Diplomacy Or Death?

[internalmemory]

I'm looking if anyone can inform me on a very good (small) AI "tweak" or mod. I'm tired of extremely poor and racist diplomacy restrictions and how poorly the AI will react to things yet all they do the entire campaign long is do exactly to you what they dislike you to do (cross your borders, sit outside your towns and castles as they wait to backstab you, randomly attack you on any day that ends with "Day"). I have also came across the problem when Nobody really wanted to ally with me at all and the only way to fix that was after playing for a week with only one ally being the Pope, I assassinated the French king and then diplomacy seemed to reactivate in the game for the most part. One main thing I wish could be removed from the game is that when you gift someone a region that your reputation rock bottoms to a point it's broken. This shouldn't count because often when you gift someone a region they end up backstabbing you later, YOUR reputation should only drop if you take their settlement if you attack them first and you start the war, not if you're trying to defend yourself or retaliate. I am playing currently as Scotland, not HRE, but Scotland - I'm not trying to dominate the map and I'm not playing as a Nazi or Roman. I try to have an even balance between the nations. For example when I wiped out the HRE for being Gary's, I divided all of their taken land and gave it to Hungary, Poland, Denmark, France, and one fort to Venice. I think this would be great in a tweak, and something that aims specifically and only at campaign AI and diplomacy, I don't need a 15GB mod that changes everything including the font of "Game Version: 00000". lol

[Kaiser Nonsense]

Stainless Steel fix most diplomacy issues. And why do you complain about allying the Pope, that is the best ally you could hope for. The game is meant to destroy you, it was how they created it, you want to play happy family give up a game called Total War.

[Aide-de-camp]

When it comes to diplomacy you have to adapt a bit. Yes vanilla and most mods don't work out diplomacy at all, but even then you can help a bit.

For example, lead countless wars against a neighbor, and don't expect for diplomacy to work. If you want peace, negotiate it sooner, or never. Many of enemy characters will have negative traits about your faction and then you are mostly war-locked to them. Switching campaign difficulty to Normal helps a lot. Put a pressure on enemies. If you are at war against an excommunicated faction, urge pope to call crusade, and then when they are at war with everybody, sue for peace.

[Highlander of Scotland]

yeah i find diplomacy easy. You just need to get a vassal. Once when I played as spain I traded lands with portugal. I owned all of spain and they owned the middle east.

[Vampiresbane]

You may want to look at my diplomacy guide. Sounds like you're having a lot of issues that could be solved with a careful reading of what bonuses/penalties are applied for what diplomatic and campaign actions are performed. There's a section that just addresses the point value of each penalty/bonus for each action. I still find it incredibly useful.

The one that surprised the hell out of me when it happened was:
1. I took Jerusalem from Egypt during a crusade.
2. Gifted it back to them for peace and a very large tribute (we had no adjoining regions besides that one).
3. Crusaded and took it again. BAM. HUGE reputation penalty. I was like wtf just happened? At the time I think I was Trustworthy and dropped to Untrustworthy in a single stroke. Looked it up and sure enough, that one campaign move gives the LARGEST penalty in the entire game. A whopping instant -1.0 to reputation (this is compared to most penaltries/bonuses being +/- 0.01 or sometimes +/- 0.1)

Gifting regions itself hurts reputation in no way whatsoever. In fact, the only thing it affects is relations and it's quite the boost when you do it.

There's a link to my diplomacy guide to vanilla M2TW in my sig.