Beyond Sol has been in Early Access for one week and we’ve spent that week reading forums, discussions, watching fan-made YouTube videos, and Twitch streams. Your reviews and comments tell us that we’ve succeeded in making something fresh and fun but our diplomacy needs some work. This blog will explain the overhaul we are currently making to our diplomacy and how we’ll expand this system in the weekly updates over the next month.
It’s important to recognize that the game world is populated by independent cities who are in competition for the resources of the solar system, which breeds conflict. The engine of conflict is the reputation system where each city has an opinion of every other city - including players. A city will want to declare war on any opponent if their opinion is sufficiently low (actually declaring war also depends on fleet strength).
Reputation System
There are a couple problems with our reputation system that we want to address. First, it’s unclear how an AI city feels about you because all you see is a number and you have to guess at what point the AI changes their relationship with you. We’ll add an ‘attitude’ to each AI city which will explain in one word how they feel about you, and this will be visible anywhere you would see reputation. The second problem is that you don’t know when important changes to reputation happen. We’ll give you a notification when AIs transition to an attitude you want to know about so you’ll be less surprised when they declare war on you.
We also have too few opinion modifiers which is why they are so severe. In tomorrow’s update we halved the negative opinion for having sectors that border another city until we can get all of the new opinion modifiers in and rebalance them all. These are important because driving opinion up or down will determine an AI city’s attitude towards you and shape the kinds of diplomatic actions they take towards you. Having low opinion will make them hostile which increases the chance of a war while a sufficiently high opinion will make them agreeable to a variety of treaties and pacts.
Diplomatic Actions
Currently we only have declaration of war and subsequently making peace to end the war, so the only meaningful interaction with AI cities is to fight them. We’ll be expanding the diplomatic actions you can take over the next couple weeks to provide you with more meaningful interactions between cities.
Free Trade Agreements
If cities have a sufficiently positive opinion of each other they’ll be able to engage in a Free Trade Agreement that will provide a mutual economic benefit – more space bucks. Having this agreement in place will also provide a positive opinion modifier. But if the reputation drops sufficiently low the agreement will be canceled so you’ll need to keep working on that relationship.
Pay Tribute
Sometimes a bigger city doesn’t like you and you don’t want a war but you have no way of instantly boosting their opinion of you. You’ll be able to pay a lump sum of credits to another city for an instant reputation boost - a critical tool for the survival of smaller cities.
Mutual Protection Pact
Cities with great relations will be able to sign a mutual protection pact. These agreements will guarantee military aid in the event of a defensive war and will be essential for smaller cities to protect each other from larger cities. This is different from a formal alliance because it won’t help if you are the aggressor in a war.
Alliance
Cities that have long standing peace and mutual prosperity will be able to enter into formal alliances. These alliances will guarantee the participation of its members in any defensive or offensive war. Alliances will have a profound impact on the balance of the game so we will deliver this feature last.
So stay tuned for these exciting new features as well as lots of new content like ships, weapons, and random events coming soon!