One-feature-a-day articles: #18 Diplomacy

[DooberGuy]

This is a re-posting of Pocus's original posting on the Paradox forum. I believe he has probably been insanely busy getting PoN ready for us, so I am only attempting to help him out.




One-feature-a-day articles: #18 Diplomacy

In a game of such scope as Pride of Nations, Diplomacy is bound to play an important role in the fate of your nation. Your actions are centralized in a single window in PON, that allows you to see the relationships and treaties of any nation with another, and will let you propose treaties (or issue unilateral moves, like forging a Casus-belli or breaking a treaty) with other nations.

Diplomacy in PON also makes use of the Diplomatic rating of your ruler and his Prime Minister, as some treaties won’t be available, or have less chance of success if the rating is low. You’ll have the opportunity to propose a state visit, to improve your relations (as they might suffer from a variety of causes), a commercial agreement, a military passage treaty (you can ask a mutual treaty here or just a one way treaty), a supply treaty and a few other entries, like the infamous ‘Forge Casus Belli’, that will allow you to have a just cause (or so it seems!) to declare war.

One thing to keep in mind in Pride of Nations is that you just can’t declare war on nations (except Feudal/tribal kingdom) if you don’t have a legitimate cause for war. Also, an important thing to consider is that you have a limited availability of diplomats and plenipotentiaries, so you’ll have to make a choice of who you want to deal with. Spamming the entire world with a host of proposals is simply not possible, and will only result in having spent all your envoys for nothing. Some new diplomats are formed every 6 months though, so you’ll have to wait for them and choose more wisely the next time.


Another thing to consider is that many AIs in Pride of Nations have a kind of ‘personality’, that depends both on their statistics (Rulers are defined by three characteristics: Diplomacy, Administration and Imperialism) and the historical behavior they had. So trying to propose a defensive treaty or even a mutual passage right when you are France toward Prussia, when Prussia is looking toward Alsace, has a much lower chance to be accepted than the same treaty with Russia. Also, you’ll have a hard time pleasing everybody, because ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ applies here: If you are befriending a nation that is hostile toward a third party, then that other country won’t be pleased much by your acts, and your relationship will start to degrade.

In the end, as usual, there will be a fine game of balance of power for you to set, and you’ll need to identify who must be your friend and who you can afford to irritate, if your long term goals demand that.

But this is not all, because some dire turn of events can always happen unexpectedly … An international crisis can develop, even between friends (although chances are much lower). But we will talk about that in another article!