Giving peace a chance

[Anabasis]

I haven't found it either. But the solution I have in mind is to make the CAI more sensitive to gifts, so that you can 'compensate' your allies by redistributing the spoils of war to keep them happy.

[Black9]

Any time you improve relationships with a faction it probably counts as a treaty in the eyes of the AI, so your allies and anyone else that's at war with that particular faction will be unhappy with you for it.

Can you make a new entry under the diplomacy menu? Something like "war losses" and make it positive?

[yukishiro1]

Any time you improve relationships with a faction it probably counts as a treaty in the eyes of the AI, so your allies and anyone else that's at war with that particular faction will be unhappy with you for it.

Can you make a new entry under the diplomacy menu? Something like "war losses" and make it positive?

That's what I'm thinking of too. Maybe there is a way to copy the normal entries in a way that you keep their properties without keeping their consequences. I'm fooling around with itn ow.

edit: You can't use pfm to edit those tables to add new values. So that option is either out or not easy.

[yukishiro1]

Found a workaround! I still can't figure out how to edit the diplomacy states themselves, but I found a way to change it so that factions don't care about what you do to their friends or enemies, or how to reduce the effect. The table is: cai_personality_strategic_components

The values correspond seem to go from -1 to 1 and correspond to how much diplomatic effect is caused by stuff happening to friends/enemies. A value of 1 means they get the same diplomatic effects as the target (either friend or enemy).

Unfortunately you can't choose the modifiers by the specific action - for example, you can't set it so military actions only carry through to allies 10% but other types carry through 50%. So there would be some minor costs involved. But it would allow for a way to stop excessive tension with allies being created by beating up on your enemies.

[yukishiro1]

After experimenting, it looks like the only one that is relevant to our particular issue is "friendly towards enemy." If you set that to 0 or a very low negative multipler, it will vastly mitigate the effects of your change on your faction standing with your allies. The only cost is that truely friendly actions towards enemies won't generate the same amount of outrage they used to...but that doesn't seem like a very high cost. For example, allying with someone's enemy won't provide the same faction hit with a given faction if you lower that value.

[yukishiro1]

I have some unfortunate news to report back. As far as I can make out, diplomatic standing has nothing whatsoever to do with decisions to make peace. I have tried editing the values so that being at war varys from 0 to -500, and it doesn't make one bit of difference. A faction that will make peace with you will make peace with you whether your relation is -500 or +500. It just doesn't matter.

The reason is that as soon as you and another faction are at war, the diplomacy table considers you to be "bitter enemies," which is a hidden status below "very unfriendly." Because your diplomacy points with a given faction seems only to effect which modifier applies to you - bitter enemies, very unfriendly, unfriendly, neutral, friendly, very friendly, or best friends - it has no effect at all on peace.

As far as I can tell after some pretty careful testing, the ONLY thing that effects whether an enemy will accept a peace proposal is your relative strength, as modified by the modifier for "bitter enemies" and the modifiers for war, total war, or last stand. These are all found in cai_personality_deal_evaluation_deal_component_values.

You can confirm if you want by switching various values. The only things that effected peace decisions appeared to be the "bitter enemy" modifier and the total_war_balance_factor. But I assume last_stand_balance_factor and war_balance_factor would also effect things when the opposing faction is in that stance relative to you. I am not quite sure what determines whether you are in the war, total war, or last stand phase of a war, but it is that value and your bitter enemies modifier ONLY that seem to effect peace decisions.

But this seems to be at odd with your screenshot and your simming experience, so there is the remote possibility I suppose that AI faction vs AI faction wars are different. For the player, however, diplomatic standing seems to have no effect.

[yukishiro1]

Addendum: It is perhaps not quite true to say it does NOTHING. In a very specific circumstance, I was able to get the result to go from "moderate" to "high" by changing the diplomatic status. But they accepted either way. And even setting the penalty for war to -500 didn't turn that "moderate" accept response into a refuse.

[Black9]

I've been busy and I just read all your posts Yuki. What an emotional roller coaster. I was curious, let down, excited, then crushed. I'm not sure what our diplomatic standing is right now.

[yukishiro1]

On the bright side, if the point is to make it easier to make peace, that can certainly be done. Just probably not by turning the war atrocity penalties into bonuses instead. Which is sorta too bad, because I really liked that idea. Felt a lot like the warscore system paradox uses.

But there's still the mystery about why it seemed to work for anabasis for the AI factions. That screenshot is not at all what one typically sees in 262 - unless he was using my minimod, of course! If he wasn't using my minimod, AI faction wars might be effected by diplomatic standing even if relations with the player arn't.

[Anabasis]

I am not using your minimod

I just uploaded it to workshop so you can try it. Look for anabasis experimental diplomacy mod. Let me know if you find it. I wasn't able to get further into the campaign today, but I will continue tomorrow and get as far as I can. I am quite certain that this does affect at least AI vs AI. I see peace treaties popping up in the message window all the time, which I never did before. As I reported above, I was unable to get peace in my own war vs Cimmeria, so you might be right about player vs AI. I will look into it tomorrow.

[yukishiro1]

Did you make sure to accept the workshop agreement and make it public? Doesn't seem to be up.

[Black9]

Maybe with a higher opinion of the player the AI will offer peace more? I'm spitballing here.

[Anabasis]

I didn't see any agreement. Just an upload button which has now been replaced by an update button. Where is this agreement?

[Anabasis]

Think I got it. Should be visible now.

[yukishiro1]

Found it, doing a few sims now.

[yukishiro1]

Ok, so as far as I can tell, the bizarre truth is this:

The changes to war atrocities to make them positive didn't do anything. Ran three sims for 15 turns, one with your numbers for city captures and troop releases/kills/slavery, two with zero for all those numbers instead. First generated 17 peace agreements, second generated 13, third generated 19. It's a pretty small sample size but I'm pretty confident there's no real relationship. Especially because of the 17 peace agreements generated using your values, only 8 of them were between factions who had got any of the bonuses, i.e. who had engaged eachother at all.

HOWEVER - what did make a difference was your setting the value of the war TREATY (i.e. in treaty values, not in event values) to 0. That is what prompted those extra peace settlements. When you set THAT value back to -50, two further sims yielded only 3 and 6 settlements respectively.

BUT - and this is where it gets downright WEIRD - when I tried setting the diplomatic status adjustment for the war treaty to PLUS 500....I got even FEWER peace treaties. I ran two sims for this just to make sure, and it was true in both. I saw only 4 treaties in the first sim, and 3 in the second. Setting the war treaty to plus 500 also resulted in FAR more factions declaring war on me and asking me for trade agreements. And it also made it impossible to secure peace with the Delmatae on the first turn playing as the Iceni, which when the value was set to zero was possible even without paying them anything.

So the bottom line is the only thing that really seems to verifiably increase peace settlements in those tables is setting the war treaty value to zero. Don't ask me why, though. What a brain twister. And with that I am off to sleep!

[Anabasis]

Reading more carefully, it seems you are talking about AI vs AI as well. Intersesting.

[Anabasis]

That's very interesting stuff. are you talking human vs AI only? Do we know if AI vs AI is affected by the event values? I will test some more today.

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, AI vs AI.

And I'm sure the AI is effected by event values, just not for factions at war as far as I can tell. Being at war apparently forces you to the "bitter enemies" tables no matter what your actual diplomatic relations value is. I'll do a little more testing to confirm later today.

[Anabasis]

I am now running a campaign with 0 for battle and settlement capture event values, and 0 for war treaty values. Only a few turns in, but there are peace treaties being made.