How to win friends and influence aliens

Image credit: Stardock Entertainment

As players got their teeth in Sins of a Solar Empire 2 at launch last year, they began to report odd behaviour from the galaxy’s computer-controlled factions. It wasn’t that the NPC commanders resisted human expansion, but it was as though they hated humans. Not only would these groups reject any peaceful overtures, turning up their noses at ceasefire agreements and gifts of resources – the idea of an alliance was practically out of the question – but the computer-led nations seemed to be allying with one another to focus all their hatred on the fleshy humans.

Unlike Civilization and other strategy games, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 doesn’t offer a peaceful path to victory. You can either destroy your enemies’ home worlds, colonise over 51% of the galaxy, or annihilate every enemy faction’s planets and ships. It is space imperialism writ large. This isn’t something Sins’ lore shies away from – the TEC (Trader Emergency Coalition) Primacy faction are out and out space racists who want to exterminate all alien threats. Yet, despite this, Sins is not meant to be a game where everyone you meet is immediately your enemy, and you should be able to remain cordial with one faction while you shaft another.

When developers Stardock looked into these reports, they found that the players’ suspicions about NPCs conspiring against them were well-founded. "They were actually allying with each other, against humans," development lead Brian Clair says. It was all down to hatred.

Well, hatred and a rigged dice roll.

AI factions in Sins 2 have a statistic called ‘Hatred’, Clair explains. "Hatred accumulates based on how many units or structures or planets you destroy of that player’s." If an AI hates you more than any other faction, then it becomes your rival. As you expand out into Sins’ galaxy, colonising planets and spreading your ships across the stars, you are going to come into spats with other factions. Trading blows is just part of the space general’s life, especially in a game where there are only military victory conditions. Except, the AI took this deeply and irrevocably personally. "Turns out that there was no upper bound to that [Hatred stat]," Clair says. "And if you got the most hatred with an AI, you had no way of getting out of it. You will end up having maximum hatred, whether you intended to or not."

Compounding the problem was a simple bug. "To be frank, it was a die roll," Clair says. "We discovered, if you roll [under a number] the AI won’t ally with the human, and it never will again for that entire game." So once you made an enemy of the AI, it would be your enemy forever. And, as the most hated faction in the galaxy, the AI factions would happily partner up against you, General Wanker.

"It sounds bad, and it was," Clair says of the bugs, but there was a silver lining. "The underpinnings for making the whole system better were there. It’s not like we had to toss it and redo the whole thing. That really would have been a Herculean task."

Image credit: Stardock Entertainment

When the team at Stardock began their plans for update 1.5, fixing Sins of a Solar Empire 2’s AI was top of the agenda. But after looking under the hood, they realised they couldn’t begin to tackle the problems there without also overhauling and expanding Diplomacy at the same time.

"We didn’t realise how ingrained the two systems were," Clair says. "When we started delving into the code base, we discovered [Diplomacy was behind] a lot of the reasons why the AI did the wacky things players were reporting." After all, Diplomacy isn’t only the tools with which players use to broker alliances and ceasefires, it’s also the behind the scenes stats and systems that determine whether an AI player decides to accept them.

To explain what is now going on on the other side of the screen, Clair rattles through some of the changes coming in Sins of a Solar Empire 2’s 1.5 update. Hatred is still a stat that builds as you destroy enemy units, and that hatred can blossom into a rivalry. But before the computer makes that dice roll and declares you a rival, it will consider other factors too. Do you share a border or are your domains distant from one another? Are you a threat militarily, or are your armies weaker than theirs? Who else are you in an alliance with? What races are you playing? The religious fanatics of the Advent hate the TEC, and the TEC despise the locust-like alien Vasari, but the Vasari and the Advent get along just fine. And within the races, the subfactions have their own biases. "TEC Primacy really hates the Vasari, that’s their whole thing," Clair says. While the more defense-focused TEC Enclave can see past their xenophobia if it means undisturbed borders.

