On occasion Petra will request to become allies or neutral with other players (regardless if they are an AI or not, and this is done taking into account the current system which allows Petra to respond if a human player changes their diplomacy stance with a bot.
It is important to emphasize that this should not happen often, and that maybe it could be restricted entirely somehow. Currently there will be lapse timer set up to restrict the times when Petra will consider sending a request; when Petra does consider, there is still only a very low purely random chance that it will actually send a request (and this value should be small, exactly how small comes down to a design decision as well, I guess).
The overall system works like:
- If Petra has more enemies than mutual allies, it may decide to send a request (which may be either ally or neutral) to the player that it has the most mutual enemies with. This will send an event to other AIs, as well as a private chat message (needed for human players). The message will explain that the AI will switch to the chosen diplomacy stance if the other player does so first.
- If the other player does not respond within some time, then the request will be rescinded.
- The AI can demand tributes from other AI players in order to accept the offer, and will wait for the other to send them to accept.
- The sent requests will be reset if the player changes diplomacy