Diplomatic Dominion

Treaties? How do they work?

Introduction

I’ve briefly mentioned many of the unique features of [D]iplomacy in Axioms before but I haven’t done a conprehensive post about foreign affairs overall. Diplomacy in Axioms is a dynamic system that uses most of the same tools as internal politics. Agreements between individual Characters, between informal groups of Characters, and between formal Organizations made of of Characters.

Treaties are essentially a fancy formal version of commitment between multiple political entities much as Oaths or Pledges or Promises are personal commitments between individual Characters. Treaties bind two or more sides to a set of commitments, though the commitments from the specific sides can vary.

War And Peace

Treaties can have a wide variety of terms used for a wide variety of purposes. Well known examples even to casual followers of our own history include peace treaties, non-aggression pacts, defensive pacts, tribute/reparations, and so forth.

Axioms has a non-binary diplomatic system. There’s functionally no difference between a treaty enforced during war and one agreed upon during peace, aside from presumably that one tends to include a requirement to cease ongoing military action. A war ending treaty merely adds a sort of extra bargaining chip to one side, and perhaps clarifies potential vs actual threat.

Additionally there’s no functional difference between how territory reacts to de jure vs de facto ownership. Resistance during a conflict by the population vs resistance following the ending of official hostilities works the same way. And control over population and resources in an occupied vs an annexed territory is not much different. Local taxes and production and trade go to whoever can take them. Of course a resistance in one territory which expects outside/allied assistance will react differently to one that is shown to be alone and unsupported.

Information And Espionage

Axioms is a game of imperfect information and the competition to be better informed and connected. This has a lot of impact on the experience of [D]iplomacy. You’ll often have both spies and legitimate connections that help you to gauge the feeling of the enemy populace, army, and political leadership. You’ll be gathering intel on the support for the conflict, the support for the enemy elite generally, and often internal struggles of your enemy.

You won’t have convenient abstractions like war progress or war enthusiasm or what have you presented to you objectively. To some degree you’ll need to figure these things out yourself. As such I’ve linked a post on the Intelligence mechanics below:

Your Intelligence Network, and those of any allies if they have them, will give you a view of the way the war is going. Note that you’ll be able to directly question the populace in areas you control as well as send undercover agents to gather gossip.

Negotiation

Diplomatic interaction works a bit differently in Axioms compared to more abstract games. You’ll select a team to negotiate, which may or may not include your own character. If it does not include you then you’ll provide guidance for negotiation to your chief envoy and they will travel to the enemy and operate on your behalf.

There are a variety of ways things could go down at the start. One side or the other may send out an embassy to the other, both sides could agree to travel to a neutral location, and so on.

The negotiations will be a series of back and forth actions, with impacts based on the knowledge and skills of the key agents involved, before a tentative agreement is made. Then the leadership of each side, which could be a single character or several, will need to ratify the treaty for it to take official effect.

If you as the player personally choose to negotiate you’ll experience the process yourself. Essentially each side will present a first offer and then you’ll debate back and forth on individual terms till an agreement is reached. Note that even as a human player you’ll be limited by the “Consciousness” of your Character, and if you go too hard against it you’ll accrue Dissonance just like in any other situation.

Another key limiting factor on treaties in Axioms is the “Commitments” you made at the start of a conflict. So if you try to take more than you said you would there will be a high reluctance by the other side to agree than there is for things you already made clear you wanted. Additionally other parties not directly involved will gain distrust/fear/aggression towards you if you don’t stick to your word.

Axioms has no artificial, rigid restrictions on what you can demand in a war. You are limited by the negative impression on others, Dissonance if you are highly Just vs Capricious, and so forth, and your own ability to control your acquisitions. Indeed you can choose to keep anything you have control over in a war if you wish, but it will of course strongly impact the willingness of the other side to agree to a treaty if you go overboard.

Additionally Axioms allows for supernational laws/norms/customs. If a group of states/societies/nations/polities agrees on formal or informal rules through the Commitment system you’ll often be much more penalized for overreaching or raw aggression than you would in an area of the world with less centralized and globalized polities.

This set of systems replaces the inflexible and hardcoded “culture/customs” of older strategy games where such penalties are fixed. Certain represenations of pre-Unification Germany in certain map painters come to mind as a contrast, where aggression is more dangerous than say, sub-Saharan Africa. Historically you might consider pre and post Westphalian Europe as an example. Regions in Axioms can naturally/organically develop such rules of international order under certain circumstances.

In any case the simplistic click button, select terms, check “acceptance”, end war treaty systems of older and more simplistic games stand in stark contrast to the way Axioms functions.

Terms

Axioms is a game which stores a significant amount of “meta data” regarding agents in the game whether that refers to Characters, Populations, or otherwise. Characters have very specific personal desires, more general family/house desires, cultural desires, and so forth. So the variety of terms available for negotiations is immense. This contrasts with other games which have only states as agents, or very simple characters defined almost entirely by a few generic personality traits.

You can make all sorts of material requests regarding resources, trade routes, ships or military gear, food, rare luxuries, land, gold, and such. You can also request information, knowledge, legal changes, various forms of political subordination, marriages, peace, non-aggression, defensive support, offensive support, training, magical information or actual mages, technology, changes in Population control, and even something like the dissolution of a super-state.

Hostages, Oaths, Pledges, Fostering, and other personal/political options are available. You can demand a Commitment to supernational rules regarding military conduct, banning slavery, territorial claims, religious changes, and other things like that. Magic can be banned wholly or in part. Specific rare creatures can be placed under protection. Joint construction projects can be proposed. Trade restrictionsor access to libraries can be negotiated. Copies of books/tomes, etc.

Conclusion

Axioms has a much more complex and flexible/powerful system for the negotiation of agreements between polities than any existing game. This allows both lots of fun options as well as the ability to simulate historical events more properly. It also creates, which may surprise some, more limits on the ability of players to abuse the NPC agents. There’s not a specific treaty term that all agents undervalue the same way that a player can always demand. You can’t just count up “treaty term costs” to maximize value.

Better or worse diplomatic envoys can change the situation. A player would often have to make a significant trade off in Attention and other costs to negotiate personally, which pushes delegation and of course prevents the player from abusing the NPC agents since they won’t be there but have to send an NPC subordinate.

Separately, I recognize that this system will be divisive, and I myself have enjoyed more rigid/objective and less complex systems in strategy games. I have generally made an effort to lay a foundation in the code for one of the expansions to provide a “game setting/rule” system that would disable or replace some game systems with more traditional forms. If a significant number of people try the demo and have complaints about the same specific mechanic/system that could provide a justification for going through the effort to add a parallel system that could be enabled or disabled in a game rule in the first or second expansion.