Hello again and welcome to this week’s diary, where we’re taking a look at diplomacy, wars, and espionage.
As emperor, you're dealing with a world full of factions that all have their own agendas. Some want to trade with you. Some want to settle on your land. And some want to burn it all down.
Relations and treaties
Every faction in the game has an opinion of you, ranging from -100 to +100. This opinion is made up of a stack of individual modifiers - things like shared religion, cultural similarity, trade agreements, and whether you broke your last treaty with them. These modifiers decay over time, so old grudges do eventually fade, though some take longer than others.
Relations between factions fall into a few broad categories: war, hostile, neutral, friendly, allied, and subject. Where you stand with another faction determines what diplomatic options are available to you. You can propose military alliances, defensive pacts, non-aggression treaties, trade agreements, royal marriages, and tribute arrangements. Each of these creates a formal treaty that lasts for a set duration, breaking one comes with serious consequences to your reputation.
The foederatiThe Himmelsvolci, a foederati of the Empire.
One of the most distinctive diplomatic tools available to the emperor is the ability to invite barbarian tribes to settle within the Empire as foederati - allied peoples who live on imperial land in exchange for military service.
To invite a tribe, you need to select up to five settlements near their territory where they'll be allowed to settle. The local governors won't be thrilled about this (you'll take a relations hit with them) - and the culture of those settlements will begin to shift towards the newcomers. But in exchange, you gain a protectorate that can provide troops and serve as a buffer against other barbarian threats.
You can also relocate foederati to new settlements if their current position is no longer strategically useful. And if you're feeling ambitious, you can attempt to culturally integrate them into Rephsian society or convert them to the state religion - though these are long, expensive, and difficult processes that can badly damage relations if they fail.
Wars
Surrendering territory to a barbarian faction.
When diplomacy fails, there's always war! Declaring war drags in allies on both sides. Your military allies join your offensive, the defender's allies rally to their side, and all subjects fight alongside their overlord. Wars can quickly become sprawling multi-faction conflicts.
Wars are tracked through a war score system that ranges from -100 to +100. You earn war score by winning battles, capturing prisoners, occupying enemy settlements, and maintaining naval blockades. Occupation is particularly important: holding enemy territory generates a steady trickle of war score over time, and if you manage to fully occupy an enemy faction, the war score snaps to maximum in your favour.The aftermath of surrendering territory.
When you've built up enough war score, you can start making demands through peace negotiations. There are several types of war goals you can pursue: one-time tribute payments, ongoing tribute, annexing specific settlements, replacing the enemy's ruler, imposing a non-aggression pact, releasing their subjects, or demanding they become your subject. Each goal costs a certain amount of war score to enforce, and you can combine multiple goals in a single peace offer - as long as you've earned enough score to back them up.A rebellion in progress.
Sieges
To actually take enemy territory, your armies need to besiege settlements. Siege power comes from your units - each has a siege value that's reduced if the unit is damaged. If your total siege power is enough to overcome the settlement's fortifications, you'll establish a full siege. Otherwise, you'll only manage a blockade, which is slower but still drains the settlement's food and morale over time.
Sieges take time. Fortified settlements can hold out for a long while, so you'll need to plan your campaigns carefully. A friendly army arriving to relieve the siege will break it, and you'll have lost time and possibly soldiers for nothing.
Espionage
Beyond open diplomacy and outright war, there's a third option: espionage. You can assign a spy to any foreign faction, and over time they'll build up a spy network. Network strength grows based on your spy's Cunning stat, and the stronger the network, the more powerful operations you can attempt. By embedding the spy you’ll also get access to the faction’s fog of war, so you can see what army movements they’re planning in their territory.
There are four espionage operations available. Spreading disinformation is the easiest - you pick a third faction and your spy damages the relationship between your target and that faction. It's a useful way to break up alliances or prevent two enemies from cooperating against you. Sabotaging the economy lets you drain a portion of the target's gold reserves. Sabotaging defences weakens the fortifications in several of their settlements - very useful as a prelude to invasion.
Every operation carries risk. Failure damages your spy network and can hurt your diplomatic relations. And your spy has a monthly chance of being discovered (that incraeses with every operation they attempt). A skilled spy with high Cunning can operate for years undetected, but a clumsy one will be caught quickly. When a spy is discovered, your network is destroyed, relations take a serious hit, and you'll need to start over from scratch with a new agent.
That’s about it for these systems, thanks for giving it a read! Next week will be buildings, settlements, and the economy - and in other news I got some good optimisations done so that the game is currently running at a pretty smooth 60fps on 4K, which will be good when playing with the event model enabled.