Diplomacy Bug: Went from 60% to 0% without failing a mission

I was playing Sins tonight, trying to become friends with the Vasari west of my Empire. I had just completed a couple of missions for them, taking out the Advent players to the East, and was hoping to draw out them into a cease fire.

But then, all of a sudden, I start getting notifications that the Vasari player was dropping our trade treaties. I skip over to the diplomacy screen and see that our relations had reset to 0%, even though not a minute before I had completed a mission for him and gotten up to 60% relations.

Now, this I was playing against 3 hard AI's for the first time; is this a normal side effect of playing against hard AI's, that they become psychotic backstabbers? Or is there a bug in the diplomacy system?
15,801 views 9 replies
Reply #1 Top
ID you have a non agression pact? Because if you didn't and you accidentalyy killed enough of their ships they will drop down to zero immediatly. I usually pay extra attentention when I'm trying to create a negotiation with an AI, I dock all my sqaudrons and set all my ships and defenses to NOT auto attack. Other then that I can't figure out why they would do that... unless they suscessfully allied with a player who was against you.
Reply #2 Top
If you build a lot of hangar defenses, it's very hard to build up diplomacy with a faction. What seems to keep happening is that the AI's scouts just wander throughout the map, and eventually they all cross through your territory. The hangar defenses are very good at taking out those scout ships, and that constantly knocks down your diplomacy rating. It's not really something that you can prevent, unless you sit at your base watching for scout ships the whole time. Or tell them not to attack, but that kind of defeats the point of having them.

If this is what is happening, it would be nice if destroying scout ships didn't affect your diplomacy.
Reply #3 Top
Oh, I'll bet that's what happened.

It would be nice if you could order your ships to leave another empire's ships alone unless they fired first.
Reply #4 Top
If this is the case, be nice if they change it so killing scouts does not affect diplomacy standing.
Reply #5 Top
Oh - this is a surprise to me and explains a lot - why does the game not automatically tell your fighters to leave alone ships from a faction with whom you have a non-aggression pact?
Reply #6 Top
If you have a non-aggression pact, your ships won't attack.

I was trying to get into a position where the AI would accept a non-aggression offer, but before I could, my relations zero'ed out.
Reply #7 Top
Also, the AI will declare war on you if it sees a significant gap in your defenses and knows it can wipe you out pretty quickly. It's very logical to backstab someone who isn't going to benefit you alive.
Reply #8 Top
Especially the vasari, since from what I've observed when playing my own games, the Vasari seem more aggressive than the other races in terms of diplomacy. That may be completely false though. Maybe I'm just led astray by their raspy voices.
Reply #9 Top
I agree. there should be an option or something for ships to auto-attack everything *except* races you flag as "friendly". i have had that happen far too many times now and it's annoying for a scout ship to fly to my homeworld, gets blown up, and magically the AI is back to 0.