Disclaimer 😳
This post is based on an old post done elsewhere.
Short version 😀
The classic diplomacy systems in 4X TBS/RTS Grand Strategy Space games is becoming a little stale after all this years of absence of innovation.
Can old and new Artificial Intelligence applications like Elza and Siri be the inspiration for something new, more interactive and more astute?
Long version 😯
In a 4X TBS/RTS Space game the player interact frequently with the leaders of the other galactic civilizations.
The quality of that interaction is paramount to keep alive the suspension of disbelieve, the feeling of 'realism'.
Let's be immediately clear: I'm not proposing here to have fake chat with the other leader. The standard interaction as the formula goes in the last years is fine. Probably perfectible but I have nothing new to propose for the moment.
What I'm talking about are the little text blurbs that should spice the barter.
Nice leaders tells nice blurbs, arrogant leaders tells arrogant blurbs and so on.
If we are developing a great, really successful game we should plan for a player who spend hours on it, that plays it tens, hundreds of time.
Well, I can tell you, that player will become quite annoyed with the endless repetitions of diplomatic banters.
The best interactivity that I have seen is the A.I. leaders remembering if you slighted them or if you break some important treaty. Sometimes they acknowledge that you are creeping near their territory or trying to mount up an influence/cultural blitz.
But even then the text blurbs are always the same, lacking personality, common history acknowledgment, last development awareness. Just noise and no signal.
I feel that a good program should try to do better.
The A.I. should have a database of all the interactions you have made with them, in the diplomatic screen and on the map, and should be able to use it to spice up their messages.
Tentative alliance opening should start first at the bantering level before to blossom in a treaty proposition. Also changes of allegiance, pointed treats, cultural similarity can be used to make the exchanges more alive and believable.
Then there is a second level: in a real world seldom diplomatic stances has something to do with what is really going on. The bantering can then become a way to steer the player attention elsewhere. It can also be another way to push along the overall game storyline.
Diplomacy is war pursued with other, more civilized, instruments. Well, for now the A.I. is quite bad at it. Something has to be done.
Will SIRI, the voice recognition service on the iPhone 4S, or at the least part of the technology behind it, be of use in a modern and radically more interactive diplomacy system?
That is a really good idea there bertipa. I know the tech is fairly new and it will probably take a while to really put it to use in games. But actually communicating with your opponents (human or npc) would add a huge immersion level to the game. And it could be used in other areas of the game such as giving orders to your computer, crew or troops.
I fear that the tech is not the problem here: look at the resources Apple is trowing to SIRI to prepare answers and contest definitions to make it all work, add to that that they are doing just three languages (and a few dialects) and that they are still in beta!
To make this work there will be the need of a well coordinated effort by the open-source crowd and volonterous players...
... and quite the server farm.
Fascinating but possibly undoable for the moment. 🙁
I'm quite a fan of the asyncronous diplomacy system of MoO3. It was a simple and efficent way to give the feel that diplomacy between different races distant hundreds of light-years would be different from what we have today.
Before getting down into something like siri, I think a quantum leap is much easier to be made by analyzing text. Some 4x games already have a diplomacy system that sort-of lets you choose whether you will yell at your opponent, whether you will beg them or just have a nice little chat. What if we take this one step further?
Imagine actually typing your communication with an AI player into a text-box, just like you would communicating with a human. Imagine a system that then went through your text and analysed it for key words and sentence structures. A system that recognizes sentences built to threaten, that prefers some words to others and so forth. For example, some races could react more favorably to the player outright naming their enemies as the target of a mutual defense treaty, while others would be offended by the mention of their name. Some would prefer long sentences with words from a broad diplomatic spectrum.
Before you declare this to be impossible, consider this, though: the system would not have to be able to actually "understand" what the player is saying. Upon mentioning certain key words (alliance, treaty etc) it could prompt the player to confirm that this is the purpose of the message. Or, possibly as a first implementation, could only act as modifier to the diplomatic endeavour rather than as its main functionality (i.e. you can supply a message with your offer, but you don't have to). Think of it as a mini-game of understanding your opponent and matching your language, style and behaviour with theirs - the key principle of diplomacy.
With games like Facade exploring human-to-computer interaction, I think that this sort of system would be quite feasible, and would like to see it implemented as another layer to the diplomatic game in a 4x project.
Edit:
Also, you mentioned controlling the AI's attention. This is something the system could tie into as well. Mentioning a certain border-system just by the way could cause the AI to send scouts there and concentrate its attention on that area. The same would go for mentioning just how threatening other empires are.
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