AFAIK, there are no fixed rules in the MoO code for that - this is just an emergent property.
This is actually something that can also happen the other way around, with the player being the aggressor. At which point I might begin methodically planning revenge while being nice-nice diplomatically. There's no way to break those ceasefires, despite it not making any roleplay sense.īy comparison, in MoO sometimes an AI race will attack one of your planets without declaring war, and sometimes I just have to take in the chin, because I'm nowhere near strong enough to fight. not so much.Īs for the wargoal system, unless you're playing a genocidal (FP/DE) race which almost removes diplomacy, you're limited to wars with very limited goals with 10-year ceasefires *. Again, early game Stellaris is awesome, but later. There are also the drastic performance issues some players have mid-late game, or how the economy revamp (a good idea in theory, tiles needed to go) didn't reduce micromanagement, but arguably increased it. So you are left with either slowly conquering the galaxy (because the wargoal system is stupid, I'll get to that), or basically doing very little - diplo is only slightly more fleshed out than MoO, Federations only make sense for some Empires and don't do much yet - and waiting until the Crisis, which is bugged enough that it's no longer that much of a threat. The war AI is a joke once you've grown enough, and diplomacy offers very few options - maybe the latest DLC will help with that. But it has way too strict rules and there aren't many meaningful (combat or diplomatic) interactions with the AI past mid-game once you've exhausted most events *. Please elaborate!īasically, it's a game emphasizing and focusing on roleplay. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy. The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses. When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. The player, likely to be of a controlling or anxious mindset, will reject the idea that these details can be left up to an unaware AI, and given the option to do so they will micro-manage the fun out of the game. The main limitation to the AI governor model, which has been tried in many games to varying success, is that the solver necessary to make them play like an optimal player tends to start encompassing more and more parts of the game mechanics as you add in tricks like "use a worker to rush production" or "plan improvements to coincide with tech advances".