Questions about Diplomacy

[nimrodd]

I don't find it stated anywhere in the Campaign Guide about who can spend points to affect breaking treaties or declaring hostilities/war. I also assume that the +5% per point of Intel can actually be + or - 5%.

Examples.
Player A has a Non-Aggression Treaty with Player B. Player A wants to break the treaty, but Player B wants to keep it in place. Can player B spend Intel affecting Player A's roll to keep the treaty in place (in this case, I see that they would have to declare in their orders to do this, they could not use Military Pool Intel to do this).

Conversely, in the same situation, lets say that Player A wants the treaty, but Player B wants to break it (without breaking it). Can Player B use Intel to cause Player A's senate (or whatever they have to roll for to convince) to break the treaty? Say Player B spends 8 Intel to give a 100% chance to break the treaty (before Player A spends Intel from his Military Pool to lower the chances). I see this as Player B spreading Propaganda against themselves in Player A's region.
If this worked, this would give Player B deniability and even a bonus to declare Hostilities/War since Player A actually broke the Treaty.

Jimmy

[mwaschak]

Quite right. Which means you can get a tug of war going trying to make or break a treatie or agreemeent with another player.

[Tyrel Lohr]

I've always played that both players can use Intel to affect diplomatic actions. Your first example is a good one of how that would work.

For most of my games I have also separated Intel into three pools: Military, Defensive and Diplomatic. The Intel points in the Diplomatic Intel Pool are thus the ones available for the empire to use for diplomatic actions, and can be applied during the course of the turn in reaction to what goes on during the turn. Military Intel points are meanwhile restricted to use on ordered missions or, when appropriate, to modify surprise or other scenario related rolls.

[virtutis.umbra]

I'm engaging in some pretty serious thread necromancy here, so if that's deeply frowned upon as it is on many fora please forgive me and feel free to move this to a new thread. But, "questions about diplomacy" seemed like a pretty likely place to post some additional... questions about diplomacy

By 3.4.4 Diplomatic Actions, The 3 types of diplomatic action are Signing, Breaking and Declaring. Also implicitly a type of diplomatic action seems to be Withdrawing, which requires unanimous consent from all involved parties. Breaking and DeclaringBreaking Treaties and issuing Declarations (of Hostilities or War) have a % chance of success (parenthesized in their titles in section 3.4.3.2 Diplomatic States), further influenced by circumstances and the expenditure of Intel Points.

1) Is it correct to surmise from this that proposing something other than a Declaration, such as a Nonaggression Treaty, is free and has a 100% success chance, as 'proposing' one is a Signing action rather than a Declaring action?

2) Are Powers allowed to propose multiple successive dependent Treaties as a package, either to be signed together-or-not-at-all or to be signed in an a-la-carte fashion by the other proposed treaty members? For instance the Nulos might want a Nonaggression Treaty, but ONLY if it's accompanied by a Trade Treaty (which requires the NonAg to be in place) - because they'd like to be free to conquer and subjugate anyone who won't trade with them.

Could the Nulos secure both of these in the same turn by proposing them together?

Could they further stipulate a 'take-it-or-leave-it' requirement that the power they've solicited must accept them both, or else neither one?

Could the Terrans propose a NonAg-Peace-Alliance package all in the same turn, and allow signatories to choose how far to align themselves by signing one, two or all three components?

[Tyrel Lohr]

Necromancy is fine, since we don't have enough traffic here to make that a problem, and the added context is always helpful when people start trawling through the old posts.

To answer you question, 1E really doesn't get into many specifics on these topics. A player can offer as many treaties as he likes and doesn't have any limitation on the number he can offer at once, either. The only actions that really require a roll are breaking and declaring.

My ruling would be that the Nulos player could offer the Non-Aggression/Trade treaty combo to the player as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition and then the other player could either accept it or not. That sounds perfectly reasonable. The Terran scenario I would probably say that the Terrans could send separate Non-Aggression, Peace, and Alliance treaty offers to the same player in a single turn and then let the other player decide if they want to sign one, two, or all three of them. If the recipient rejects a prerequisite treaty, then the decision chain of course ends there -- no Peace Treaty obviously means an Alliance Treaty is an impossibility.

VBAM 2E gets around some of these vagaries by making everyone act like a 1E NPE to a certain degree, in that all empires (player and NPE) are assigned AIX values and have relationship values with the other powers. The one difference there is that players can offer any treaty that they themselves would be willing to sign based on their relationship and Xenophobia values. I think players can only offer an opponent one treaty per turn, too, but I can't remember now if that's the case or not. The intent is to keep players from rapidly establishing binding political ties with one another when that doesn't make much logical sense in the context of interstellar political powers.