Diplomacy

Talking to other countries: leader voices, group threads and polls, memory, reactions and unprompted approaches.

Diplomacy is a conversation, not a menu. There is no "propose alliance" button and no accept/decline dialog. You open a chat with a country and talk its leader into something, or fail to.

Find it in the Chat panel, Diplomacy tab — Start New Chat to open a thread — or with 💬 on the card when you click a country on the map, or Open Diplomacy in a country's panel.

On beta the panel is headed Diplomacy, and its tabs are Contacts (your threads, with Start New Chat), Institutions and Intelligence.

Talking to a country

Threads you are part of. Germany opened this one unprompted after a time skip.

Every country is played by its leader, in that leader's voice, shaped by their country's situation and by how they see you. Ask questions, make offers, issue threats, propose terms.

What works is roughly what would work on a real government:

• Offer something. A demand with nothing attached gets refused by anyone who can afford to.
• Be concrete. "Let's cooperate" goes nowhere. "Preferential grain transit in exchange for your vote at the UN" is a proposal someone can answer.
• Know who you are talking to. Read their panel and ask for the advisor's report first. A country in crisis wants different things from a confident one.
• Follow up. Agreements reached in conversation become real through subsequent events and orders, not the moment the words are said.

Leaders remember

Each country keeps its own private summary of its dealings with you, carried between conversations and fed back as context. A leader you threatened ten turns ago has not forgotten it, and neither has one you kept a promise to.

This is separate from the world's event history. The event log records what happened; the diplomatic memory records how that country feels about you because of it.

They know what has happened since. A thread can sit for months of game time. When you write into it after the world has moved on, your message carries a short note of what happened on the public record since the thread last spoke — the newest events, borders moved, countries renamed, founded or dissolved. Your bubble shows it as one small line, "⏳ Since 1 December 2015 · 3 events · 1 border change", with the whole note on hover. Only what is public goes in it: a leader learns secrets through its own threads, not yours.

Reactions

Leaders attach an emoji to your last message — a small, immediate read on how what you just said landed, before their actual reply arrives. It is a genuinely useful tell when you are probing.

Group conversations

Starting a thread. Select as many countries as you want in it — one for a private line, several for a summit.

You can open a thread with several countries at once. When you speak, one request answers for the whole table: every other participant can reply, react, rename the thread, bring someone in or show someone out, and call or answer a poll. The lines are said one at a time — each speaker is seen typing for a few seconds before its line appears — and you can cut in: speak before the table has finished and the lines not yet said never are, and the next turn knows who was interrupted.

A poll in a thread is binding: every AI participant votes in the same turn, and you can see the question, the options and the votes, and cast your own.

Each country hears only what was said while it was in the room: a power brought in on turn six is not written as though it heard turn two. What a leader heard in its own other threads, it may bring with it.

Group threads are where multi-party diplomacy actually happens: mediating between two rivals, assembling a coalition, or being ganged up on.

Institutions

Beta channel only.

On beta, the bodies countries belong to — an alliance, a union, a council of nations — have a tab of their own in the Diplomacy panel: Institutions. Your institutions lists the ones you take part in, View all every one in the world, and ＋ Found institution creates a new one: a name, a type, a purpose and the governments you invite to found it, with its decision rule (simple majority, qualified majority or unanimity) and the rest of its charter under the advanced settings.

Open one and it has tabs of its own: Overview, Council, Agenda, Decisions, Charter, Members and Documents.

• Council is the members' own conversation. It reads like a group thread, and the members nobody plays speak, table business and vote in it themselves.
• Agenda is where business is done. Table a matter and choose Open for debate or Put to vote now. On an open proposal you cast your ballot — yes, no or abstain, or veto where the charter gives you one — propose amendments, which its sponsor accepts or rejects, or Call vote on one that is ready.
• Decisions keeps what was settled, with every member's ballot and its reasons.
• Members is where you Request membership or Request observer status, invite other governments, withdraw, or propose a member's expulsion or the institution's dissolution: each a formal procedure under the charter.

Your advisor knows your institutions and can draft your business in them.

They contact you

Germany's opening message, in its government's voice and grounded in what the world had just done.

Countries open conversations with you on their own initiative, in three ways:

Because of an event. A border incident produces an ultimatum, a war scare produces an offer of mediation, a windfall produces a trade delegation. The other side always speaks first.

As general outreach. Treaty feelers, non-aggression proposals, warnings, summit invitations — approaches that are not tied to any single event.

The simulation is told to write these only when some country plausibly would — an approach has to serve the sender's interests — so a quiet turn brings none.

Unprompted, while you play. On average every eight minutes of real time while the game is on screen, the model is asked whether some country with a live reason to speak would write to you; most of the time nobody does. It never fires during a time skip or while events are still being revealed. Each attempt is a request nobody pressed a button for, so it only runs while Background AI is on (Settings → AI → AI requests), and stops at its daily cap. A scenario can change the cadence, or switch it off, with its Idle diplomacy feature.

A document can arrive this way too: a paper held by you and other governments reaches you as a note in the thread with them, spoken by whoever sent it.

