exists.

While not possible in the current CoM, in CoM 2, marking the violating stack on the map will be a possibility. I'll add it to the list of planned improvements.

[massone]

A strategy game is not real life. If an AI can unexpectedly attack you that means you have to be ready to fight all enemies at the same time, so you can't use the best strategy against your target.
Considering the game does work with quite a few absolutes, you need to be 100% sure to be able to know what enemy spells (or unit abilities) you will be facing. If you don't, you can't specialize because most strategies have weaknesses.
For example unless I can be sure the Sorcery wizard is not my enemy, I cannot use lots of units buffs. Unless I'm sure the person with Fire Storm is not my enemy, I cannot rely on high figure count, fragile units like bowmen, magicians, sprites, or so on.

The risk/backstabbing comes from the player not knowing the rules and diplomacy formulas, or miscalculating them.

It sounds like we can solve it only by changing the violation rules, or making it easier to identify which troops are in violation.

Indeed, but this is a recurring topic and no one managed to suggest a working solution for that in the past 4 years. At this time I believe such a solution simply does not exist.

As explained in my previous post, drawing a line using "stack strength" for violations can't be done based on numbers because the player can't know what and how much is allowed - stack strength is not an actual visible gameplay metric, it's only used by the AI, so instead it's done based on "these two unit types can enter, the others stay out". In other words this already exists.

While not possible in the current CoM, in CoM 2, marking the violating stack on the map will be a possibility. I'll add it to the list of planned improvements.

I would consider not being able to plan your strategy perfectly to be a feature. "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" is how it should be, and plenty of other strategy games work on that principle too. Strategy games aren't supposed to be mathematically solvable.

I also don't think the stack strength is that much of an issue just because the player can't see it. It doesn't need to be consistent and perfectly plannable. I would prefer the AI to act differently, and for me to pretend it's because they have a real and differing personality between each AI, rather than knowing the formula and getting annoyed because they aren't working according to the formula.

Also, you might have missed a couple of my posts when I double-posted after a post. This forum doesn't seem to notify on new posts and I'm not sure how to make sure they get seen. I posted a bunch of other ideas for solving this.

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid725414

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid725421

[namad]

This has a pretty easy solution, give engineers scouting 1, lore wise it's their surveying abilities.

That said spamming engineers to surround unclaimed wizard pacted ai nodes so they can't take them, but you can later take them, is already kinda OP. But if you wanna cater to people who want to improve the quality of troops that can violate the wizard's pact, basically giving engineers scouting 1 totally solves all issues.

[Seravy]

There is a subscribe button to get notifications and you can also subscribe when posting.

-New icon/highlight on the Cartographer for units violating Pacts

I prefer to put it directly on your unit on the overland map and/or maybe on the armies screen but yes I'll do this for CoM 2. Considering the main problem is the violating units being hard to find, not the wizard's pact rules themselves, this is definitely the way to go.
Sadly implementing this for CoM 1 would be entirely too complex and time consuming. I rather spend that time on completing CoM 2 faster.

[prokolyo]

This was considered but even a spearmen allows you to cast Flame Strike at the enemy army and win the battle. It exists as a feature though : Settlers and Engineers are not considered a violation.

This is very good to know, and perfectly acceptable.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[prokolyo]

The 3 turn "limit" is, if you violate the wizard's pact in 3 consecutive turns, the AI will break it.

Does this rule also apply for alliances, or then you can walk freely?


Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[massone]

The 3 turn "limit" is, if you violate the wizard's pact in 3 consecutive turns, the AI will break it.

Does this rule also apply for alliances, or then you can walk freely?


Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

You can move freely in an alliance.