Diplomacy
| Diplomacy | ||
|
Basic Diplomacy: allows you to negotiate with monsters who are weaker than your group, and reduces the cost of surrendering by 20%. | |
|
Advanced Diplomacy: allows you to negotiate with monsters who are weaker than your group, and reduces the cost of surrendering by 40%. | |
|
Expert Diplomacy: allows you to negotiate with monsters who are weaker than your group, and reduces the cost of surrendering by 60%. | |
Diplomacy is a secondary skill, that increases the chance wandering creatures will offer to join the hero's army and lowers the cost of surrendering to another hero. Additionally, Diplomacy enables hero to learn primary skills from Library of Enlightenment earlier than experience level 10. With Basic Diplomacy hero has to be at least on level 8, with Advanced Diplomacy on level 6 and with Expert Diplomacy on level 4 to receive +2 to all primary skills from Library of Enlightenment.
Heroes with Diplomacy as a starting skill:
Basis of joining
Whether or not the wandering creatures will join you for "greater glory" or at price, depends not only on a hero's level of Diplomacy, but also on several other factors (for details, see also External Links below). For creatures with a randomized chance to join, the chance can be summed up in the following way:
- Army strength
- 40% bonus with expert Diplomacy (30% chance to hire) if the army is 3 times the strength of the creatures
- 30% bonus with advanced Diplomacy (20% chance to hire) if the army is 2.5 times the strength
- 20% bonus with basic Diplomacy (10% chance to hire) if the army is 2 times the strength
- 10% bonus if the army is 1.5 times the strength of the creatures
- 10% penalty if the army is weaker than the creatures
- 20% penalty if the army is less than half the strength
- 30% penalty if the army is less than a third of the strength
- Army composition
- 20% bonus if over 50% (creature count) of the hero's army consists of the same type (up/downgrade) of creatures
- 10% bonus if there's at least one creature of the same type (up/downgrade) in the hero's army
- Diplomacy
- 30% bonus for expert
- 20% bonus for advanced
- 10% bonus for basic
In total, this allows for a 90% chance to join (60% free, 30% hire) if all the conditions are met.
Note that fire and energy elementals, water and ice elementals, and earth and magma elementals are considered different creature types, even though the latter of each pair is an upgrade of the former.
When playing at easy difficulty, heroes receive a diplomacy bonus even when they have not learned the skill. No Diplomacy acts as basic Diplomacy, basic Diplomacy acts as advanced Diplomacy, while advanced and expert diplomacy act as expert Diplomacy for the purpose of joining.
Horn of the Abyss
On all standard random map templates, monsters now only join for money, and only half the group for the price of the entire group; these settings can be altered in the map and template editors.
Description
Diplomacy reduces the cost of surrendering, and increases the chance of wandering monsters joining you, be it 'for greater glory' or at a price.
Recommended for: At least one hero, typically a support, on maps with wandering monsters that are not set to 'savage', but preferably to 'aggressive' (i.e., the default setting).
Although a main hero's attack and defense skill help in convincing wandering monsters to join, it typically works well to let a support hero learn this skill instead. This support hero can then borrow troops from your main hero to convince wandering monsters to join and return the troops immediately after. This saves your main hero a skill slot and potentially a lot of movement points.
External links
- Diplomacy internals - thread on HeroesCommunity
- Tribute to strategists: Heroes of Might and Magic III Manual by Rainalkar, pp. 22-25.