psychoak, I think the 3 sides are suppose to be at war, so starting off neutral doesn't make a lot of sense.

Alliances of convenience do make sense though.

why? just look at the total war series. it's a seperate mini-game in itself. it's supposed to be fun and challenging. hopefully they will fix it in this game.

Ummm...the diplomacy in most of the Total Wars reeked. In my opinion, that is. It mainly bought you some breathing room from time to time. Which is, I agree, much better than Sins, but that doesn't really say much, now is it?

And second, Total War is not a RTS, not in any shape or form. It's a TBS with RTS battles. That's entirely different.

You want to see an example of a RTS that done it exactly right? Seven Kingdoms 1 and Seven Kingdoms 2. Granted, they are old and wrinkly now, and their graphics could make your eyes bleed, but no RTS ever beat them from diplomacy stand point. Alliances, surrenders, spies, bribes, demands for attack, demands for defense (which surprisingly worked - the AI actually came to your defense! That never really happens in RTSs, at most they just say they're coming but won't budge. In 7K your ally's army was right next to you on the fight and requested), you could convince one AI to attack the other, you could even offer the AI to purchase its entire kingomd and annex his empire to yourself. And if you were large and strong enough, and had a lot of money, this actually worked!

Ahhh, sweet reminisces This really was an amazing game, mind you. Very much ahead of its time. Too bad almost no one played it.

The battle portion of TW is a RTT. Probably the best example for RTT's.

Try using hangers and carriers to counter siege fleets. If you have defenses, and ample bomber/fighter support, you really don't have much to worry about.

But I agree with the points on diplomacy. Could be I just don't know what I am doing in that regard, but FFA games tend to come down to me vs everyone. Been playing teams because of it.

the ai could have researched a tech that gets you a percetage of everything you spend.

Yeah, I found diplomacy hateful, as even in a 7x1, within an hour, all ai's turned against me and mass jumped in against me all at once, 3 different maps.

A lot of requests don't make sense given the time. Destroy 13 of so and so's ships in 15 minutes. Yeah, that's great, but their empire is 20 minutes away, or they don't have that many ships and the game just started.

As for everyone starting hostile, I can kind of see that as that's how the lore is, but why are TEC hostile to TEC, why are Advent hostile to Vasari straight off? Those two could be allies.

Nah, it'd rather see the diplomacy working right. I don't like the diplomacy system but would live with it if the mission was a bit more realistic in term of possibility to succeed because right now, it takes more time just to get to the ennemy before the timer runs out.

How about instead of getting missions -assigned- from the AI, that players are allowed to -pick- from a list of missions they can choose to complete, missions that undoubtedly set one empire against the other?

To prevent stupid steamrolling you could have a weighted system based on the number of planets empire have and the number of phase lines connecting them- have smaller empires unite and offer more lucrative rewards, while some larger empires won't even dean to deal with the player.

This game is awesome but it needs better diplo :/

The diplomacy will be going through some minor tweaks for the upcoming patch.

Alot of people have suggested that we should be able to start FFA games with 50% allegiance and cease fires in effect. i love that idea.

Two points that kind of tie in together
1) The computer doesn't cheat, it is just not intelligent in managing its resources and ends up with huge surpluses near the end of the game
2) The diplomacy system is reasonable all things considered and will probably get better with time. Diplomacy is THE hardest thing to code for an AI without being formulaic (give x to get y). Consider first it is an RTS and compare this games diplomacy to other recent titles (are you going to find better in C&C3, SupCom, COH, DawnofWar? to name the recent big names) To be fair though it also is a little 4x but think back to the release day diplomacy systems for GalCiv or Civ4, the comps were basically braindead and all but the simplest interactions were impossible.
It is clear that the devs were working hard to give the best combat AI possible and they more or less delivered, the rest will come in time.
As a side note, Is it too much to ask for people to not call the game broken just because they bump up against something that is kicking their ass a little when they have only played three games. It is a strategy game, so come up with a strategy to overcome it. I've played over 6 games thus far (TEC only for now) and am just begining to get all the stratigic ins and outs and that is only one third of a game