Age of Wonders 4 - Dev Diary #13 - Diplomacy

Dev Diary #13 for Age of Wonders 4 explains how diplomacy works.

Welcome to another Age of Wonders 4 Dev Journal! My name is Thom (not to be confused with Tom or Thomas), I’m a gameplay programmer at Triumph Studios and primarily responsible for the Diplomacy systems and related AI.

Today I will take you through some of the changes and additions we’ve made to the Diplomacy systems. There is a lot to go through as we had many objectives when working on the diplomacy system for AoW4:

•     Improving the overall experience of how players interact with each other.
•     Increased player agency while still focusing on how AI players can manage difficulty and pressure in a more proactive manner.
•     Clearer AI behavior and proper foreshadowing of actions and shifts in the AIs attitude.
•     Greater variety in gameplay and the role of personalities.

Together with Jordi, we’ve done a stream highlighting these changes as well:

Trading

We’ll start off the journal by talking about the trading system, which is at the heart of your negotiations and dealings with the other rulers in the realm. Throughout the series we’ve featured Diplomacy in various forms, always trying to improve upon the last iteration, and we hope that the new system is no exception.

With Planetfall we introduced free form trading where you can haggle with AI players to try and achieve specified trade deals, sometimes at a great profit too. The only downside was that you’d have to go back and forth with AI players to broker a deal, which did not always work out since there was no way of knowing which deal would work for the AI beforehand. For AoW4 we have reworked this system entirely, focussing on clarity and providing a more straightforward experience.

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