What Good is Answering Demands?

Wait until all three of them swarm you at once to get the answer.

If you do not ally with an AI by satisfying their demands, the three of them will "like" each other more than they like you, and you'll have all three of them beating on your door. Depending on the map, you'll likely be fighting your battles on at least two fronts, resulting in being overwhelmed. Having at least one AI on your side, particularly if they're next door to you so you're down to fighting on only one front, makes the game a lot more balanced.

Eventually the AI's will start offering missions like {Team 1 wants you to kill 3 civilian buildings on Team 2}, but that's much less convenient and more difficult than Team 2's mission for you {kill 6 ships from Team 3}. So as you make these choices, some AI's will become more friendly and others will go back to hating you.

-- Retro

Ooooooo Kaaaay --

So am I to understand that the AI players are busily asking each other for "freebies" in order that they each are "liked" at one extent or another?
Or are human players the only suckers in the game?

Also -- can human players ask for "freebies" from the AI players? All I see in the manual is I can "ping" and have allies go after a target. At this point, I don't have any targets. I just want somebody to pay me to "like" them!

The AI missions may sound like extortion, and it is. But try looking at it this way:
It is FAR FAR FAR cheaper to meet their demands and make peace, than to wage war on a new front. Let's see... give 500 credits, or destroy 40 ships, 4 planets, and lose a potential ally. Take your pick! Destroy part of one enemy armada, or fight TWO armadas at once! Kind of tricky to pull off IMO.

I don't see how the AI does it though. There's no way in game to figure out where your tributed resources came from! You also can't see who is blowing up what without having scouts on scene.

Yep (although whether it actually occurs within the game mechanic is questionable).

Another way of looking at it is that the game *requires* all players to have at least one enemy at all times (which is why one of your allies will go hostile on you as soon as all the foes are cleaned out). So in a 1v1v1v1, each player requires at minimum one enemy and up to two allies. If you are the least liked because you never respond to their requests, that "one enemy" is always going to be you.

You don't have the ability to generate AI requests in the game, other than ping and sharing things like vision and trade.

-- Retro

i don't think they do. I think they cheat here... a LOT. Played a couple of games on medium maps and got hit by 3 AIs at once. When I watched the repaly, every AI was in at least a cease fire with someone elese, and a couple of them had peace treaties.

This all occured BEFORE i had to the opportunity to complete a single mission. Sounds a little sketchy if you ask me.

It's less of a problem on larger maps where you have an opportunity to really make a name for yourself. But in small games with 5/6 planets per player, the can all come at you much sooner than you'll have an chance to impress anyone.

mehoo, my thoughts are that either that was a fluke statistic or you were optimizing your own play and the general rule of "attack the strongest" worked out against your favour.

Consider: In a 1v1v1v1 map, there is a 1/3 * 1/3 * 1/3 (or one in twenty-seven) chance, ALL ELSE BEING EVEN, that you become the target of everyone's attentions. This considerably escalates if you're playing perfectly and have a lead on everyone else, or if you have the largest territory because you may have expanded more quickly than anyone else. I can't say for certain that the enemy AI's DON'T have a predilection to always attack the player, but I have a number of examples of gameplay where a 1v1v1v1 unlocked map didn't end up with me being attacked from every angle.

Besides, if you're battling AI, they really don't deal well with a good turret+hangar defense. Even if all 3 attack you, a decent level of defense on your planets allows you to get there with your fleet and counterattack...

...and then you research phase disruption and [deep sonorous voice]MAKE THEM PAY... heh. heh heh. Heh hehheh haw. Heh HEHEHEH HAHAHA... {to avoid repetition and preserve suspense, simply end this post with maniacal cackling laughter.}

-- Retro

Heh.

Well, I think it's nutz.

Real life, nobody just up and demands tribute, unless they've already achieved a significant power imbalance in their own favor.

Indeed, I think it would make more sense for the Pirates to demand tribute. They start the game with about a gadzillion ships, and could easily wipe everybody off the map if they wanted to. Thankfully, they generally only send out a small fraction of their fleet to harass people.

It's like they don't even really care, they just want to harass people -- one time I saw that another player was on their Hit List. But they needed to phase jump through one of my systems to get there. I left them alone, they left me alone. Weird.

BTW, I saw one mission I liked, where I was supposed to shoot up one of the other player's ships. Well, that's more like it! I wanted to do that anyway! So how's come I didn't get any money for all that hard work I did? Or did I just not read it right?

But I can't complain. (I will anyway.) It pumps more adrenalin into the game, as apparently the designers have set it up such that there's no such thing as any half-hour going by without something getting blown to smithereens!    

Actually, in real life, they certainly did. There was all sorts of cases in our own human history where empires basically paid other cultures not to attack them, or paid tribute to gain allies. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't, but many a barbarian empire got a bunch of trinkets to make them go off and sack some other city.

