The alliance dev log came after these questions, but it's probably the biggest angle now. I'm not sure exactly what form alliances vs. fort mode will take this time through, but now that we're actually going to engage in that sort of positive and active politics, I think the chances have increased significantly. And it might even matter in some substantive way in e.g. the fight against the goblins or the dead. There's a kind of betterment to the player's overall military-political understanding of the world implicit in organized villains and alliances and army battles that, if we're lucky, will achieve a kind of happy balanced picture before we go off to do magic. It's also quite possible it'll still be mega-lumpy, like everything else in the game.
Very nice, i would hope some alliances would also make the game less bumpy for the typically weak nations to not get rolled over by the largest (which are usually hyper zealous elves) and give me some time to build a under-floor trapdoor to dispose of begging diplomats bringing menu message spam.
Do you think more investment into active diplomacy would break the cycles of DF that any small hitch in the working relationships of your fortress and outside civs eventually leads to a conflict without resolution?To kind of add, gifting artifacts to my knowledge is meant to smooth things over as are demanding them but usually there's only really a few out of probably many (when you have a set of 10 therabouts) that other civs actually covet. Once you start a war often by accident of bugs without meaning to strain your relationship the only REAL resolution is to prepare to kill the entire population of the enemy which is often unfeasable.
Im aware of it being a abstact concept, but do you have any kind of view on making DF's war & politics more 'game' like for accessibility-(concepts like 'War Score' for instance to determine after how many raids, battles and razings the war's direction is going to pressure diplomatic action like surrender and peace)
-or will the game always have other civs or 'actors' as it were in the abstract?The breakdown and very scatty diplomacy breaks many wars this way, which are status quo because the relevant people are offsite or dead already and they won't quit, i think i had a near extinct human civ once battle a large elf nation for 200 years because they retreated (or bandits did) into the caves where they wouldn't be found once, that was a wierd world save (I've lost it now anyway).