Diplomacy Era (0.1)

[zookeeper]

Diplomacy Era is an era in which you can make and break alliances with other players, vote on decisions affecting your team and send private messages to any player or whole teams. It's intended for FFA games, although team games can probably be used as a starting point just as well. I'd recommend the number of players to be 4 or higher, although people who like 3p FFA might find this enjoyable even with 3. Note that this is not an era where you can exchange units and villages, give gold to your teammates, negotiate ZoC policies or trade one thing for another: I've intentionally wanted to make a very KISS system in which the focus is simply on managing alliances which otherwise work very much like in your average team match.

The 0.1 version is still missing an diplomatic option or two (mostly about vision sharing) as well as victory mechanics which will guarantee that teams will eventually have to disband, because currently there is pretty much no reason for everyone to not join the strongest team and no reason for the strongest team to reject that. However, the basic system of making and breaking alliances and voting seems reasonably solid, although I'm sure there's still bugs to be found.

You can find this on the 1.8 add-on server. It'll eventually be on the trunk/1.9 server as well.

[Anonymissimus]

To bring some life to the thread , I had tried this one too and it's an a lot more interesting era than some others with populated threads imo. However it seems it requires all players joining to have this era ? (I still don't understand when this is required and when not...)

EDIT
Did you try making it so that this era is not required for the non-host clients ? It works in "pick your recruits". (I was surprised to see I can join a PYR era game without having that era myself, and it actually worked well without any OOS errors.) Both eras don't define new units. http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php ... ra#p434319
Would be a great help in reaching popularity.

EDIT2
Wanted to find out about it and just changed the require_era=yes (default) to no, and the first trial with someone on the server without the era did work. What you want to sent here are messages with options and modified sides to the other clients don't you ? So from my naive point of view at the moment it should work; thing confusing me is that PYR is maintained by you too so you should already have known this though.

[zookeeper]

I think the likeliest explanation is that I simply forgot to add require_era=no; there's no reason why it should be required, nor do I have had any plans to include anything in it which would make it be required. Thanks for spotting that.

[Anonymissimus]

Which factors do you know about that would have made it required (other than units) ? (or eras in general) ? Which (toplevel) tags or whatever ?

[zookeeper]

Which factors do you know about that would have made it required (other than units) ? (or eras in general) ? Which (toplevel) tags or whatever ?

Basically, if an era requires any other top-level tags, then it's required. The most common is of course [units], but I guess sometimes one could need [terrain] and [terrain_graphics] as well.

[Anonymissimus]

I've used it a bit in real multiplayer (with Gwledig's conquest for which it's suitable and with require_era=no) and can confirm that it works. Some folks liked it it seems.
2 problems:
-The allied-player specific chat messages don't seem to work, there's an error message from the server.
-The help message is shown to all players when one of them (the current player) uses it, just put a side_for=$side_number there.

[Gwledig]

This sounds really good, I was looking at some kind of diplomacy addition to conquest+ and this might sort it.
One suggestion which would be good would be Tribute, i.e. a player can send another player gold as a one off or reoccurring every turn. It would also be good to make NAPs formal with TW expiry once a NAP partner declares it over.

[Anonymissimus]

It would also be good to make NAPs formal with TW expiry once a NAP partner declares it over.

eplanation for zookeeper :
NAP=non aggression treaty
TW=turns waiting (for a broken treaty having effect after declaring it over)

The basic problem I see here is that the wesnoth engine does not know about the diplomacy status "peace"/NAP. The engine only knows "enemies" and "allies". Peace would be not allied - no share view, no share maps, not being at war with the same other sides. But not at war, so can't attack each other. ZoC should be in effect.
Such diplomacy status would be ideal for conquest IMO and other types of addons.
Probably rather difficult to implement.