Importing Minor Annoyance, Exporting Death

Diplomacy

One of the more fascinating properties of economic games are emergent properties. Think Dwarf Fortress and it's physics system. So with Cultura, where does that come from? It's the AI factions. So here are some thoughts surrounding the diplomatic angle of the game.

At the very beginning there's few options. Nobody can speak with each other and there's no common language (or much of a language at all). It's all zug zugs and dabus. But the diplomacy will be styled after three factors: Prestige, Reputation and Relationship. And from that comes different kinds of relationships that work on two principles: type of time frame and type of exchange.

Prestige, Reputation and Relationship

Prestige represents the power of your society as perceived by others. Reputation represents trustworthiness. Relationship represents the summation of interactions, positive and negative, between each society. Prestige and Reputation is global. You will seem just as powerful to everyone according to your prestige rating and much the same, your reputation is global. Break a treaty with anybody, everyone sees you are a treaty breaker. Relationship however is between each nation and so while you can be seen as weak or untrustworthy by someone, they may still be your good friend because their relationship score is high.

Reputation is the primary vehicle that promotes the honouring of treaties and oaths. Breaking an oath damages reputation and causes global damage to your ability to craft future deals. Your friends will still like you but those who know you less only have your reputation to go by and thus will discount your offerings to them. It's very much like losing face in life. You can only lose face, you can't gain it. So damage to your reputation cannot be fixed by anything other than waiting it out for people to forget and see that your newer dealings are trustworthy.

Types of Treaties

However, the more interesting part is the kinds of treaties you can make. There'll be the usual neutral ones of "don't breach my territory" and also "territorial claims" (which are less neutral). But for the ones that define the relationship with another society, these go down different paths with increasingly more powerful treaties much like leveling your relationships. Maybe you want to seek a deep friendship, perhaps you want to be the most powerful badass barbarian horde or you want to be the imperialist dynastical China. I'm quite sure dynastical is a word. Don't look it up, just use your gut feeling.

The way the relationships are organised is based on type of time frame and type of exchange. For time: An exchange of presented goods OR an exchange of future goods OR a contractual renewable agreement. So for instance, if your emissary takes 300 watermelons to the neighbouring Boogaloo tribe, then they can only trade the 300 watermelons for whatever the Boogaloo have. A future exchange is to promise to send what you did not present. A contractual agreement is the ability to continue to trade without having to again speak with the neighbouring tribe.

For the type of exchange, goods have roughly been divided into three categories. Tangible goods are objects such as food, consumables, property or super property. Tangible social goods are objects such as military recruits, slaves or labourers. Finally, intangible goods are prestige, reputation and relationship.

The paths roughly go down that of War, Power and Peace. I may add a fourth, which is a different way to pursue peace (seeking alliances versus seeking amalgamation). So as examples of types of relationships: Within War you could choose Subjugation where the defeated party agrees to a supply of tangible goods, or there is Conscription where the defeated party agrees to supply tangible social goods. Or you could seek a route within Peace: representation relationship, an exchange of intangible goods for tangible social goods. The main design will be a relationship that starts off simple but expands in options (a wider range of goods and social goods you can offer for a wider range of goods/social goods in return).

Thus allows the diabolical machinations of the evilest players. Or AI.