Why isn't neutrality a diplomatic option?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

So in multiplayer maps where there are 8 players, starting on a large map. Everyone starts as hostiles or on teams. Why?

In the real world, civilizations who had not met were neutral, and then when they did meet it was very very rare to go straight to combat.

So, what would neutrality entail?

  1. No attacking economic units. Trade ships, villagers, fishing ships, monks, and carts of the other civilization.

  2. No attacking buildings of the other civilization. Also no converting buildings.

  3. No vision sharing.

  4. Conversions of the other civs units are allowed. But this can piss off other players, resulting in the status quickly going from neutrality to war.

The point here is to allow multiplayer games where people don’t necessarily start on teams to have a bit of trust for their neighbor, and to trade with them for profit without showing the neighbor their military hand and base layout.

As an aside, in scenarios with ai, neutrality would be an interesting thing to use as a goal for players. For example, the ai could say we will stay neutral so long as you dont cross X line. This could lead to scenarios where players avoid an easy route and instead focus on a harder, longer route to an enemy to avoid pissing off a large empire.

2

To play such settings you need to play a scenario. With lots of fancy triggers and stuff.

3

I’m pretty sure neutrality is a diplomatic option, unless I’m mistaken.

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4

This literally exists, just uncheck “fixed teams” and you can pick between allies, neutral or enemy on the diplomacy tab

Multiplayer ranked doesn’t have diplomacy, but you can set up diplo games on the lobby

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5

Monks are military, as far as I remember.
A neutral AI player’s towers and military units would attack monks.

6

Who says people meeting for the first time were neutral?

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7

It is already in the game man. Set the teams to - whjch js no team, and everyone start neutral. Maybe im wrong but you can still choose neutral diplomatic stance in game

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8

When teams aren’t locked, you can set other players to neutral. As I recall, this means that your units won’t automatically attack them, but that you can manually choose to attack. Scenarios have the option of setting players neutral to each other (and also player who have different diplomatic stances towards each other), but in lobbies you only select the teams (and players are all allied/enemies accordingly - “-” team means enemies with everyone). Though in lobby games, there is still the option to uncheck “lock teams” (as mentioned by others)

Some of the in-game campaigns do use the neutral diplomatic stance as I recall.

9

Interesting. Its a shame that the neutrality option isnt explored more. Perhaps there could be a new setting in lobbies of neutral start. That way everyone starts neutral, but they have to decide if they want to be friends or foes.