In today’s dev journal, we take a look at the the improvements we’re making to Diplomacy.

Diplomacy Improvements

First we take a look at the new AI surrendering logic. Imagine the following situation: you have built a mighty empire, you are crushing everything your enemy can throw at you. You are conquering his realm city by city. But still, no throne city in sight to end the reign of that puny lord. It looks like you are in for the long haul… or?

Yeah, that’s more like it, on your knees!

AI Surrender

AI surrender is one of the new free features that will be released simultaneously with the upcoming Golden Realms expansion. We want the game to finish with a bang, so to reduce any tedious slog during the end game, the AI will now consider surrendering to you (if this option is enabled in map setup). We don’t want to cut out the ‘epic final battle’ so this will only happen in situations where the AI is substantially outmatched and just lost a great number of its forces in a battle.

When you accept the surrender the leader will join your army as a hero and you will receive his throne city, including its defenders. This will save you the time to do a mop up of his army and give you an edge when fighting other rivals. But if you really hate his guts and want to see his whole empire burn you can always just decline the surrender.

Trespassing

Another thing we’ve addressed is AI trespassing. How did we do that? Well, the AI doesn’t do that anymore. It will try to get an open border agreement with you when it really needs to get through your domain. That’s because trespassing is pretty scary now. When one of your armies is trespassing it can now be attacked without a declaration of war. Even when you are at peace with someone it might not be smart to just waltz into his domain if you don’t have an open borders agreement.

The patch will include a bunch more diplomacy improvements, ranging from interface improvements to more subtle AI changes. Like a messaging system where the AI will ask you not expand near its borders, and the way the AI handles declarations of war and peace proposals when it just met a player.

This is just the start of fixes we’re going to make to the diplomacy system. In future we’ll be looking to further improve the diplomacy AI. Let us know what you think about these changes, and be sure to check back for another Dev Journal next week.