Right then, let’s get to the topic at hand. Diplomatic Catalysts is a new system added in update 1.7, the role they play in creating Political Lobbies, and the impact they will have on how the diplomatic AI acts towards other countries.
So, what is a Diplomatic Catalyst? Put simply, a Diplomatic Catalyst is a type of diplomatic ‘occurrence’, positive or negative, between two countries. There are many different types of Catalysts, here is a small list of examples:
- Relations between two countries increases by one full ‘level’ (for instance from Cordial to Amicable)
- A subject has their autonomy decreased
- Two countries end up on the same side in a Diplomatic Play
- A country reforms their government and becomes significantly ideologically divergent from another country’s government
- A country declares another country their rival
- A country breaks off a mutually negotiated Diplomatic Pact with another
Each type of Catalyst may result in the creation of a Political Lobby in one or both of the countries, targeting the other country. The type of Lobby and chance for it to appear depends on the nature of the Catalyst (such as whether it is of a hostile nature), the diplomatic conditions between the two countries, and whether the overall conditions are suitable for the creation of a Lobby. For example, a ‘Relations Increased’ catalyst will only create pro-country lobbies, with an increasingly higher chance to do so the higher relations go. Conversely, the ‘Pact Broken’’ catalyst can create both pro and anti-country lobbies and is more likely to do so the more significance the broken pact had for the country that just had it taken away from them. Some catalysts, such as ‘Ideological Divergence’, can result in the creation of either a Pro or an Anti-Country lobby.
Of course, it isn’t as simple as just being a dice roll: the proper conditions must be in place for a Lobby to appear to begin with and there must be at least one non-marginalized Interest Group interested in joining the Lobby. Additionally, the calculation for whether an Interest Group wants to join a lobby or not can depend on the type of Catalyst: For example, if the ‘Ideological Divergence’ catalyst creates a Lobby, Interest Groups calculating their desire to join that lobby will place additional emphasis on their own ideological view of the country in question. After all, just because a country that’s going all in on Market Liberalism has ideologically diverged from your government doesn’t mean your in-opposition Industrialists aren’t over the moon about their new politics.
The signing of a Defensive Pact between Brazil and the USA has resulted in the creation of a powerful Pro-American Lobby comprised of the Industrialists and Landowners
Right then, onto the diplomatic AI. Since this is a topic we haven’t talked about in a while, I thought I’d give a little refresher on how the AI decides its behavior towards other countries, before telling you about how this decision-making process will change in 1.7.
Fundamentally, the most important factor in how an AI country behaves towards another country is their Attitude. Attitude is mainly determined by a country’s Attitude Score and Strategic Desire, which is in turn influenced by their Diplomatic Strategy and other factors such as active Journal Entries.
Confused yet? I’ll try to illustrate with an example: If you’ve ever played Mexico, you should be all too familiar with US aggression. They typically start as Antagonistic towards Mexico and progress to Belligerent after some time has passed. Though these are both hostile attitudes, they differ considerably in which particular hostile behaviors the AI will engage in.
Antagonistic AIs will tend to oppose you in diplomatic plays and use hostile diplomatic actions like rivalry and embargo, but will rarely attack you outright. Even if they do attack, they will do so using wargoals aimed at weakening you or at worst snatching away subjects they have an interest in: they want to keep you in check but they don’t have any interest in taking your land.
Belligerent AIs, on the other hand, are very much interested in taking your land. They may be after just a single state, or a handful of states, or they may in fact be seeking outright annexation. Regardless, when a Belligerent AI comes over for a visit, you’d better hope that your army and its allies are up to the task of seeing them off.
So why does the AI pick one over the other? It all comes down to the aforementioned Strategic Desire, which represents their long-term diplomatic goals towards a particular nation. The US tends to start with the ‘Antagonize’ Strategic Desire towards Mexico, and change to ‘Conquer’ once they research Nationalism and unlock the Manifest Destiny Journal Entry. If these sound like they line up directly with Antagonistic/Belligerent, it’s because they do! In some cases, a Strategic Desire will translate directly into a particular Attitude unless offset by the Attitude Score, while in others it’s more nuanced. I don’t want to go too on too much of a tangent into Attitude Score, but you can think of it as the AI’s calculation of whether it’s willing to set aside its long-term diplomatic goals for short-term reasons. I.e., ‘we do want to conquer a state from the Ottomans, but at the moment we need them to protect us against Austria’.
