Alliances... Will they ever be fixed? If so how will they work then?

Yeah, that's the question I'm also interested in. Anyway this is a STRATEGY game. Endless fighting is not the way. We need improvement in diplomatics.

I agree, it would be great to see alliances & diplomacy in general working the way it was intended.

What would really help is a complete list of Alliance functions that are not working as intended.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I agree that this should be researched.

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Here's a start. I played much of an old 1.33/BM 1.06 game as 'leader' of an alliance. I don't know if I could scare up the save or if MM would be interested in something so out of date. I've seen nothing in the changelogs which would indicate these issues have changed.

What the alliance feature is supposed to do:
When functioning properly, the alliance should replace the empire for all diplomatic relations external to the alliance. Outsiders should only see the alliance - not the empire as an entity. Internally, members of the alliance should not be able to directly address each other either, but conduct all affairs in the special empire mode (where you vote on measures and make new proposals).

The primary problem is that half of the program isn't aware of the alliance. The AI empires don't acknowledge the alliance for diplomacy & movement purposes. AI's will declare war on your empire - not the alliance. Even members of your own alliance will issue DoW's against your empire.

The members of the alliance still view the other empires as if the alliance did not exist. They will move fleets to attack fellow members. Here's where the mix comes in: no combat can take place because the part of the program that determines if combat is initiated actually does acknowledge the alliance. It's about the only part. Planets will riot due to alliance ships being present, and there's no way to drive them away.

Relations will worsen between allied empires also, if they have ships in each other's systems. In fact, there's no way for relations to improve among members of the same alliance. They can only get worse because that part of the program views the empires as untreatied aliens.

Another major bug is that any proposal of a treaty involving the alliance is erroneously prohibited. If you go to propose a treaty and put it up for a vote, the game thinks you're proposing a treaty involving your empire (as an individual entity), and won't allow it. So alliances cannot conduct any meaningful diplomacy with outside empires. They can give and receive gifts, and issue "bluster" complaints about the actions of empires, but that's it.

As a human, if you look at the diplomacy screen when there is an alliance you don't belong to, you will not have the option of sending messages to individual member empires. You must address the alliance as a single entity. This is how it's supposed to be. But this is not the case for AI-controlled empires. They still try to conduct diplomacy with individual member empires. As stated before, they will even declare war. These wars are "on hold" indefinitely so long as the target is a member of the alliance, but activate immediately if the member leaves the alliance.

Receiving gifts is a function that works surprisingly properly. I gifted several planets to my alliance, and these planets went to member empires by turn. The first planet went to the first member, the second to the second member (myself), and so on. Once I caught on to the pattern, I was able to see in advance which member empire would receive each gift and target them appropriately.

There is potential for exploitation if players can get the votes to dominate the alliance. A dominant player could force the rest of the alliance to give/trade all sorts of gifts to his empire, and it may be nigh on impossible to get the AI to recognize such abuse and respond appropriately. Tech, and resources can be obtained this way, but I never attempted planets or systems.

This isn't a complete list, and it's fairly vague. I can't recall the details of a couple of points, but it's a start. Maybe I should cut & paste this as an "official issue". It hasn't been a priority for me as I see the alliance feature as a nonessential frill on the game.

Dvoongar -- that's a very impressive contribution to help fix something you think is only a frill. I think it's just what Kwok asked for. The parts where you tell which parts of the program recognize alliances and which don't should really help. Aaron can focus in on those sections of the code instead of sitting there with the big, undefined task "fix alliances".

Yes. I hope it gets fixed soon. Thanks Dvoongar!

Spiritu vivimus, Spiritu et ambulemus (Ga 5,25)

if you have savegames of these that you could send to aaron it would help.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

Is that true in this case? It's not that alliances have "bugs" caused by arcane interactions of code that you have to tease apart to make them work. The whole system simply isn't designed properly, so a verbal description of the problem is enough. It's the difference between "my car has a rattle" and "my car has no gas tank." You don't need to get the car up on the diagnostic machine for that.

One issue we ran into when playing MP in a LAN setting was that if 2 human players formed an alliance and then later tried to add a 3rd player to the alliance, the alliance 'vote' to add that 3rd player would never complete. Thus we found it impossible to add a player to an already formed alliance. This was back in version 1.35 with the appropriate Balance Mod at that time (we haven't played for a little while due to other RL issues unfort). If a saved game would help I'm sure we could find one that is exhibiting this behavior still. Thanks!

Yes it is true, aaron seems to need savegames before he understands what you're talking about, could be because the game is so big and complex that he can't remember what he did in that part.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

The most important feature for Alliances IMHO would be the possibility of combined fleets: two or more members of the Alliance put ships under the control of the Alliance and give one member the command authority. The ships would still remain the property and retain the racial abilities of the original empire and could be revoked from Alliance control every turn.

From what I could see, there was no way to combine the fleets to that extent. All planets, ships, and fleets get tagged with the alliance's flag and a smaller flag showing which empire controls them. I saw nothing in the interface which would allow control to be transferred, and I don't think it's intended to be so. Might make for an interesting new feature.

As for my savegame, I think I can dig it up, but it'll be from later on - after I quit the alliance. I could still use the password to change sides I suppose, and make a new save as a member of the alliance.

There are some big problems, and I doubt if it'll get fixed. But I guess I should try. I'd rather see more work done on 'normal' diplomacy. Alliances will be just one more think for the AI to bungle. As it is, they base their vote on how much they like you. You can propose giving them a handful of techs they don't have (or some other major gift), and they'll vote against the proposal just because they don't like you. Blondes are smarter than AI.

if you have/want to spend the time doing it, it would be helpful to create a 4 player mutiplayer game against yourself and find them all that way. I've been meaning to do this for a while but just haven't gotten around to it.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

I posted this a long time ago: http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/3410

But Dvoongar, you've summed up the problem(s) in much greater detail. I know some people consider Alliances a "frill", but honestly, in games against other humans, I see this potentially being a huge part of gameplay. I certainly hope that now that people are talking, some work can be done on resolving the issues!

Well, I did like I said and scrounged up the save. I cut & pasted what I said and added some more, and sent the whole works off to MM. Turns out I was wise and didn't overwrite my last save from within the alliance: it was still available.

I wouldn't mind one bit if alliances were fixed, but I think it'll take a lot of work and there are more important problems in line ahead of these.

There isn't much you can accomplish with an alliance that you can't accomplish without it. You get to go vote in the fancy 'alliance chamber'. Big deal.

All the alliance really does is prevent things. It prevents an empire from making a deal that it otherwise would when the proposal is voted down. And after some time has gone by it serves to prevent members from leaving because they'd be on their own without trade until they could establish new treaties.

It also prevents member empires from making private deals with each other. Everything has to be done by vote.

I'm not saying it's a bad feature. I'd probably use it a few more times if it were repaired. But it's not like we're missing out on all that much when we don't use it.

I'd much rather see 'normal' diplomacy beefed up. You know, like peace negotiations where one side imposes things like 'no research' on the losing side, or tribute. Maybe that happens in multi-player, but in 1p those check-boxes don't make for a good game.

As it stands, it looks like there's room for bargaining in diplomacy but there really isn't. We could use another row of red boxes to designate things as 'out of the question' instead of this back-and-forth guessing game. There should be something that happens when you promise to send aid to another empire, but there isn't. There could be ultimatums: "make peace with our friends or it'll be war".

And I could quit rambling on and on. Well, maybe someday.