Diplomancy OXP

The additions to the F4 ship-station interface screen (with ANA installed)

Overview

The new Embassy District on the Orbital Station

The Star Wars screens (need ANA installed)
Toggles between Wars Map/Diplomancy Map/Warring Systems Map.
This one is the Warring Systems Map: red cross means that the system is at war with somebody, no idea who!

legend for Star Wars screen

The Wars Map
Red line = war, Green line = alliance
Qubeen is at war with Soorbi, Onlema & Xexeti. She is allied with Arraesso.
To the West, Usanat is at peace with both Geerra and Soladies - no wars with them and no alliances either

The Diplomacy Map
Red = hate, Green = love, Yellow = love/hate,
Orange = dislike, Blue = like, Grey = neutral
Feudal Qubeen and anarchic Xexeti have a love/hate relationship. Commie Usanat hates Democratic Geerra despite being at peace with it

System History screen
Note the yellow "Love+Hate" line between Qubeen and Xexeti on the "Diplomacy Map" above

This OXP effects three major changes in the game:

• It creates an inter-galactic politics with systems declaring war on each other, forming alliances and signing peace deals.
• It allows purchase of citizenship of a system (with resulting tax liabilities & refugee status in systems at war with one's own)
• It requires visas for travel to some government types. Not all surrounding systems will sell them (depending on wars or on being anarchies)!

Not to be confused with Home System OXP which allows investment in systems.

Citizenships

The player may acquire, or renounce, a system citizenship when visiting this system, for the right price. They may choose which one of their citizenships is announced as the flag of their ship.

• The player is considered fugitive when in systems warring with their flag.
• Anarchies provide no citizenship. They also have no embassy district (for buying visas for neighbouring systems).
• The player may buy several days of visa in the Embassy district in a neighbouring state, which is not an enemy to the destination system.

Corporate systems, dictatorships and communists refuse docking to players when stateless and visaless.

• Citizenship leads to Income Tax!

Systems' alliances, wars

• GNN news: GNN news is now displayed when an alliance is formed or broken between two systems, or when a war starts or ends between two systems, and the player is in one of those systems.
• Strategic maps showing the warring systems, and the diplomatic relationships!

These need the ANA to be installed to show on the F4 station-interface screen.

• Two systems within 7ly of each other may now form an alliance, if they like each other enough.
• They may break their alliance, too!
• They may wage war to each other, and make peace too!
• New F4 Interface screens: the Embassy District & the System's History!

Systems' treasury

• Wars require money, and countries are defeated either by battles or by bankruptcy, sometimes the latter producing the former.
• The Treasury and Tax levels are displayed in the F7 system information.
• Each system treasury is increased through taxation each player jump, depending on the time past since the last jump.

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What's currently implemented technically?

The oxp contains Engines which may be use by developers to implement interesting galaxy-spanning events:

• (main) Engine,
• War,
• History,
• Systems,
• Economy,
• Citizenships.

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Effects on game

Effects on game difficulty

• The player is considered fugitive when in systems warring with their flag.
• The player is refused docking in some stations when they have not the requisite visa or passport.
• Some new ways to spend money: passports, visas.

Effects on game performance

• This .oxp works only when the player is docked, so there is no impact during the flight time. During the docking, it works once every ten frames, the effect on player experience should be negligible.

If it isn't negligible, tell me and I'll put in the ability to choose the number of frames.

Even if the effect is negligible on the player, it uses lots of CPU, so it might not be negligible on the battery.

Tips

• One now needs to keep abreast of developments in the systems one is about to visit. This can be done using the new F4 choices while docked. And it can also be done using the F7 screen - and if one's route has been plotted using the ANA, one can view the different systems along the route in F7 using the left/right arrow keys.

• If one is approaching a set of systems needing a visa from an anarchy, if a rock hermit can be found in the first system needing a visa, once can dock there and then a visa for the second system can be purchased there.

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Instructions

• For OXZ's, the Expansions Manager download is fine.
• For OXPs, do not unzip the .oxz file, just move into the AddOns folder of your Oolite installation.

