sven wrote:zolobolo wrote:Marauders have also ignored the Orthin system of Alphard (presumably due to the recent change) - this seems to have had a visibly positive effect on the Orthin so far. Please consider them paying the Marauders actually money though going forward so that the reason is visible in diplomacy screen and the in-game mechanic is used (scripting around is fine for things that do not have a working mechanic but this does have one)
This is a fair point. I was in the process of writing up a response explaining that, actually, it's not easy to reliably trigger to the dialog chains that lead to bribe payments, when I realized that, /actually/, I can ignore the dialog trees in the case of an AI/marauder encounter, as they won't show up for anyone anyhow. As of r21730, Marauder/AI relations should now, theoretically, be reliably peaceful; but, they should also be relatively 'real' relations, rather than a crude kludge that just sortof makes the AI invisible to the Marauders.
I see
Would it be doable to trigger a simplified chain for the event instead?:
When fleet arrives: check how much money the AI has: If it has enough funds, the "bribe" can be detracted and listed for the Marauder Diplomacy screen: Empire XY has paid tribute (the player now knows that they have been paid off)
If not enough funds are available, Marauders default to attack
In case of the player, the Marauders seem to "remember" having received payment and not attack after that which makes this a no-brainer investment.
To make things fair, the player should also always be prompted to pay up when fleet arrives...
If you want to make the whole mechanic dynamic from hereon, the bribe could be made to include a global variable which increases with each payment weather it comes from AI or from player. This would make Marauders a real threat for the player as well and a ticking time bomb as each time one side pays them off, the next guy needs to pay even more
To make this transparent of course, the next expected value of the bribe needs to be displayed on the diplomacy screen so the player can plan ahead and play around with the mechanic
PS: I do believe that Maraduers need to occasionally attack someone for them as a concept to make sense, else who is going to drive the slave market?
It needs to be less of a burden to the AI though and while more dangerous to the player, it still needs to be avoidable with careful planning - it think the above would accomplish that
PS PS: The above would also mean that Marauders would always have a hostile stance against everyone - the decision to attack would always be made on the stop when they arrive, but even when paid off, they would still have a hostile stance against the faction