Hey all,
The focus over the summer was implementing the final mechanical changes on the economic side of the game. Well, prior to that task I’d spent time laying down the basic infrastructure for the diplomacy system, but it was still a ways from being functional. I knew I was onto something, but it would take more time to hook all the different pieces together, especially since there was basically no actual game content yet (e.g. the various interactions that can take place). This month we’ll be picking that feature back one up last time and talking about the now fully implemented – though still in need of polish – diplomacy system.
And phew, has it been a big task. I’ve spoken about it a bit before on Twitter and elsewhere, but this has been easily the toughest game development challenge I’ve tackled in my career. First, on the design end, there’s the question of what “good diplomacy” even looks like. After all, even representing how things work in the real world might not be any fun. And we haven’t seen many good examples of strategy game diplomacy being universally praised, so there’s not even a particularly good frame of artificial reference to start from. Furthermore, the job gets even tougher when you then need to build a system which is both powerful and flexible enough to accommodate a design which will require a huge amount of real-time iteration. This is the kind of feature you need to be able to tinker with a lot, since the initial numbers you plug definitely won’t add up to a fun experience. You can get there, but you’re gonna have to do some grinding just to see how things are playing out, let alone identify what to adjust. There’s a reason why “great” diplomacy is basically unheard of – in a sense I like to think of it as the ‘final boss’ of game design.
The Basics
I’ll start with a quick review of the basics: there are few different kinds of diplomatic stats (Relationship Level, Influence, and global Reputation) which add up to a Leverage score that determines whether another Leader is willing to do something or not. RL is simply a measurement of how much the other leader likes you. Influence is a “currency” usually earned alongside RL in equal amounts that can be cashed in once in order to temporarily increase your Leverage. Reputation is the same concept as Influence, except it can be spent with any leader, and earning it requires some kind of great or bold act (such as, say, insulting Attila!).
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