Dependencies

• GNN OXP
• Anarchies OXP

Known bugs

None.

License

• Diplomancy was created by Commander Day‎, from the home of diplomancy (think of Talleyrand & Richelieu!).
• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License version 4.0.
• If you are re-using any piece of this OXP, please let him know by sending an e-mail to david at pradier dot info

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Versions history

• v.0.18

Improvement, user-friendliness: the visa system in-game explanation is clearerer.

• v.0.17

Improvement, user-friendliness: the visa system in-game explanation is clearer.

• v.0.16

Improvement, flavor: the player is considered fugitive when in systems warring with their flag.

Improvement, flavor: no "Embassy district" in anarchies, no citizenship in an Anarchy

Improvement, flavor: the player may buy days of visa (cost: productivity / population / 365 per day) in the embassy district in a neighbouring, non-enemy from the destination system.

Improvement, flavor: the first time the Diplomacy OXP is used, if a visa is needed in the current system, we give the player a 1-day visa.

Improvement, flavor: a GNN news introduces the Visa Law.

Improvement, flavor: when stateless, docking is refused in corporates, dictatorships and communists without having a visa.

Improvement, flavor: maps are centered and zoomed. Possibility to center on the target system, or on the whole trajectory. Possibility to display the short/quick trajectory, or no trajectory at all.

Improvement, performance: the API are removed in favor of JsDoc.

Improvement, code quality: the Snoopers dependency, which is deprecated, is replaced by the GNN dependency. Oolite minimal required version is now 1.88, because of this.

Improvement, code quality: moved the GNN connection to external script.

Improvement, code quality: tax level and treasury are now displayed through mission.addMessageText rather than through a modification of the system description.

Improvement, tweaking: the alliance threshold between systems is lowered.

Bugfix: the initActions wasn't set as it should be. In particular, initActionsByType wasn't set when adding an initAction, and initActions was set with an ActorType as key instead of an ActionId.

• v.0.15

Improvement, flavor: the player may acquire or renounce the citizenship of the system they are in.

Improvement, flavor: the player may display one of their citizenships as the flag of their ship.

Improvement, dev func: other scripts may subscribe to be informed of a citizenship change of the player.

Improvement, dev func: citizenships prices are dynamic and available to other scripts.

Improvement, dev func: other scripts may inquire if the player has a particular citizenship.

Improvement, code quality: introduced JsDoc comments, including some allowing to document the Oolite javascript hooks!

• v.0.14

Improvement, flavor: War declaration! Peace! Snooper news about them!

Improvement, flavor: Wars map!

Improvement, dev func: the war threshold and the alliance threshold are scriptable through the WarEngineAPI.

Improvement, dev func: new F4 interface making History happen for debug purposes.

Improvement, code consistency: Alliances scripts become War scripts.

• v.0.13 Bugfix: manifest.plist for the oxz manager.

• v.0.12 Bugfix: manifest.plist for the oxz manager.

• v.0.11

Improvement, flavor: added a F4 Alliances Map, showing alliances between systems.

Improvement, flavor: having only Snooper news for the player current system.

Improvement, flavor: fixed Diziet Sma citation

Improvement, code consistency: the tax script becomes the economy script.

Improvement, code consistency: removed the TechnicalPrinciples.txt file, as its content is now mainly in the new OXP Performance thread.

Improvement, dev func: added a beginning of Economy Engine API.

Improvement, dev func: added a _debug flag in the Engine to start as if you just spent a turn and entered the station; ie, events are processing.

• v.0.10

Improvement, flavor: added a F4 System history, showing the F7-selected system events history. The displayed text depends on a formatting function definable through API per event.

Improvement, flavor: the alliance and alliance break events are now displayed in the history.

Improvement, dev func: the EngineAPI provides the events, and the events by actor.

Improvement, dev func: the EngineAPI allows now to store a variable in the saved state with the other saved variables of the oxp.

Improvement, dev func: introduced a Systems API and a History API. The systems API provides the system actors indexed by galaxyID and systemID.

• v.0.9

Improvement, flavor: the score given to a system by another depend on who they are allied to.