No similarities regarding the antics of real-life pirates, though. Unlike real-life, a big batch of free fully-crewed corsairs didn't just materialize every little while on the open seas.
Now that's the attitude of someone who can enjoy a game! Sometimes ya just gotta leave your rational brain at the door and go into the theater and enjoy the Bruce Willis action movie without thinking too hard about it.

-- Retro

Yeah, I often blow the AI off if they ask for resources. However, I have a weakness. I will cross the entire solar system(s) and lose more than the value of the reward to destroy enemy ships/installations if my planets aren't under siege.

I find that I can usually align myself with a research/trade/everything else but offense. Offense (and to a lesser extent, defense) AI will ask for most resources. I usually completely blow off diplomacy.

That little hit of resources, or trade agreement, etc. is helpful mid game. I find that early game I can't just go gallivanting into one AI's turf just to please another AI. Later in the game I'm just picking them off one at a time so diplomacy is moot. But midgame, where some extra resources means a few more ships, which means reinforcements for that fleet that's dead locked... it can be helpful.

I never give up credits. Sometimes they'll ask for metal or crystal, and if I have a surplus I may do it.

I haven't played multiplayer yet. How is diplomacy done in multi? Or is there any?

why not give up credits? I usually end up with way more credits than I know what to do with. As most NPCs ask for 1k-4k it's not a great loss for +33% popularity (note: I play TEC).

why not give up credits? I usually end up with way more credits than I know what to do with. As most NPCs ask for 1k-4k it's not a great loss for +33% popularity (note: I play TEC).

TEC get more credits as their racial advantage. As Vasari and Advent, your initial game advantages are different and credit requests aren't so easy to satisfy.

-- Retro

As far as I'm concerned, they're more likely to stop shooting you. That's good in my book.

It's great to send out a scout, find a massive armada you simply cannot defend against, go give a few resources, and watch that fleet turn and pound somebody else.

if they like u, u can ask them to help defend or attack planets.

If u select an ally's planet u can click a "ping button" to request defence at a certain place and a "ping button" to attack a certain place and they will send their forces there.

Heh,

In games against the AI, I don't typically do the "give" missions. Screw those guys, they can't have my metal or money. I go aggressively fight the enemy tho, so often times I complete missions and find myself in alliances with certain players just by fighting constantly with a common enemy.

As a matter of fact, I rarely even open the diplomacy screen in single player, save once every 10 minutes or so to spot check where I'm at with certain AI players or find out if any alliances/cease fires have been offered to me.

Just be aggressive, ASAP, and you'll find yourself at peace with at least one AI player by mid-late game.

On a side note, I recently played a game against three hard AI opponents, and ended up at "best buddy" status with him. I had planet/ship vision, peace accord, trade rights, the works.

We eliminated the only other AI left in the game, together, then I won the game. Which sucked 'cause I thought I'd automagically end up at war with him when that happened. Instead, it brought up the victory screen. I was a lot more powerful than him, too. Thought I was gonna complete the "defeat 3 hard AI" achievement, too, darnit.

I find it better to have your own star so that everyone needs to research their ability to jump to another star. This allows you to build up your research, fleet, and planetary defenses. In turn this delays the AI's ability to ally up early on. Doppleganger is my favorite map since everyone starts from their own location. Also I used Galaxy forge to make a couple of custom Doppleganger maps with additional planet and stars for more players.

The downside is that your choke point is the sun and that someone who warps in from one location can quickly warp to a planet depending on the direction of their entry point. The strategy that I use here is build are a lot of carriers (cap and cruiser), so your defense at the sun is a large number of fighters that can easily get around.

So ally up early on. A hard AI will start trading early if you have ports up, but you should complete some missions so you don't lose their trust. Normally the first you chat with is the strongest and the last is your enemy.

The diplomacy AI rather sucks =/

random works for me.

looking at my member number... I'm old.

I find that you need to decide which of the AIs' quests you're going to accept. That is, if you've got two opposing AIs, and each of them keeps giving you quests to destroy structures or ships belonging to the other, pretty soon you're going to stretch yourself too thin.

Pick one of them and concentrate on fulfilling quests for that player, so you can build up a relationship that will evolve into trade alliances, cease-fires and maybe peace treaties.

One of the best benefits that was missed above is so that you can boss them around. Its a feature I think a lot of people don't realize is there

cool...

They may refuse, though, if they don't like you enough.

BTW, i have a game going where i have a "seice fire" agreement with all AI's. Apparently there is no diplomatic victory

yes there is, u'll just have to sit out their wars until they finish eachother

After doing some checking on one game, I discovered that my 3 AI allies were all enemies AND were all allied to all the AIs that I wasn't allied with. :NOTSURE: