frank prism
I mostly play 2p w/ my roommate. We were on the same continent our first game, so diplomatic relationships were easy, but were limited value outside non-aggression, due to diplomacy limitations.
When one of his vassals/regions rebelled and a Rebel Nation was formed, I couldn't retake one of his cities on his behalf, only for my own. Think how cool deeper diplomacy would be!
Our second game, we were on separate continents, and we couldn't directly interact until more than 100 turns had passed and we could sail the deep ocean. That kinda sucked - why is deep sea exploration so late-game if you can't control your start locations?
Options to better allow allies (human/bot) to assist allies (human/bot) would be phenomenal!
Some related ideas:
- more diplomacy options (gifting regions. I accidentally ended up with -100 diplomacy with an AI because my border grew too close, and wanted to gift them my region/vassal to turn the -100 penalty into a positive instead of destroying the entire region and having to face chaos)
- spawning options (either guaranteeing human players are placed close to one another, or through an "teams" option in the pre-game screen. Being able to at least have an option to see each other from the diplomacy screen from turn 1 would be neat, since even if you were on separate continents, you could make treaties.)
- shared vision diplomacy option (we're doing screen share via discord & 2 monitors, but it's a pain to try and figure out where our ally's big cities are for merchants)
- multiple treaties (w/ increasing costs). It hurts to have a treaty that only grants 1 culture - let us have that AND another treaty that makes knowledge!
- combined/shared armies (where you temporarily form an army stack out of armies of 2+ players, granting the largest contributor temporary control until you pull them out). This would allow true alliances! You could help your ally recover from negative culture/happiness, by making rebels/invasions a team team effort!