You are told when they write. A message that lands while its thread is not on screen raises a toast (click it to open the thread), an optional two-note chime (the 🔊 toggle), and a 🔔 notification centre until you open the panel; desktop notifications can be allowed too. Unread threads are badged. Answering them is most of the game's texture — a campaign where you never reply is a much smaller campaign.

The world cannot sign for you

This is an explicit rule the simulation is held to: no other country can commit you to anything.

The world may not sign treaties, alliances, ceasefires, surrenders, trade pacts or unions on your behalf, may not accept or reject offers for you, and may not have your country take landmark unilateral action — declaring war, ceding territory, changing government — unless it is directly executing an order you actually gave.

When another country wants such a decision from you, it has to ask: as a chat where they speak first and make the proposal, or as an event describing the offer as open and awaiting your answer.

So if you find yourself in an alliance, you agreed to it. Events remain free to narrate whatever other countries do among themselves.

Peace and calls to arms

Beta channel only.

On beta two decisions come with buttons to accept or decline:

• Peace offered. A country at war with you that decides to seek peace writes to you in your diplomatic chat with it, and its terms (the ground as each side holds it or restored to the old borders, and any reparations) are shown on that message: you Accept or Decline there.
• Call to arms. When an ally you are bound to defend is attacked, it calls on you, in a card over the map until you answer (Fold away shrinks it to a button): Honour the alliance and you are at war beside it, or Break the treaty, which ends it and costs you 15 reputation. A call left unanswered for two turns counts as broken.

You can make the first move too: in your chat with an enemy, Peace lets you set the ground and the reparations and Send terms. Its leader answers in the reply, accepting, declining or offering other terms. A government at war knows its own war in every conversation (its weariness, supplies, ground and allies) and decides by them. See alliances that bind and peace on terms.

Turning talk into outcomes

A conversation on its own changes attitudes. To change the world, pair it with an order:

In chat: talk Germany into backing a joint force on the eastern border. In the queue: "Formalise the joint eastern deployment agreed with Berlin and begin stationing troops."

The chat establishes that they are willing; the order is you acting on it. Doing only the first tends to produce a campaign where everyone likes you and nothing happens.

Reading everyone else's diplomacy

The Spy tab of the same panel (Intelligence on beta) shows conversations you are not part of, as far as your intelligence service can read them. That is a whole system of its own — see espionage.

Rostra

Beta channel only.

Leaders do not only write to you. Rostra, the world's social network — the third button of the toolbar — is where heads of state, ministers, generals, journalists, analysts and business leaders post about what each time skip brought, and where, now and then, a celebrity or an ordinary person posts about something that has nothing to do with world affairs. Its tabs show everything, your country, your Mentions (posts that quote you or name your country or leader) and your own posts.

You post as your country's leader: the pen at the top of Rostra opens the box to write in. You can quote any post, and the post you quote is shown inside yours. Poll in the box turns your post into a question with two to four choices: the public of your country votes during the next time skip, and the poll then shows how each choice did, how many voted and what the public said. The result is public opinion your government has to live with. What you post is public. The next time skip reads it as your leader's own words, and the world answers: leaders and journalists quote you back, and allies, rivals, markets and crowds act on what you said. Posting costs no AI request; the posts come in the answer each time skip already gives. A scenario or a game can switch it off with its Social media feature.

A new game's feed is empty until the first time skip. While it is, Rostra says so and offers Refresh: one AI request that writes the first posts by the people who make the news.

Search, where the Your country tab was, opens on your own country and finds any country or region on the map. A place shows what its people of note have posted on Rostra and, on Refresh, what ordinary people there are posting today, as Listen in did: each new place is one AI request, and the same place on the same day opens again at no cost. Check in Rostra on a region's card opens Search on that country; its posts load when you press Refresh.

The ledgers behind the talk

Conversations sit on top of explicit ledgers: numeric relation scores between every pair of countries, a formal register of treaties and their status, and a war ledger that is the single authority on who is fighting whom. See relations, treaties and war.

You read them from the 🤝 Diplomacy block on any country's stat sheet — every bilateral score that country holds, its treaty register and its current wars, for anyone you click on the map. Checking a country's existing friendships before you open a thread with them changes how you play.

On beta the map can show the same thing. Switch it from Political to Diplomatic at the bottom right, and every country takes the colour of where it stands with you — your puppets, allies, friends and trade partners, the hostile, those at war with you, and the neutral — with a legend beside the switch.

On beta, an overlord can make demands. In the one-on-one thread between a puppet and its overlord, a message can be a demand — an overlord marks one with the ⚑ beside the message box — answered on a card with Accept, Refuse or an alternative of the puppet's own (Offer). Only a refusal costs the puppet loyalty, and only once; the card stays, so a puppet that thinks better of it can still Accept after all. An overlord offered an alternative can Accept alternative or Reject it, insisting on the demand or revising it.

Next

• Espionage — reading what is said when you are not in the room.
• Giving orders — acting on what you agreed.
• Relations, treaties and war — the ledgers, and what happens when talk fails.
• Countries and identity — reputation, tags, and who you are dealing with.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-10-25 · main 6e6239c4 · beta d7e8fa85. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.