The Concept of Relations (Drawing Inside!)

I always liked the concept of Spore's Enemy-Ally relation system, but it wasn't very realistic. Say you had an incredible amount of more power over the opposing nation and you attack them. They go angry and attempt to attack your nation, instead of growing scared and avoiding attacks with your nation. That's what my idea is, 3 types of relation ships, demonstrated here:

It's an equilateral triangle containing another equilateral triangle. (I KNOW I ACCIDENTALLY SPELLED NEUTRAL WRONG, OKAY?!?)
When the mouse is hovered over: Something like this might show:

Where green is fear, red is bad relation points, and blue is good relation points.
This would make the nation and/or the tribe/space stage so much more interesting in my opinion, generating many different relations with other nations/empires

Each vertex of the outer triangle represents 100 points in relation. So if your relation is all the way back in the red corner, it'd be 100+ red points, and you'd be at some serious war with the opposing enemy.
Maybe if you had a lot of fear points, but also a lot of enemy points, it'd be in the far right neutral corner and the relation would be so:
Their nation is too much of a threat, but our nation isn't strong enough to fight them yet!
And so on.
Please share your opinion and comment below!

Very good work taking such initiative to help out with the Strategy Mode! However, make sure to ask around first on relevant topics or the Misc. thread before posting a new thread, since much of this is already covered in the current concept.

Relations will be handled on a linear scale from -100 to 100. I think it is misleading to label the ends "Ally" and "Enemy" since you can have bad relations with a nation and not be at war, or good relations with a nation you are at war with. Your concept for fear is handled by Influence, which does not affect your relations but affects your effectiveness in negotiating in diplomatic situations. Strong militaries, strong economies, lots of magnificent buildings, etc. all increase your influence over other nations. This could be used to help threaten and subjugate them without war.

Furthermore, I presume it would be easy enough to add in AI that determine the odds of the battle and decide whether to fight or retreat. Most RTS games already have that, Spore was just the odd one out.

NickTheNick wrote:

Relations will be handled on a linear scale from -100 to 100. I think it is misleading to label the ends "Ally" and "Enemy" since you can have bad relations with a nation and not be at war, or good relations with a nation you are at war with. Your concept for fear is handled by Influence, which does not affect your relations but affects your effectiveness in negotiating in diplomatic situations. Strong militaries, strong economies, lots of magnificent buildings, etc. all increase your influence over other nations. This could be used to help threaten and subjugate them without war.

Furthermore, I presume it would be easy enough to add in AI that determine the odds of the battle and decide whether to fight or retreat. Most RTS games already have that, Spore was just the odd one out.

Well yeah, being in the red or blue zone doesn't mean you'd be an ally or at war with the opposing nation, I guess it'd just mean they'd be negative/positive towards you, but if it was just a simple +/- system, how would there be fear in-between 2 nations?

Fear just makes certain propositions you make more likely for them to accept. All RTS AI, or at least the good ones, also already have a built in system of gauging your strength and deciding whether to attack you or not, whether to retreat or not, etc. For example, in Civilization V, there is no numerical value for the "Fear" of another Civ, but it is quite well established that by keeping your troops on a border with a possibly hostile Civ, or building up more troops, you can deter or delay their attacks, because they recognize your military strength. I think we could expand this to the economy, religion, technology, and other fields as well, to make it more interesting.

That's a good idea, and i got a sugestion: when you "examine" a nation, you see a triangle like this with a little circle, this circle starts in the middle of the triangle, but depending of what did you do to that nation, the circle will move to green, blue or red, or come back to the center ( if you attack them, and later, help them, the circle will come back to the center). It's like on Spore, when you see the terraforming thing of a planet. Tell me what do you think about this

I'm think that was DesertBeagle's original suggestion.

Such a chart is interesting, but like I said, can not accurately depict international relations. Fear is not something that can be this easily quantified.

Im a Peanut wrote:

That's a good idea, and i got a sugestion: when you "examine" a nation, you see a triangle like this with a little circle, this circle starts in the middle of the triangle, but depending of what did you do to that nation, the circle will move to green, blue or red, or come back to the center ( if you attack them, and later, help them, the circle will come back to the center). It's like on Spore, when you see the terraforming thing of a planet. Tell me what do you think about this

That's actually where I got the idea from, Spore's TerraScore circle. Then I just thought of a different shape and how it would work.

Interesting. I like idea, but might need some updates.

If I might make a suggestion, unless this thread is dead, instead of having fear countries can have a threat level.

The base threat level of a country, which serves as the  is based on their military capabilities. For example 1 unit of infantry = 1 base threat, 1 nuke = 100 base threat, and improvements in military technology, tactics and training might increase it by a percentage.

Additional modifiers that calculate the relative threat of country A to country B can be added based on historical and geographic factors that increase or decrease the threat that one country is to another. For example if country A has a military force equal to 50% of country B's entire military near B's border then that adds +50% threat, if Country A defeats a regional military power then that adds +300% threat for 20 years which decreases over time, if country B has access to some resources that country A uses then that adds +10% to A's threat towards B, if A has a non-aggression treaty with B then that lowers the threat by -500% until the treaty expires.

Factors that affect relative threat level could include:

Same/different religion
Trade relationship
Time since attacking a country in the region
Time since attacking anyone
Contested territory
Alliances with other countries
Naval power (if overseas)

When the computer is considering attacking a country it will also take into account the threat level of all the countries allied to the country it's planning to attack, balanced again the combined base threat of its allies.

In terms of balancing military power each country will try to ensure that its base threat is balanced against the total threat of other countries based on their relations. If A has +100 relations with B then they will be unconcerned with balancing threat, if they are neutral then they will try to ensure that they have +10% higher threat, and if they are at -100 then they will aim for +50% threat. If done correctly this should lead to both the possibility of arms races and peaceful coexistence.

When we get to designing the AI for this stage, we will definitely need to get to quantifying the effect of game entities on international relations. However, for now I don't think we are ready for it, cause we have no AI whatsoever, and we are still laying the foundations for the stage itself.