I was playing Nobu 13 and all the characters in there have an honor rating from 0 to 100. If you ally with say, Uesugi Kenshin who has an honor rating of 100, he pretty much can always be counted on to help you out. But, let's say you ally with Saito Dozan who has an honor rating of 0, this doesn't mean allying with him is a negative thing. He will still prefer to attack people who are not allied with him first over you, and assuming you don't just march all your troops away to do something else he probably won't try to backstab you. If you ask for reinforcement he'll at least send somebody to help though they may mysteriously leave halfway when the battle starts to look bad.
This got me thinking, because based on how people play strategy games and simply what makes sense, allying with a human player would be close to allying with someone with an honor rating of negative 100. That is, you'd almost certainly think worse for a guy allying with you compared to anyone else that you're already at war with. You'd probably suspect your ally might backstab you the moment anything looks bad, or that his request for reinforcement is most likely just a ploy to send your units to a trap.
And this isn't just on strategy games. In real life if you pay up the ransom for say, Somali pirates, usually you do get the guys back alive. In Grand Theft Auto you can pay a prostitute and then immediately kill her to get your money back. I'm not talking about game where they're clearly keeping track of some kind of 'ethic score' and being bad on that score adversely affects the outcome of the game. Of course everyone is a model citizen in that behavior. But in a game that is more or less FFA like GTA or the Oblivion line of games, people generally play these games with lower ethnic than the lowest rung of humanity. I realize this is just a game and you're just doing what it is necessary to win, but it's really hilarious to read people complain about 'unrealistic AI' in Civ 5 that refuses to sign a peace treaty for 5 gold after you just slaughtered their entire race minus one city, and everyone knows you're just going to wipe that last city off the face of the map after 10 turns and you only signed that peace treaty to get another 5 gold. If there was a current world simulator where you get to play as USA, I bet the most likely way to play the game is to convince Canada to attack Mexico, and then invade Canada while their troops are busy fighting Mexicans so you can conquer them both. After all if the game makes any sense in terms of game it'd clearly be a good idea to conquer the guys around you first, never mind that you'd commiting some kind of crime against humanity that even the Al Queda wouldn't contemplate were they in charge of the USA.
I guess there's a tendency to treat computer and even online entity as things that are not really human. If you look at the way people approach any game where there is any kind of diplomacy involved, to be successful you'd make the biggest backstabbers in history or fiction look like saints. There's a chapter in Saint Seiya: Lost Canvas when Alon killed all his minions while they're celebrating on the verge of victory, and his advisor reminded him that he's supposed to murder his minions in cold blood AFTER victory is secured, and Alon replied that might work for the previous evil dictator but he's not just your average evil dictator. Even in Zelda, we go around and destroy people's property and wonder why they don't hide more rupees inside jars as we tear them apart!
This got me thinking, because based on how people play strategy games and simply what makes sense, allying with a human player would be close to allying with someone with an honor rating of negative 100. That is, you'd almost certainly think worse for a guy allying with you compared to anyone else that you're already at war with. You'd probably suspect your ally might backstab you the moment anything looks bad, or that his request for reinforcement is most likely just a ploy to send your units to a trap.
And this isn't just on strategy games. In real life if you pay up the ransom for say, Somali pirates, usually you do get the guys back alive. In Grand Theft Auto you can pay a prostitute and then immediately kill her to get your money back. I'm not talking about game where they're clearly keeping track of some kind of 'ethic score' and being bad on that score adversely affects the outcome of the game. Of course everyone is a model citizen in that behavior. But in a game that is more or less FFA like GTA or the Oblivion line of games, people generally play these games with lower ethnic than the lowest rung of humanity. I realize this is just a game and you're just doing what it is necessary to win, but it's really hilarious to read people complain about 'unrealistic AI' in Civ 5 that refuses to sign a peace treaty for 5 gold after you just slaughtered their entire race minus one city, and everyone knows you're just going to wipe that last city off the face of the map after 10 turns and you only signed that peace treaty to get another 5 gold. If there was a current world simulator where you get to play as USA, I bet the most likely way to play the game is to convince Canada to attack Mexico, and then invade Canada while their troops are busy fighting Mexicans so you can conquer them both. After all if the game makes any sense in terms of game it'd clearly be a good idea to conquer the guys around you first, never mind that you'd commiting some kind of crime against humanity that even the Al Queda wouldn't contemplate were they in charge of the USA.
I guess there's a tendency to treat computer and even online entity as things that are not really human. If you look at the way people approach any game where there is any kind of diplomacy involved, to be successful you'd make the biggest backstabbers in history or fiction look like saints. There's a chapter in Saint Seiya: Lost Canvas when Alon killed all his minions while they're celebrating on the verge of victory, and his advisor reminded him that he's supposed to murder his minions in cold blood AFTER victory is secured, and Alon replied that might work for the previous evil dictator but he's not just your average evil dictator. Even in Zelda, we go around and destroy people's property and wonder why they don't hide more rupees inside jars as we tear them apart!
