What to do when a sector becomes a love-in?

[ShaggyMoose]

Apparently all the races in my sector are filthy hippies. They are all just holding hands and have a groovy set of alliances that mean if I become a downer for just one of them, they will all come down on me like I flushed their pot. I tried spreading rumours to break up the love-in, but for two well crafted rumours I only managed a negative vibe of 0.1! This just isn't a feasible course of action. No one wants to break their treaty for all the money in the universe (seriously, damn hippies). Strategies?

[Geokinesis]

Originally Posted by ShaggyMoose

Apparently all the races in my sector are filthy hippies. They are all just holding hands and have a groovy set of alliances that mean if I become a downer for just one of them, they will all come down on me like I flushed their pot. I tried spreading rumours to break up the love-in, but for two well crafted rumours I only managed a negative vibe of 0.1! This just isn't a feasible course of action. No one wants to break their treaty for all the money in the universe (seriously, damn hippies). Strategies?

Yeah spreading Rumours really isn't that useful with regards to that as the reputation loss is super low and they spend the entire time sending diplomacy ships to each other which offsets the rumour instantly.

Rumours should be made more powerful, especially the most expensive ones. Also maybe they should have an ongoing effect rather than just a tiny one off hit.

Maybe making diplomacy ships rare might help too?

[MuttersomeTaxicab]

Haven't quite run into this particular situation yet. If you're not super-attached to the sector, you could push for alliances between the other races and just move on to another area. Otherwise, start checking out just HOW in love the different races are. Maybe if you have a drastically higher approval rating with one race than they have with another race, you can pressure them into breaking their treaty.

[Shadow]

I'll look at the rumor impact. Everyone is a little too peaceful for how I want things to work eventually btw.

One nice thing is if you do a quest for a race it will improve your relations with their allies also.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Shadow

I'll look at the rumor impact. Everyone is a little too peaceful for how I want things to work eventually btw.

Glad to hear that.

I have a couple of things I'm trying to understand about the macro game the races are playing. In DoP, the goal of every covenant was to obtain the most influence and to eventually be the only covenant in Jorvik. It's a zero sum game that forced conflict. Is the goal of every race to obtain as many planets as possible? How does the AI make the decision of which race is a threat and which isn't?

It's not clear to me how once race A knows of races B, C and D, A can decide which race is the biggest threat to its interests. Since planets seem to be the only resource races try to control, you would think that A's biggest enemy would be A's closest neighbor who would want to expand into A's territory, or alternatively, the enemy who is most powerful, or both.

However, it seems like a race can a planet from any other planet in the sector. Is that correct? That would mean that neighboring races aren't really more of a threat to each other.

The most important thing I would like the AI to know to do though is to figure out where the biggest power bloc is. This is something the factions in DoP were unable to do, and I think could really contribute here. If race A is the biggest and most threatening race, B, C and D should see it as the biggest threat and ally together to counter A. Alliances therefore should mostly be functions of necessity -- not of races feeling good about each other (though that can factor in). If E and F, 2 small factions, band together to form a big, powerful alliance, then G, H, I and J should counter that by forming a similar sized (or a similar-power) alliance among the most friendly races among those 4.

[Shadow]

They care about various things like how they have been treated, being too close to each other, power balance, etc.

They don't do it right now, but I do like the idea of the AI purposely combining to form power blocks.

[pnakotus]

Your average sector has way more planets and resources than DoP had quests/money/NPCs to hire etc. There's just less competition because any faction can just spread into a new system rather than conquer a planet for many hours of play time.

It's worth remembering that in many 4X games, wars are hundreds of turns long and quite low intensity, with occasional skirmishes or huge blob fights and a whole lot of waiting around the rest of the time. If the aim is for vibrant and interesting conflict, you might need to look more at RTS and board games than GalCiv. Buddy's comments on victory are extremely important; in Drox, everyone can win by just not fighting. There has to be a reason to create conflict. Every sector I have played so far has had the 'constant peace' problem (and the suicide colony ship problem, which might be related).

[keith.lamothe]

Odd about constant peace. I play small sectors and it's always a bloodbath after an initial expansion phase. Two times I've won by allying two races that were allied together, and only the first time was it slow to get that second race's relations with me high enough. The other two times I won there was only one race left standing.

[pnakotus]

Right, and on normal settings it isn't, probably because it takes so many hours to fill all the planets. This is why people want to skip expansion phase entirely, or encourage more to happen before the universe runs out of planets.

Real 4X games use limited population, expensive colony ships and tech-limited colonisation options to artificially limit thr number of 'available' planets early on. A faction who can't afford to waste money on colony ships that constantly get destroyed or who lack the tech to live on any known worlds would - hopefully - instead do something interesting like directly compete with the other factions.

[Reefpirate]

Small sectors are the 'normal' setting I think... At least that's what my client defaulted to.