NPC decision making

[Kaiser Kirk]

Originally, NPCs were supposed to be isolationist lumps on the map.
You could wrest territory from them with a war..and that was it.

I wanted to have them be potential landing spots for future players, which meant
they would need colonies.

I also wanted someone other than a player you could have a opposed war with to
show off your ships. You are not guaranteed a victory, or that they will fight only
where you want to fight, but they are willing to cease fighting with mild losses.

Hence why the Mayans would not be happy with the loss of San Diego, but
they haven't counter raided Aztec shipping through the straits of Yucatan for years.

One of the big items on the "To Do" list is making NPCs more interactable.
Logic, Consistency, Fairness, and tracking are BIG problems with that.

However, we can break it into 2 rough categories.

Low & Mid-range Decisions - buy/sell a vessel, buy pr accept a tech, agree to a colonial province for colonial province swap, peace terms (since they don't declare wars), and signing onto international agreements, royal marriages, etc.

BIG Decisions - Basing rights, Alliances/Non-Aggression, Concessions, nation-nation treaties- anything that could involve them in an offensive war, or loose homeland territory, or put them at an disadvantage.

Snip and I did some talking a while ago.

For the Low & Mid-range Decisions
the concept is to form council to evaluate the decision.
2 Players who are not involved and then one of the Mods.  Each player would have 1 vote, the Mod 2.
This means the Mod and 1 player need to agree (3 of 4 votes) for the NPC to agree to a proposal.
Therefore the Mod can not adoppt the decision if the players think it's a bad idea, and the players can't adopt it if the Mod think it's a bad idea.

That way some interaction can be done fairly quickly on minor things as needed.
And matters like the Acapulco conference can move forward with a mechanism for the NPCs signing on, regardless of if all the players do.
Snip and I did agree that if all players sign on, then all NPCs do by default.

That seems clean, fair, and gives a little bit of interaction that does not require tracking.


For the BIG Decisions :
This is proving to be a conceptual problem.
No one thing, short of declaring war on them, is going to push a severely isolationist nation (which the NPCs are) to a major decision point.
I also believe we don't want wild swings or clearly game-able results that does not make sense.
Parthia should not be able to to "Gift 150BP" (of old rusting ships) to Rajasthan for +15, shifting into "Allies".
Nor should we have "Parthia hires the Ethiopians to attack Byzantine" when Byzantine could swear relations had been great the half year before.

That suggests NPC opinions should change slowly in response to stimuli, and be trackable and a little predictable ($10gift / hy = +1 diplomacy) so people can slowly arrange diplomatic
matters to their liking, but other players have a chance to respond.

Designing Tracking this though... that's a problem.
Then how to design the diplomatic system and how much each act matters. Plus some reduction factors so- say in the case of gifts- a bunch of really big gifts in a short period aren't as effective as gifts over time.  Declaring war on a neighbor Rajasthan hates would be a plus...unless Rajasthan can't see a reason why they would not be next.

So, right now I have that latter concept,
and may get to trying to actually build it out this year.
...once I catch Parthia up and do stories...
...and likely after I put down in writing how logistics & mechanization affect things.

[The Rock Doctor]

Low/Mid-Range:  Your proposal likely works in general terms in most places.  We might have a bit of difficulty in the Americas, since everybody has a finger in the pie there.  However, neither snip nor I are dabbling in Asia, snip and Foxy are not (yet) in Africa, etc.

Of course, it's the Americas where all the action is right now cuz a lot of us are tempted to have a go at the Mayans.

High-Range:

There's probably some useful NPC Diplomacy content in RPG systems.  D&D, for example, allows for players to do things that make an NPC friendly or unfriendly to them without it necessarily equating to actively hostile or actively allied. 

Your NPC write-ups give some sense of NPC priorities and interests.  If we can quantify PC gestures in terms of how they advance or set back an NPC's specific interests, it would be helpful to gauge their response.  For one NPC, 150 BP of old Parthian ships is a huge boost to their defence capabilities; for another NPC, it's a whole pile of junk that costs money to maintain and paints a target on their back.

Things with a price tag attached should perhaps have their effects applied in a non-linear way.  Maybe not necessarily logarithmically.  But a gift of $1 might mean a +1 bonus for one turn, while a gift of $4 might get you a +2 bonus for two turns and a +1 for another two turns after that, for example.  Although with some of us now generating significant cash incomes, maybe we'd need to go by $1/$10/$100 increments instead. 

[Kaiser Kirk]

The low/mid range at least gives us a mechanism to move forward with some actions.

For long range, I'm a very long term RPG player, and as DM I'm used to playing multiple roles, both as various NPCs and the 'Foe'.
Those NPC outlooks were built from that background - what would they want. At one point, I considered just ' playing everything', but that really is not my role. I view myself more as arbiter/facilitator.

So yeah, looking to an established mechanism and working off that for something here seems the best path.
The time to create it , tailor it to this, and then actually track it in some transparent manner... other hurdles first.

So ideas welcome,
just wanted to update folks on the current status..which is partial progress.