Stellaris - Miscellanary
Jul. 11th, 2018 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack"Thuurgla Disseminute", "Gleggrot Disseminute", the names of these Fungus' navy fleets are very very them. As are some of the others. Including the pirates! :)
Pets
I found some alien pets! Alas they were on one of the fungus' core worlds, and for whatever reason the fungus' concentrated more on building warships than petting pets. I only found them when I flew through their home system in the post-war truce and conducted a little informal surveillance.
Liv immediately asked me to save them, but I had to admit, I was already trying as hard as I could to rescue the normal funguses from their own government, but it wasn't possible to speed up the processes without another war and maybe even planetary bombardment.
AI personalities
The characteristics of an empire (and I think, their ruler, and maybe a couple of other things) determine in their 'personality' according to a complex algorithm. Like, empires who are spiritualist and also militaristic usually get the "honourable warriors" personality. Many empires get the "hegemonic militaristic" which just means they want to conquer things. Etc.
Some are fairly specific, like the "assimilate everyone in the galaxy" and the "eat everyone in the galaxy" empires.
I think the personality is deterministically determined by those values. And the effects of the personality are mostly or completely determined by various modifiers like "chance of declaring war" and "positive/negative modifier to their opinion if you have a border with them" etc.
So it's a bit fiddly, but I quite like the concept, that you can (hopefully) just play by understanding that you can probably trade with the "spiritual seekers" especially if you're spiritualist yourself, you may or may not be able to form pacts with the hegemonic militarists depending on their political situation, and you might as well give up on some of the xenophobic personalities who mostly hate everyone.
But that because it's all run by an algorithm, it's all exposed to modders who can tweak it in various ways. And "never" is expressed as "modifier by -1000" so if there's some overwhelming pressure the other way, that might still happen.
Opinion, Trust, etc
It took me a while to get an idea how this works and I'm still not sure. There's a few relevant values, opinion, trust, and attitude, and I think a couple more under the hood.
Trust represents a relationship built up over time. Any ongoing diplomacy (trade deals, guaranteeing their independence, non-aggression pact, defensive pact, alliance, federation, etc) provides both a small monthly increase in trust, and a maximum value of trust, higher for more significant relationships. If you don't have an ongoing relationship it slowly decays to 0 again.
Opinion represents an instantaneous snapshot, which comprises (a) trust (b) various relevant modifiers, like sharing politics and philosophy gives a boost, xenophiles/xenophobes have a flat bonus/penalty to their opinion of everyone, etc. And (c) various short term effects, like breaking a treaty or making a favourable trade deal gives an instantaneous bonus/penalty to trust which slowly expires over some number of months.
So the general process of diplomacy where possible is, find empires who have at least somewhat positive base opinion of you. Build up trust by making a trade deal of guaranteeing their independence. Then combine increased trust and if necessary a temporary boost to opinion (say, a one-sided trade deal to just give them a temporary bribe), enough for them to accept a more significant diplomatic overture, which will hopefully have a higher trust cap etc.
This can see-saw back and forth based on various things -- if you're far away, diplomacy is more difficult, if your mutual border is too long, there's a penalty for needing to police it, if there's another empire mutually threatening, that's a positive to various pacts, etc.
There's also an "attitude": "wary", "cordial", "friendly", etc. This is partly due to opinion (and trust?) and partly due to relative empire strengths and to AI personality (?). I'm not sure if that's mostly just due to opinion and trust and obvious overall modifiers, or if there's a extra determinants behind the scenes.
Lots of diplomatic options have a default "no", so it can be a bit of a hurdle to get anyone to agree. You need to max out trust, but then you're left with some negatives if your empires are incompatible. And some empires will just never like you unless you're overwhelming in military force because you're naturally incompatible.