‘Maintain Balance of Power’ is one of the more common Diplomatic Strategies, and has the AI pursue more moderate diplomatic goals, avoiding excessive infamy and preferring weakening their rivals to expanding their borders in most cases.
When the AI is prompted to select a Strategic Desire towards another country, they look at the pool of available and achievable desires, assign them a score, and then select through a weighted random process. As mentioned above, Diplomatic Strategy plays an important role here: A country with the ‘Acquire Colonies’ strategy needs no particular reason to select the Conquest desire towards a juicy Unrecognized target, while a country with ‘Defend the Borders’ will only consider picking it to retake lost territories, and even then they’re reluctant to do so in an offensive war. Journal Entries also factor heavily, as we saw with the Manifest Destiny example above. There are of course many more factors in how the AI scores different desires: as an example, AI countries tend to pick more hostile desires towards a country going full-in on radical leftism if they themselves are not pursuing a similar path.
But enough with the long-winded explanations, let’s get to what has actually changed in 1.7. I mentioned above that the AI selects a Strategic Desire ‘when it is prompted to do so’, and here is the crux of the matter. In the current version of the game, the AI uses a system that you could call a ‘reroll progress bar’. For each country, it tracks the progress of said bar, which increases slowly over time but can also make larger jumps from certain occurrences, such as the country selecting a new Diplomatic Strategy or the two countries suddenly ending up opposed in a play, essentially a much simpler version of the very Diplomatic Catalyst system we’re going over in this DD.
Once the reroll progress bar hits 100, the AI will re-roll its strategic desire, often with an additional weight towards ‘staying the course’, particularly towards a country they have long-standing diplomatic pacts with. This may seem like a fairly sensible system, but the problem is that it’s entirely opaque to the player. You simply aren’t told that your long-standing ally just turned hostile towards you because they had a massive ideological shift in their government or picked up a new Journal Entry - at best you may get a custom notification that gives you a hint, such as the one for the French Borders Journal Entry.
This, of course, is where the Catalysts come in! As of update 1.7, the ‘re-roll bucket’ is gone, and replaced with a system of weights similar to those used for Lobby creation, which allows for the AI to adjust its long-term goals in a way that’s far less arbitrary and most importantly, which can be explained to the player. Just like different Catalysts have different weights and conditions for creating Lobbies, the way they potentially alter an AI’s diplomatic strategy is also tailored to the specific Catalyst.
To give you an example, ‘Country Bankrupt’ is a Catalyst that triggers for all of a country’s diplomatic ties when they go bankrupt. For most AI countries, this is of little significance and won’t result in any change in Strategic Desire, but if an AI thinks it’s in a position to take advantage of the bankrupt country’s momentary weakness, particularly if they are pursuing a strategy of Economic Imperialism, a recalculation may trigger in which the AI picks a new desire towards the bankrupt country, which will always be of a more hostile nature than whatever they had before. Other catalysts (for example ‘Relations Improved‘) may only ever change their Strategic Desire in a friendlier direction, while yet others (for example ‘Diplomatic Strategy Changed’) can potentially change it in any direction that makes sense at the time.
By declaring bankruptcy to deal with their crippling debt problems, Ashanti has displayed their weakness to the world and become a tempting target for Great Britain
So what does all this mean? Essentially, what it all boils down to is that the AI is now much more transparent and comprehensible in its behavior, and that the diplomatic relationship between two countries will flow much more from the actions of those two countries. Your AI ally will no longer turn on you just because some dice rolls behind the scenes told them to, they will turn on you because you broke a Trade Agreement they saw as vital, or because you pushed your Infamy too far, or because the ideologies of your governments simply became too incompatible. Similarly, befriending an AI is no longer just a matter of keeping relations high and praying for a re-roll, instead you can actively work to improve their Strategic Desire (and thus attitude) towards you by acting in a manner that benefits them: Make enemies of their enemies, support them in diplomatic plays, and so on.
Even if you missed the notification informing you of an Attitude change resulting from a new Strategic Desire, you can always tooltip the Attitude of an AI country to discover the reason that they adopted their current Strategic Desire towards you. You can even use this to discover why two AI countries are enemies or friends with each other by using the Attitude filter on the diplomatic map mode!
That’s all for today! Next week we’ll be switching topics and talking about the content side of Sphere of Influence, starting with The Great Game. See you then!
