NON-AGGRESSION PACTS
Formal agreements not to attack — signed treaties with durations, break penalties, and reputation stakes — occupying the diplomatic space between war and alliance.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN GRAND-STRATEGY · 4X · STRATEGY · MMO
Paradox grand strategy runs them as standard instruments (with truce timers and treaty-breaker penalties that make violation expensive), Civilization's open borders and friendship declarations tier the same idea, and multiplayer 4X and MMO territory games see player-negotiated NAPs emerge even without mechanical support, enforced purely by reputation. Designers include NAPs because diplomacy needs intermediate commitments: alliance is too much (mutual defense drags you into wars), unstructured peace is too little (nothing stops tomorrow's backstab), and the NAP's precise value is making intentions legible — signing one is information, refusing one is information, and breaking one is a reputational event the whole map reprices. NAPs also let AI and players safely turn their backs, which is what makes concentrated wars elsewhere possible; they are the mechanism by which multipolar maps produce focused conflicts instead of universal skirmish. Key decisions: enforcement weight (honor-system versus hard-coded attack prevention versus severe penalties — hard blocks are legible but gamey at expiration), duration and renewal flow, and how AI values proposals (an AI that signs anything makes NAPs meaningless; one that never signs makes diplomacy decorative). Pitfall: penalty-free betrayal — if breaking a pact costs a token reputation hit that decays by next war, players learn NAPs are ambush-timing tools, and the trust infrastructure the mechanic exists to build never forms.