Mechanics

Diplomacy and truces

The game has exactly one diplomatic action: the truce. You buy it with gold, it lasts 10 turns, and it expires on its own. There is no treaty tree, no alliance, no trade route — the table holds a single question: do I spend this gold on peace, or on an army?

What a truce does

Two sides under a truce:

• cannot attack each other — the command is rejected, whether the target is a unit or a city;
• cannot enter each other's cities — not even a city whose hit points have been driven to zero. If a third player brings your truce partner's city down, they are the one who can walk in; you cannot.

A truce is non-aggression, not a wall. What it deliberately leaves open:

• Movement is free. You may cross your truce partner's territory, and they may cross yours.
• Zones of control still apply. A unit that steps next to a truced unit still ends its movement there (Combat). Control comes from the board, not from diplomacy: walking past an army standing beside you is not free just because peace was promised. An exemption would turn the truce from non-aggression into a right of passage, opening a free corridor to the third player behind it.
• A siege still counts. If a truced unit stands on one of your city's neighbours, that city is under siege and does not repair at the start of the turn (Cities and population). The test is adjacency, not attack; a truce closes the attack, not the blockade. Gold repair still works (Gold). Buying peace does not send the army at your gate home — it only freezes the front.
• Vision and fog are unchanged. A truce is not an intelligence sharing agreement; you still know only as much of their army as you can see (Fog of war).
• The score race does not pause. A truce buys time, not the lead (Territory and score).

The price: weaker means dearer

The price comes out of three factors, and the number on the panel is the exact number the engine charges:

• The rate per turn is 3 gold. For two evenly matched sides, 10 turns of peace cost 30 gold.
• Turns bought can never exceed the turns left: late in the match the truce gets shorter and the price shrinks with it. On the final turn the longest peace available is one turn — still enough to shut down one rival's attack for that turn, and priced accordingly.
• The balance of power is their strength divided by yours. Above 1 means "I am the weaker one" and raises the price; the ratio is clamped between 0.5 and 3. The floor stops an overwhelming leader from freezing a rival for free; the cap stops a side on the brink of elimination from pricing peace out of reach.

Strength is the sum of two terms: each unit's (attack + defense) × hp ratio, plus the city base defense (3) for every city. A half-dead army counts as half a threat — the same measure combat itself uses (Combat). Score is not used: the question at the table is "can they crush me", not "how many points do they have".

The price does not listen to the fog. The balance of power is computed from both sides' real strength, not from what you can see — so the figure on the panel counts the army your rival is hiding under the fog. Two reasons: a price is a total, not a position (the score bar is open all match long), and the number the panel prints can never diverge from the number the engine charges. It has a useful side effect: a truce that costs more than you expected is news about an army you have not seen.

Payment is all or nothing: if the gold is short the command is rejected, and the panel keeps the button disabled anyway.

Two directions, one decision

You offer. Pick an opponent in the diplomacy panel and offer a truce; the answer comes back immediately. If it is accepted, the gold is spent and the truce starts that turn. If it is declined, you pay nothing — you have simply learned where they stand.

They offer. The AI also offers you truces on its own turn, and then it pays: the side that wants peace is the side that buys it. The offer box is not a blocker — you can play your turn without answering it, and the offer waits until your next turn. Answering closes the box.

Only one offer waits at a time, so three opponents cannot bury you in offers in a single turn.

Declining buys silence. Turn an offer down and the record is not deleted: it stays in the state marked "declined" and stops opponents from making a new offer for 5 turns — the box does not reopen next turn. When the time is up the record drops and offers can come again. That is deliberate: were the record deleted, the same offer would return every turn and the box would become noise. Your right to offer is untouched; the silence only quiets the incoming side.

No breaking it

A truce cannot be broken early. It lifts as the first thing that happens on the turn it expires, so your first attack that turn is already possible. There is no "betray" command: with one, every truce would become a bluffing calculation, and single-action diplomacy would grow exactly the kind of hidden layer this game avoids.

If either side is eliminated (its capital falls), the truce falls with it.

Which opponent comes to the table

The decision comes from a personality weight (truceAppetite) multiplied by the visible balance of power — so the AI only seeks peace from a side it sees as stronger, and never from an opponent it has not met (The AI opponent).

The appetite needed to make an offer is higher than the one needed to accept one, and that is deliberate: the offering side pays. "I would accept" and "I would pay for it" are two different decisions.

An opponent on several fronts accepts peace

There is a second reason an incoming offer gets accepted, and it ignores the balance of power entirely: if the AI is in contact with 2 or more separate opponents at once, it accepts even when it sees itself as the stronger side. A front is an opponent with at least one unit visible right now — an army behind the fog is not a front, and neither is one that has scattered out of sight.

Bandits do not count as a front (Bandit camp). The count walks the seats only, and the reason is the rule itself: this clause answers "would I take peace to close one front", and no truce can be signed with a bandit — there is no front to close. Were they counted, a single gang that never strays two steps from its camp could flip an opponent's whole truce decision.

What that means on the board: an opponent fighting more than one rival at once may take your offer even while it is ahead of you. If it is in contact with you, one of the fronts it closes is yours — so buying peace is also a way of pointing it at the other rival.

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.