Diplomacy and relationships

[OddBob]

We have been discussing diplomacy/relationship systems on IRC (yes we have been busy).

We have come up with this system:

Relationships are handled between sovereigns (the player is a sovereign) in pairs.
Each relationship has three values expressed in numbers from 1 to 100 or -100 to 100 or whatever:

Affinity: this is how much they like you.

Trust: this is whether they trust you or not.

Respect/loyalty/professionalism/fear: this is a value that represents a lot of things but the basic thing it does is ovverride the other values. In other words this is how likely they are to help you (or not help you) regardless of how much they like/trust you. This allows, for example, a good friend of yours in the police force to let you slip by even though you are a wanted criminal. It can represent a lot of of other things.

Now I know I said that the values apply to sovereigns, and your friend on the police force is not a sovereign. It is computationally prohibitively expensive to have a relationship for every ship and station in game. So what we have devised is a system like this: all of your actions have a small affect on the sovereign's attitude for you as a whole, HOWEVER, if you perform a large action towards someone resulting in a large attitude change (doing a mission for somebody, for example) then they are "split" off into a separate sovereign. They are still linked to the main sovereign but they can have a different opinion, allowing someone to hate you even if you are a hero or like you even if you are a crinimal (as well as a lot of other situations).

[Periculi]

Whether it's 1 more or 100 more sovereigns, how will you generate a new sov for a split off relation?

I like the idea, I just see some difficulty in implementing it.

[Betelgeuse]

growing tables

here is a two by two table '((1 2) (3 4))
now lets add another row and that gives us '((1 2) (3 4) (5 6))
if George uses lists or whatever it doesn't matter all that matters is that it can be done

they don't have to be real sovereigns for relationships just state what the relationships are (each ship/station would point to where on the table it was)

child sovereigns would be treated as there parents in the cases of things reacting to them but in the cases of them reacting to others it can be different.

[F50]

If you really want to do that, you will have to be able to do something with the other sovereigns first. Right now I am working on a mod that allows you to interact with Charon Pirates. Of course, I am just learning scripting and dockscreens so its going much slower for me than it ever would for you, but I should be able to do this for every major soverign (Pirate, Sung, Ranx, Ares) as soon as I have the basic stuff worked out. Right now I'm stuck with trying (and failing) to get a ship to buy/sell things so that you don't end up with a huge amount of items if you blow up an enemy station. I'm wondering if there is a better way do this so that all items are removed upon [OnDestroy] and then are replaced with the items you get now.

[Sheltem]

I also thought about a revised diplomcy system basing on relationships. This would make it possible to chose a good/evil game-style, as you could start to stick to the Ares in late game. They would let you make missions that hurts commonwealth. Therefore you lose trust by the commonwealth. This can also be applied to Black Markets, Sung and others. On the other side you can stay on the side of the commonwealth and continue to destroy Ares.
In case George has not designated the player to stick to the commonwealth, you may achiev certain rank for another races by killing ships of the opposing force. This could also be combined with the idea in upcoming "Spawning Enemys" thread - when you destroy their ships/stations, you lose much relationships at them, so they would start to turn hostile.