Conflict Without War: How to Solve the Borders Issue

First they have to teach the AI to avoid those borders, then maybe they could look at that. But I truly doubt it.

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Quoting Christian_Akacro,

First they have to teach the AI to avoid those borders, then maybe they could look at that. But I truly doubt it.

Yeah, I know. I was thinking about that too. The damn idea has to be programmable.

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I meant I doubt you'll ever have freedom of fire without war. They will be able to teach the AI to avoid borders unless necessary.

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+100500

Beats me why we even have borders if nobody gives a damn about them.

That said, currently Culture=Influence=Borders. If we want a more strict border system it'd be wise to separate the concept of borders and "staked" territory form the concept of culture and influence. Mixing them would go sideways both ways. You shouldn't loose borders with influence, only with actual border source that was lost. Nor should you gain "ground" just because you songs can be heard farther than your flags can be seen.

But that's probably not happening, and probably so is the "meaningful borders revolution".

Quoting Christian_Akacro,

reply 3

...unless necessary.

Define "necessary".

That BTW is the main problem of writing an AI in a nutshell. Once you successfully strip ALL the concepts that seem obvious to the human mind into the terms that the machine can understand, the rest is just coding routine.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

...
That's how we do it on Earth.

Nope, not quite. On earth we cross borders, ignore "the right of the host" on each and every imaginable front including vocal and cultural, break other laws and moral standards, and then after being persecuted raise a stink about it to the point that should the one who is in the right go through with exercising his rights, he ends up being the guilty one in the public's eyes.

Sorry, about that, but sometimes the "public nonsense" of this world reeeeeealy gets on my nerves.

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I'm talking about jet fighters flying into another countries' airspace. What exactly are you talking about?

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Quoting Reianor3,

reply 4

+100500

Beats me why we even have borders if nobody gives a damn about them.

That said, currently Culture=Influence=Borders. If we want a more strict border system it'd be wise to separate the concept of borders and "staked" territory form the concept of culture and influence. Mixing them would go sideways both ways. You shouldn't loose borders with influence, only with actual border source that was lost. Nor should you gain "ground" just because you songs can be heard farther than your flags can be seen.

But that's probably not happening, and probably so is the "meaningful borders revolution".

I made a thread similar to your idea, here. I agree there should be a Zone of Influence and a smaller Zone of Control that means war if you violate without an open borders treaty.

Quoting Reianor3,

reply 4

Define "necessary".

Necessary: required to be done, achieved, or present; needed; essential

Sorry, couldn't resist. How about war? That seems like a good requirement to me.

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Your culture isn't your borders. Space is vast. Your borders encompass the atmospheric bubble around your colonized planets.

And yes, the AI gets annoyed when you fly through their space. Just like you get annoyed when they fly through yours. Huh. How about that.

+1

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Yes, we get that. Doesn't mean we have to agree with it, or that we can't come up with ideas to make it better.

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Quoting marigoldran,

reply 6

I'm talking about jet fighters flying into another countries' airspace. What exactly are you talking about?

Real world...

Quoting Christian_Akacro,

reply 7

Necessary: required to be done, achieved, or present; needed; essential

Sorry, couldn't resist. How about war? That seems like a good requirement to me.

There's a good old way to explain (or rather show) the complexity of programming to a computer newbie. It's called "playing the robot". The idea is that the one doing the explaining agrees to "follow orders" (can be on paper for all it matters) but then starts questioning each and ever order to the details that look stupid and excessive in the eyes of human intuition. Let me continue the example.

Define "required".

Ok, on second though... let's not. Let's take a shortcut...

Required for what?

Is crossing borders to scout "necessary"?

Is it "necessary" to cross them to settle on the other side of them faster?

Is it ever necessary to settle?

Is it necessary to win?

What is necessary FOR wining?

Is it necessary for me to ask any more of these question to make it clear that necessity is excessively subjective?

Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 8

Your culture isn't your borders. Space is vast. Your borders encompass the atmospheric bubble around your colonized planets.

And yes, the AI gets annoyed when you fly through their space. Just like you get annoyed when they fly through yours. Huh. How about that.

So, you've got me wondering... are you troll-fishing or are you just posting while drunk?

Borders on earth aren't much more "material" than empty space. The concept of borders involves the claims to territory, rules of crossing, jurisdiction and the ability to enforce those rules by actions that are "allowed" by the aforementioned jurisdiction. Basically it's a statement "don't get on my lawn or else" + a statement "this here is my lawn" + a law that will pardon you if you harm a trespasser (in certain law-defined ways) while he is on your lawn.

