Hall of Shame

[moderation]

vfb said:No nation necessarily considers itself evil. The people of Sauromatia may eat the flesh of their enemies to show respect or gain their powers. In the nations conducting blood sacrifice, it may be a great honor to be chosen as a sacrifice. The righteous flames of the Marignon inquisition save the souls of those who are burned by the fires of justice. The Ashen Empire removes the pain of life from the world, and when all is reduced to ash and dust, nirvana is achieved.

Okay I'm mostly repeating myself, but I think this is clearer and more concise. Hanging an arbitrary "evilness" hat on certain nations and deciding that they are the ones most likely to break treaties is not useful because everyone has a different definition of what "evilness" means and which nations it applies to. Without any common understanding of the "evilness" and or "goodness" the nations, it's hard to have a consensus that EA Abysia is likely to break treaties because they are evil and EA Mictlan is not. Because of this lack of consensus on "evilness" (and the fact that the designers made the majority of the nations morally ambiguous), it's not generally meaningful to blame a broken treaty or similar strategic decisions on a nation's "evilness" or "goodness". Ultimately, these decisions are still up to the player.

In addition, what kind of models do we have for how an ancient Aztec god with a entire nation under his control may have negotiated a trade or alliance with a Greek goddess like Athena who also happened to be also have an entire army and nation under her control? Keep in mind this is happening as numerous Egyptian, Indian, Nordic and Chinese gods all happen to be sharing the stage and in various stages of war or alliance with each other. If you were dealing with a WWI or WWII scenario, then yes, it might make some reasonably logical roleplaying, but roleplaying this kind of scenario in Dominions is just too weird because we really have no practical ideas about how gods are supposed to act in the realm of international relations. As a result, attempts at this sort of roleplaying just seems like a way to dress up strategic game decisions as a story. But there is no real compelling story there for me to see, just some people trying to win at a game. I'm happy to roleplay flavor elements, but attempting to roleplay diplomacy just opens up too big of a can of worms for me.