Yeah, I probably ought to find a way to reduce war/peace flipping at some point.
For the non-alliance case, I've got a concept where diplomacy events (and perhaps agent actions and such) can't directly make the faction hostile, rather they accumulate an "outrage meter" (could use the existing diplomacy disposition for this). And when it gets high enough, it's up to the diplomacy AI (such as it is) to actually make the decision to go to war. Kinda like how 4X games do it.
Well, that'll probably come around the time I actually implement a high-level strategic AI for factions, which is a long way off at best...
Thanks for the reply!
Yeah, I can imagine it is sort of a tough balance to find, between interesting, shifting developments between factions happening at a steady pace, and stagnancy. Personally, I do feel like the "random events", like failed deals, diplomatic blunders, etc randomly popping up are somewhat too frequent, and have too dramatic of an impact versus other things. For example, a player faction might take on a 200k+ bounty placed on a deserter for x faction, wipe out a massive fleet of battleships and cruisers, and net +3 rep. Two days later, a jilted lover or scandal takes place via RNG, and the faction loses 10+ rep through that.
While to some extent, that is always going to be unavoidable with a system like this, it does get a little groan-inducing at times (and if I'm trying to do more of an immersive, roleplay focused run, I may just wind up consoling the rep back to where it was). I don't really have a solution for that, so I don't mean to just sound like a whiner, it's just a thought on it all, and the bits that feel a little too spastic and all over the place. Even some variant version of the mod might be an interesting option, where faction shifts are just set to a much rarer, slower pace of random events like that. Not exactly a foolproof fix, but it might make faction relations feel a little more meaningful. Even alliances seem to fall prey to these frequent, dramatic shifts, where I've seen any number of different alliance configurations over the course of a couple cycles. Creating and breaking alliances, I would think, should be relatively dramatic and meaningful, as opposed to being forged, dissolved, etc, at a a relatively rapid pace.
At the very least, when I see ceasefires and whatnot happen, even the description for these events in the intel screen say something along the lines of "this will stay in place for x amount of time (150 days or something like that)", and I can say with certainty, that isn't the case in execution (like I mentioned before, I observed Hegemony and Tri-Tachyon agreeing to a ceasefire, neither within an alliance, and then going back to war 2 in game days later). If agreements like this did actually impose strict time limits, only breakable by very specific developments, it would go a long way towards making these political developments feeling that much more impactful.
Looking forward to seeing where things go, in any case. It really is a great mod, I appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears that go into it.