That last part is something that we lack.

Also, NO the AI doesn't get annoyed. And unless SD can pull GC race out of the lore and into their office there'll be no such thing as AI that can get annoyed. All they do is show you a red minus and use that to evaluate their reactions to you. The player on contrary CAN get annoyed and doesn't like it. On top of it he cannot scare the lawn trespasser with big bad red minus of negative diplomacy. Which is bad because that means that as far as AI is concerned - we're totally ok with him waltzing through our territory.

Ah heck, why am I even bothering to reply... you obviously aren't taking it seriously.

+1

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I reiterate, war seems like a good requirement. To be clear; I was thinking only war, no other circumstances except for open borders, obviously. Ever play BotF? The borders there were impermeable without an open borders treaty or war. It made tons of sense, great game for its time.

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Yet again, influence isn't a border and you don't have force fields protecting your "zone". There are always open borders treaties, to solve a lot of these problems, but if the "possession is 9/10 the law" scenario (meaning who can get their 1st with a gun, regardless of what a map says) isn't to your liking, then you're not much for history.

I like the challenge of having to figure out how to allocate resources to make sure the things I 'claim" as mine wind up really being mine. But challenges aren't for everyone... and its not like those same people would have 5 threads about how easy the game is, right?

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OMG, we know! There is something called a political boundary.. cross that with military and you're in for war. I'm not arguing that your influence should be the hard border, though I might prefer that, I'm arguing for a seperate political boundary that does prevent military ships (a troop transport or anything with a gun) from entering my political boundary without war or open borders between me and them. Also, your thinly veiled insult at the bottom was pretty unbecoming. It's not about challenge, if the AI or another opponent thinks that I'm not defending my planets well enough then they declare war and crush me, what's the problem? All this does is define some space as 'yours' that your opponents can't colonize/build in or move military ships without war/open borders. At the moment Open Borders just prevents a small diplomatic penalty which no one cares to work around because the cost is generally outweighed by the benefit of taking that shortcut. Heck I would be immensely happy if you could have a political boundary that was only two or three tiles deep, while your influence stretches on to infinity. At that point I could care less if the AI is wandering around in my Influence border, just as long as he leaves my political boundary be.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

Allow the AI or the human player to destroy foreign ships in their influence territory without having to declare war.

Problem solved.

You want to fly through my space? Fine. But this gives me the right to shoot it down.

That's how we do it on Earth.

Thats how Endless Space does it, too. It gives actual value to peace/open borders. That said, ES also has Cold War, which is the default state of diplomacy, which allows people to ignore borders, but declare fair game on anyone who does so. I suggested it be picked up in beta, but that was one of the ideas that didn't make it. I still think it should happen, though, because it would solve many problems.

+1

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I would absolutely LOVE something along these lines eventually.

I think there should be more to conflict then peace or total war. There should be lesser military sanctions/blockades, cold war, etc.

options like:

-blocking trade routes.

-be able to attack enemy ships that come within your "borders" or withing 5 hexes of your planets and stations or whatever. But not outside that area. great for "self defence" diplomacy options

-be able to attack enemy ships anywhere except close to their planets.

-Declaration of minor military conflict, instead of total war. ie: war for Planet X or Station Z, and then peace unless someone escalates. combat only allowed within 5 hexes of the target(s). could work great in combination with threads/demands.

-Abilty to escalate/de-escalate between various levels of war/tension

-Maybe something like a crusade/jihad thing, based on ideology a call for war of all benevolent factions is made to attack some other dude. and if you don't go along you are considered a heretic.

-ability do establish DMZs as part of peace negotitiations, with increased penalties for having fleets near the border.

-United Planet Peace keeping missions to stop a war by having factions donate ships to a neutral UN faction (sorta like pirates but with a specific objective), that occupy the DMZ between the two warring factions, trying to prevent them from killing each other by force.

+1

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If someone missed i asked Brad about it in Steam, and here his nswer http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/617336568065171463/#c618463446160277579

It's somewhat vague and i'm all for shooting down other races ships in your ZoI.

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Quoting Reianor3,

reply 10

Borders on earth aren't much more "material" than empty space. The concept of borders involves the claims to territory, rules of crossing, jurisdiction and the ability to enforce those rules by actions that are "allowed" by the aforementioned jurisdiction. Basically it's a statement "don't get on my lawn or else" + a statement "this here is my lawn" + a law that will pardon you if you harm a trespasser (in certain law-defined ways) while he is on your lawn.