The tried and tested maxim of ‘The enemy of my enemy…’ is also now alive and well in Sins of a Solar Empire 2. "Let’s say we don’t have a deal [with an AI], but I’m attacking their enemy," Clair says, "They’re going to start liking me more. I may not even know at the time that it is their enemy, but they like that I’m beating the crap out of them." So, just know, as you fly through the galaxy, firebombing a planet from orbit, someone across the galaxy might be warming to you.

Image credit: Stardock Entertainment

As well as background factors that are largely out of your control, shifting and changing as a side-effect of the actions you take in your campaign, Stardock are introducing a slew of new ways to make friends with and influence the AI.

"Before, there wasn’t any real way for the AI to like you unless you happened to get lucky when making an alliance first thing in the game," Clair says. Drawing on their experience building Diplomacy systems for 2012’s Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, Stardock added the tools to give gifts to other factions. These range from basic resources, such as credits, crystal and metal, to more rare or complex items, such as exotics, items, and even planets. "The more valuable the gift is to them, the more it’s worth," Clair says. Though, the inverse is also true: Vasari society doesn’t use credits, so the alien locusts are unlikely to accept a peace offering of cold hard cash. Cold hard metal on the other hand…

Your gifts can be given with no strings attached, simply to up your relationship with a faction. Though, if you’ve a particular deal in mind, the gift can be used to sweeten a treaty proffer or demand, same as you can in the Total War games. "You can see in real-time, as you’re offering things, the likelihood of it making the deal go through," Clair says.

Image credit: Stardock Entertainment

While the focus is on how computer-led factions behave, Stardock accounted for human nature too. "We had to make sure you couldn’t game the system, because we know our players," Clair says. "We built a safeguard called Patience. Essentially, if you nag the AI with requests, gifts or ‘Hey, do you want to make this alliance?’ it gets annoyed with you. And once it gets too annoyed, it just won’t deal with you until its Patience fills up."

The final factor to account for is Trust. If you abide by the terms of your agreements with other players, not violating a ceasefire, for instance, then you build trust with that faction. But Trust is more widespread than that, Clair explains. "Even if you have an alliance with an AI, if you backstab another player that lowers trust [with your ally], because you might do the same to them. They’re aware of what you’re doing."

With all these new systems in play, your Sins of a Solar Empire campaign shouldn’t become predictable by the mid-game. At launch, by the time you had encountered all of the other players and expanded your starting borders to the point factions were butting up against each other, it was already too late for peace. Every AI faction would have identified you as their rival and potentially even formed an alliance focused on taking you down. Now, those alliances won’t be fixed and the relationships between the computer factions will tense and strain based on their power and location relative to one another.

"It’s no longer a case where even if you build up a tonne of hatred because you’ve just bombed the crap out of someone [that it’s scorched earth]," Clair says. "There is always a way to essentially buy your way out of hatred. But the more damage you do, the more [resources] it takes. At some point you’re just not going to have enough to do it."

Many of these systems will be familiar to players of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, the game in which Stardock first expanded the series’ diplomatic toolbox. But, one underlying feature of modern Sins that makes the familiar unfamiliar is its galaxies’ shifting orbits.

As a Sins of a Solar Empire 2 campaign progresses, the planets that make up a map move from their starting positions. New travel routes open up between them and factions that start on the other side of the map from you may move closer. Predicting the impact of those celestial movements could be a make or break decisions in some games. "It might behoove you to make an alliance with the guy on the other side of the map, because early on, you’re not going to be rivals," Clair says. "But if the orbit shifts enough, you could come into contention. And, you probably won’t be able to become friends at that point."

Image credit: Stardock Entertainment

Clearly there will be a lot more to account for after Update 1.5’s release. Though Stardock have made those important stats – Hatred, Patience, Trust, and the factors that influence them – visible in the Diplomacy interface. "The player can see what each AI player thinks of them," Clair says. "Your actions impacted these numbers, and you can see why [the AI] feels the way it does about you."

While there’s a lot more coming in today’s Sins of a Solar Empire 1.5 update, with tweaks to the economy and tech trees also set to impact play, it’s the changes to AI and diplomacy that will most radically change your campaigns. Or maybe I just like to see that in the cold distant future, we will be able to make friends with AI overlords. We may just have to give them a pile of metal and punch their most-detested neighbour to do it.