And as people helpfully clarified on the previous post, once you've got a bad diplomatic situation with someone, i.e. their opinion of you spiralled downward and they declared you a rival (or declared war or proclaimed a claim to some of your systems), it is nigh impossible to increase their opinion again because those all provide an ongoing negative modifier. You just have to hope an extra-dimensional threat spawns nearby :)
Pets
I found some alien pets! Alas they were on one of the fungus' core worlds, and for whatever reason the fungus' concentrated more on building warships than petting pets. I only found them when I flew through their home system in the post-war truce and conducted a little informal surveillance.
Liv immediately asked me to save them, but I had to admit, I was already trying as hard as I could to rescue the normal funguses from their own government, but it wasn't possible to speed up the processes without another war and maybe even planetary bombardment.
AI personalities
The characteristics of an empire (and I think, their ruler, and maybe a couple of other things) determine in their 'personality' according to a complex algorithm. Like, empires who are spiritualist and also militaristic usually get the "honourable warriors" personality. Many empires get the "hegemonic militaristic" which just means they want to conquer things. Etc.
Some are fairly specific, like the "assimilate everyone in the galaxy" and the "eat everyone in the galaxy" empires.
I think the personality is deterministically determined by those values. And the effects of the personality are mostly or completely determined by various modifiers like "chance of declaring war" and "positive/negative modifier to their opinion if you have a border with them" etc.
So it's a bit fiddly, but I quite like the concept, that you can (hopefully) just play by understanding that you can probably trade with the "spiritual seekers" especially if you're spiritualist yourself, you may or may not be able to form pacts with the hegemonic militarists depending on their political situation, and you might as well give up on some of the xenophobic personalities who mostly hate everyone.
But that because it's all run by an algorithm, it's all exposed to modders who can tweak it in various ways. And "never" is expressed as "modifier by -1000" so if there's some overwhelming pressure the other way, that might still happen.
Opinion, Trust, etc
It took me a while to get an idea how this works and I'm still not sure. There's a few relevant values, opinion, trust, and attitude, and I think a couple more under the hood.
Trust represents a relationship built up over time. Any ongoing diplomacy (trade deals, guaranteeing their independence, non-aggression pact, defensive pact, alliance, federation, etc) provides both a small monthly increase in trust, and a maximum value of trust, higher for more significant relationships. If you don't have an ongoing relationship it slowly decays to 0 again.
Opinion represents an instantaneous snapshot, which comprises (a) trust (b) various relevant modifiers, like sharing politics and philosophy gives a boost, xenophiles/xenophobes have a flat bonus/penalty to their opinion of everyone, etc. And (c) various short term effects, like breaking a treaty or making a favourable trade deal gives an instantaneous bonus/penalty to trust which slowly expires over some number of months.
So the general process of diplomacy where possible is, find empires who have at least somewhat positive base opinion of you. Build up trust by making a trade deal of guaranteeing their independence. Then combine increased trust and if necessary a temporary boost to opinion (say, a one-sided trade deal to just give them a temporary bribe), enough for them to accept a more significant diplomatic overture, which will hopefully have a higher trust cap etc.
This can see-saw back and forth based on various things -- if you're far away, diplomacy is more difficult, if your mutual border is too long, there's a penalty for needing to police it, if there's another empire mutually threatening, that's a positive to various pacts, etc.
There's also an "attitude": "wary", "cordial", "friendly", etc. This is partly due to opinion (and trust?) and partly due to relative empire strengths and to AI personality (?). I'm not sure if that's mostly just due to opinion and trust and obvious overall modifiers, or if there's a extra determinants behind the scenes.
Lots of diplomatic options have a default "no", so it can be a bit of a hurdle to get anyone to agree. You need to max out trust, but then you're left with some negatives if your empires are incompatible. And some empires will just never like you unless you're overwhelming in military force because you're naturally incompatible.
And as people helpfully clarified on the previous post, once you've got a bad diplomatic situation with someone, i.e. their opinion of you spiralled downward and they declared you a rival (or declared war or proclaimed a claim to some of your systems), it is nigh impossible to increase their opinion again because those all provide an ongoing negative modifier. You just have to hope an extra-dimensional threat spawns nearby :)