And influence boundaries make an absolutely terrible system for setting tile ownership. You do not have a claim to territory I settled before you ever explored the region just because your nebulous and ill-defined "influence" has spread across the void to enclose the worlds therein. I do not have a claim to your homeworld just because my influence exceeds yours at the planet.

If you want a concept of territorial space, then pick something sensible - e.g. a 5-tile limit from the nearest inhabited world - not the nonsense that is influence.

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Franco fx

Join Date 04/2003

+59

Quoting sweatyboatman,

reply 8

Your culture isn't your borders. Space is vast. Your borders encompass the atmospheric bubble around your colonized planets.

And yes, the AI gets annoyed when you fly through their space. Just like you get annoyed when they fly through yours. Huh. How about that.

Yes, I was playing an immense game recently where by T180 I was so far ahead of the 7 AI I got bored and put the game on soak and watched my faction colonize another 100 planets and start/stop a few wars. Then I restarted the game just to see what was going on with me in control.

My power was about 10X the closest AI and any faction with common borders (which was all but 2 by then) hated me and the main reason was Zone incursion. They seemed to be doing their best to stay out of my zone while my faction , while under AI control, was completely ignoring theirs.

Bottom line, if you have enough power, the AI seems to respect borders more. If they are close or ahead, they seem more inclined to ignore your borders. More or less like real life, it seems.

This was just my impression, and I am sure they were in my Zone more than I noticed, but they definitely seemed to have some degree of respect for my power rating VS my own faction's total contempt for theirs when on soak.

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Where in that quote does Reianor advocate for your ZoI=PB (Political Boundary)? He (she?) is only advocating, like I am, that there be some sort of PB as well as your ZoI, like the five tile limit you mentioned.

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Quoting Christian_Akacro,

reply 19

Where in that quote does Reianor advocate for your ZoI=PB (Political Boundary)? He (she?) is only advocating, like I am, that there be some sort of PB as well as your ZoI, like the five tile limit you mentioned.

Is that what Reianor is doing, though? SweatyBoatMan said that you do not have territory outside of your colonized planets. This is, for the most part, true in the current version of the game, with the exception of strategic resources and relics (which are owned by the first to claim them by developing the resource), and debatably another exception for the starbase exclusion zone around any given starbase. Reianor's response to this was to accuse SweatyBoatMan of being drunk or troll baiting. Reianor then backed this up with marginally topical stuff about real-world political boundaries which nevertheless fails to require a boundary beyond the limit SweatyBoatMan claimed for territory - that of the planetary atmosphere.

It would also appear that based upon earlier statements made, Reianor would prefer "influence borders = political borders" to "colonized planets = territorial limits," though Reianor would prefer a rule other than either of those for determining political boundaries. To say that Reianor is 'only' advocating that there be some sort of political border in addition to the zone of influence is in my view a misrepresentation of Reianor's position.

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Personally I like the freedom of movement that GalCiv offers. That's how it was in GalCiv2 (and maybe before, but I don't now) and that's how it is in GalCiv3. At the moment, I really can't see any convincing argument to restrict this movement by introducing political borders that cannot be crossed without being at war. An argument that convinces me would need to show how the game really proftis from it.

So far every argument I heard was basically just a complaint that the AI was "mean" by colonizing a planet faster oder securing resources or something. But there are already tools and mechanics to your disposal in the game to deal with this. So at this time, I would suggest to just get better at playing GalCiv3 instead of demanding a fundamental aspect should be changed.

That said, I'm not close minded about this. Just show how such a border would make GalCiv3 more fun - and when I say GalCiv3, I mean GalCiv3. Don't point to other games, because they are a different thing.

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Quoting joeball123,

reply 20

Quoting Christian_Akacro,

reply 19

Where in that quote does Reianor advocate for your ZoI=PB (Political Boundary)? He (she?) is only advocating, like I am, that there be some sort of PB as well as your ZoI, like the five tile limit you mentioned.

Is that what Reianor is doing, though? SweatyBoatMan said that you do not have territory outside of your colonized planets. This is, for the most part, true in the current version of the game, with the exception of strategic resources and relics (which are owned by the first to claim them by developing the resource), and debatably another exception for the starbase exclusion zone around any given starbase. Reianor's response to this was to accuse SweatyBoatMan of being drunk or troll baiting. Reianor then backed this up with marginally topical stuff about real-world political boundaries which nevertheless fails to require a boundary beyond the limit SweatyBoatMan claimed for territory - that of the planetary atmosphere.

It would also appear that based upon earlier statements made, Reianor would prefer "influence borders = political borders" to "colonized planets = territorial limits," though Reianor would prefer a rule other than either of those for determining political boundaries. To say that Reianor is 'only' advocating that there be some sort of political border in addition to the zone of influence is in my view a misrepresentation of Reianor's position.