Improvement, flavor: systems may now break their alliances.

Bugfix: systems within 7 ly of any of both systems in the alliance are now informed of the alliance.

Improvement, dev func: introduced an Alliance API.

• v.0.8

Improvement, flavor: Two systems within 7ly of each other may now form an alliance, depending on their relation quality. Currently, each must have a score for the other of at least +0.5.

Improvement, flavor: some Snooper news are now displayed when an alliance is formed between two systems, and the player is within 7ly of one of the allied systems.

New, oxp dev func: introduced a functional Event system.

• v.0.7

Improvement, flavor: added a F4 Strategic Map, showing links between systems nearer than 7. The relation between systems is currently based on their government.

• v.0.6

Improvement, flavor: tax amount depends on the time spent since the last taxation.

Improvement, speed: major refactor to remove closures, dereferences, JSON (de)serialization special functions.

• v.0.5 Bugfix manifest.plist for the oxz manager.

• v.0.41 Put into the oxz manager.

• v.0.3

New, oxp dev func: delivered DiplomacyEngineAPI for oxp developers, provided a dedicated readme file.

New, doc: provided a dedicated file DiplomacyRoadmap.txt

Improvement, code consistency: the Systems and Tax js script now use the API rather than the native engine calls.

Improvement, speed: optimized the loops in the engine

Improvement, logic: when starting, the player is docked, so we should process the saved actions.

Bugfix: solved a bug in the Tax script recurrent tax task after a savefile load.

Bugfix: the init action using the api wasn't working after a restore from the savefile.

Cleaning: log cleaning, file cleaning.

• v.0.2 The actions are made progressively, one every 10 frames when docked, so as not to need more execution time than allowed at the same time, and to avoid slowdowns during the game.

• v.0.1 First version of the Diplomacy engine. Systems are introduced as a type of "Actor". "SELFTAX" is introduced as an event for systems. Tax level and treasury are displayed on the F7 screen.

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RexebeCitizen.oxp

• RexebeCitizen.oxz grants citizenship of Rexebe for users of Diplomancy who want eg. to try out Hermitage (Phkb, 2021)

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Musings

Library's PAD (Personal Assistance Device) showing player's origin

Cholmondely writes: this is one of my favourite .oxp's adding a good dash of realism to my game. And it makes visiting other places difficult just as real life does! If anybody ever manages to introduce real wars into Oolite, this will help provide a realistic background to them (Montana05 has created an "invasion oxp" which is currently in alpha stage).

There are a number of things which still need doing/thinking about.

• This bug of multiple consecutive peace treaties being declared needs fixing (see the "System History" screen shown above: Qubeen & Xexeti)
• One should be able to choose one's first citizenship without paying - ideally it should be linked to the self-chosen system of "origin" on Library's PAD.
• It seems unlikely that there would be Embassy Districts on Rock Hermits! But it might well be possible to buy over-priced visas through the Black Market there (as eg installed by Smugglers oxp) - and especially for the same system that the RH is in!
• The decision not to install Embassy Districts on the local orbital station in an anarchy needs thinking through. The Lore is that the anarchy does not provide any finance for the orbital, meaning that GalCop has to pay for all of the costs. Hence GalCop runs the orbital, not the anarchy. And thus the lack of an "Embassy" with (inexistent) anarchic "governments" would seem to be irrelevant to the presence of some sort of visa-issuing body on the station. Even if the second system were at war with the anarchy. This can of course all be handwaved away by referring to GalCop regulations, but still, it should be thought through!

Links

• Discussion
• Tax OXP? thread (2012)
• Wars discussion (2021)
• Is Political Change Possible? (2018)
• Problems with combining the buggy Diplomancy with Bounty System OXP (2022)

New version

• oolite.oxp.Day.Diplomacy.oxz (Phkb 2023: v.0.19 Bugfix: Process of making peace and breaking alliances were spamming the system events and not changing anything.)

Gameplay and Balance Indicator

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Diplomancy makes things a bit more difficult - you need to pay for a visa to visit some of the systems - or get fined! And you can't buy the visas just anywhere either - sometimes you can't even buy them at all!