Diplomacy hopes and wishes

[Falcrack]

From the roadmap description of diplomacy, it reads:

"This update will introduce a new room in the player’s headquarters, where faction representatives can gather and offer you strategic options. In addition to this room, players will have access to agents (NPCs) who can be dispatched on independent missions to achieve diplomatic goals in the X universe. The highlight of this update will be Diplomatic Events, giving players the opportunity to manipulate their own relations with other factions, and even in some cases between specific NPC factions."

How would you as a player like to see diplomacy implemented?

Will there be Diplomatic penalties for supporting the enemies of a faction? For instance, would selling ships and doing lots of trade with HOP end up hurting your relationship with their enemy, the Argon?

Will the diplomatic options be hard coded for just a few specific situations? Or will we be able to apply diplomatic options in whatever way we want? I would prefer more freedom in diplomatic options. Otherwise the "diplomacy" just becomes another storyline, instead of a free form method to influence relationships between factions.

Will factions engage in their own diplomatic actions independently of the player? For example, if one faction (even perhaps thr player faction) becomes too powerful, could the NPC factions form a coalition to keep the more powerful faction in check?

[Alan Phipps]

Heh, I'm more interested to see what the devs offer in outline rather than to speculate with perhaps entirely moot what-ifs and hopes - or diplomacy parallels taken from other games.

The devs will come up with stuff that generally meets with X4 game engine and interface playability, capability and capacity for typical gaming rigs and also that meets their envisaged strategic direction for the game. Once we have their outline of what's on offer then we can perhaps usefully have a hand in tweaking some of the balance and details (rather than the overall strategy). I'm sure there will be private and public betas involved too. That's all just my personal opinion as a player though.

[Raptor34]

Honestly I'm expecting it to be trash, or more likely underwhelming. After all I've seen 4x games with diplomacy which is frankly not that good anyway and that is with them being more of a key system. Unless it's a way to essentially pay a faction to do something you want I guess, that's diplomacy too right?
What I'm hoping is that whatever it is it's something you can ignore if it doesn't turn out good, rather than wrecking the rest of the game in the process. And of course hopefully it doesn't gatekeep other stuff in the patch I might find more interesting like the current beta with the new flight system vs. station enhancements.

[Lord Dakier]

I don't have much faith in it being as deep as I'd like. I'd rather have to pay Cr100m to adjust the relation by -/+5 than some barebones questline.

I think it'll also be important to be able to create peace as well as war. In my game the Teladi desperately need an enemy.

[Falcrack]

Speaking of paying factions credits to influence diplomatic relations, what if (and I realize this is a controversial point here) credits actually meant something to a faction? This would require that factions have limited, rather than unlimited, credits. It would also help if sector ownership had a financial benefit for sector owners. More sectors with high population means higher income, with more ability to purchase and maintain fleets and stations.

You want to pay me in air here on earth to do something? I am surrounded by virtually unlimited quantities of it, getting more air doesn't matter. You want to pay me in air if I live on a space station? That actually has some value, since it is a finite resource there.

If factions had finite credits, then paying them gobs of credits to influence their relationship with other factions would actually help them in a tangible way.

[Pejot]

Speaking of paying factions credits to influence diplomatic relations, what if (and I realize this is a controversial point here) credits actually meant something to a faction? This would require that factions have limited, rather than unlimited, credits. It would also help if sector ownership had a financial benefit for sector owners. More sectors with high population means higher income, with more ability to purchase and maintain fleets and stations.

You want to pay me in air here on earth to do something? I am surrounded by virtually unlimited quantities of it, getting more air doesn't matter. You want to pay me in air if I live on a space station? That actually has some value, since it is a finite resource there.

If factions had finite credits, then paying them gobs of credits to influence their relationship with other factions would actually help them in a tangible way.

Nah. Changing whole AI economy to include limited credits is probably to big project to implement at current stage. Would be better to pay with ships/resources/favors to raise relations. Those are the only limited factors and ready to be used.

In case of diplomacy I wish for more of a covert ops kind of things. Where You send ships disguised as one faction to attack another faction assets to imitate border incident.
Or if I qant peace with a faction I have to build them a station in limited amount of time (ceasefire for that time) or hand over a sector I own. This kind of stuff. Maybe pay tribute by giving ships and resources.

I don't want anything mindless like just pay and forget.

Maybe it could be done through Dal Busta. Like we provide him with ships with specific setup and he will send them as for example PAR to attack TER assets to initiate a war.

[Raptor34]

Speaking of paying factions credits to influence diplomatic relations, what if (and I realize this is a controversial point here) credits actually meant something to a faction? This would require that factions have limited, rather than unlimited, credits. It would also help if sector ownership had a financial benefit for sector owners. More sectors with high population means higher income, with more ability to purchase and maintain fleets and stations.

You want to pay me in air here on earth to do something? I am surrounded by virtually unlimited quantities of it, getting more air doesn't matter. You want to pay me in air if I live on a space station? That actually has some value, since it is a finite resource there.

If factions had finite credits, then paying them gobs of credits to influence their relationship with other factions would actually help them in a tangible way.

That's the kind of shit I mean when I talk about breaking the game.
Frankly rather than just dumping the whole thing into a game where you have no choice at all, I don't trust Egosoft to implement it right on their first, or even second implementation, I'll rather they try something like that in a DLC first, limited to new factions. Perfect it rather than force the rest of us who don't care to get stuck with a broken game until X5.
Otherwise you're basically telling me the game is perfect now with no major bugs and issues.

[flywlyx]

Will there be Diplomatic penalties for supporting the enemies of a faction? For instance, would selling ships and doing lots of trade with HOP end up hurting your relationship with their enemy, the Argon?

I kind of like this idea, but I think it could disrupt many players' games, as trading with both sides during a war and making a profit is quite common among the player base.

Speaking of paying factions credits to influence diplomatic relations, what if (and I realize this is a controversial point here) credits actually meant something to a faction? This would require that factions have limited, rather than unlimited, credits. It would also help if sector ownership had a financial benefit for sector owners. More sectors with high population means higher income, with more ability to purchase and maintain fleets and stations.
...

An ecosystem with a limited budget needs to be built from the ground up and adjusted carefully. The current X4 ecosystem lacks the capability to handle such adjustments effectively. Introducing this limitation at this stage would either break the game if set too low or have no meaningful impact if set too high.

[Falcrack]

An ecosystem with a limited budget needs to be built from the ground up and adjusted carefully. The current X4 ecosystem lacks the capability to handle such adjustments effectively. Introducing this limitation at this stage would either break the game if set too low or have no meaningful impact if set too high.

My opinion, Egosoft ought to have had factions dealing with limited budgets from day one of launch, and then keep at it to get it to work rather than throw up their hands and say it is too complicated.

So maybe this should be an X5 thing. I sincerely hope it is an X5 thing. The infinite credits for factions thing really throws an awful lot of the whole dynamic economy out the window. We only have half an economic sim with X4 because of it.