Good points. I only reread that post, not the entire thread. So I could have forgotten some earlier things they mentioned.

Quoting Empress_Fujiko,

reply 21

Personally I like the freedom of movement that GalCiv offers. That's how it was in GalCiv2 (and maybe before, but I don't now) and that's how it is in GalCiv3. At the moment, I really can't see any convincing argument to restrict this movement by introducing political borders that cannot be crossed without being at war. An argument that convinces me would need to show how the game really proftis from it.

So far every argument I heard was basically just a complaint that the AI was "mean" by colonizing a planet faster oder securing resources or something. But there are already tools and mechanics to your disposal in the game to deal with this. So at this time, I would suggest to just get better at playing GalCiv3 instead of demanding a fundamental aspect should be changed.

That said, I'm not close minded about this. Just show how such a border would make GalCiv3 more fun - and when I say GalCiv3, I mean GalCiv3. Don't point to other games, because they are a different thing.

Ugh... why does everyone say that I need to 'get better' at the game. Trust me, my skill is not in question, it's a question of being frustrated by the mechanics. I can definitely deal with it, I'm saying I shouldn't have to.

I'm not 'demanding' anything. Stardock, AKA Brad, is more than welcome to ignore my idea, he probably will. I'll happily keep bringing it up though. It's a suggestion, not a demand.

The point is for some realism. If I'm a race with faster than light travel it seems utterly reasonable to me to set up a political boundary that encompasses some space around my planets, empty or not. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that anyone else should be able to colonize Mars, for example, when I'm the Terrans because I ignore it. That's within my home system but that's totally ok and my only recourse is to declare war? How about making them declare war to be able to colonize Mars? Do you think that if we start to colonize the galaxy in real life that we wouldn't hold a special place for the Sol system and would let any alien colony ships get near it? For me, reasonable realism does make the game more fun.

Also, telling me not to point to other games is rather annoying. I'm not saying GCIII needs to be a new upgraded version of Birth of the Federation (BotF), I'm just pointing to a single mechanic that made sense to me in BotF that could also apply to GCIII.

+1

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Quoting EleventhStar,

reply 15

I would absolutely LOVE something along these lines eventually.

I think there should be more to conflict then peace or total war. There should be lesser military sanctions/blockades, cold war, etc.

options like:

-blocking trade routes.

-be able to attack enemy ships that come within your "borders" or withing 5 hexes of your planets and stations or whatever. But not outside that area. great for "self defence" diplomacy options

-be able to attack enemy ships anywhere except close to their planets.

-Declaration of minor military conflict, instead of total war. ie: war for Planet X or Station Z, and then peace unless someone escalates. combat only allowed within 5 hexes of the target(s). could work great in combination with threads/demands.

-Abilty to escalate/de-escalate between various levels of war/tension

-Maybe something like a crusade/jihad thing, based on ideology a call for war of all benevolent factions is made to attack some other dude. and if you don't go along you are considered a heretic.

-ability do establish DMZs as part of peace negotitiations, with increased penalties for having fleets near the border.

-United Planet Peace keeping missions to stop a war by having factions donate ships to a neutral UN faction (sorta like pirates but with a specific objective), that occupy the DMZ between the two warring factions, trying to prevent them from killing each other by force.

I would really like something like those things to be added in some expansion. In fact, I was recently thinking about the First Contact War between the Turians and the Alliance, from Mass Effect. It was a small scale conflict that involved small battles, and at its peak, a planetary invasion that almost escalated the whole thing to a full out war, but then the Council intervened and made peace. This would be awesome in GalCiv, where you could wage small "undeclared wars" for star bases or to destroy or apprehend those fools who dare to cross your ZOC. And then the United Planets could take the role of the Council from Mass Effect, and propose peace before the thing gets nasty.

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DARCA1213

Join Date 01/2014

+106

Surprise surprise, this issue is back...again. Seems people really hate the border system more than tofu hot dogs.

We really need solid borders and to shot at the occasional rouge colony ship or scout as has been wanted since galciv2 at least.

PLEASE STARDOCK, GIVE US THIS AND WE WILL SERVE YOU FOREVER!

+1

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Nah, leave the game the way it is. Clearly you folks never enjoyed or played GCII. You cannot enforce borders in space, besides if you did this then you could not cross to the otherside of someones influence to get at stuff only you know about.

Count me as one who likes the way borders are permeable. You already get a diplomacy modifier to trespassing or having open borders.

+1

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