Diplomacy is Not an Option Review – Streamlined City Defense Goodness

Diplomacy is Not an Option (DINAO) was first released into Early Access on February 9, 2022, but fans of the RTS and city building genres probably had their sights on it from before then. I remember seeing it featured on Splattercat’s channel in 2021. That was probably the first proper gameplay I and probably a lot of you saw. 

2 whole years (and change) after that Early Acess release, we have the 1.0 release on October 4th, 2024. Refreshing as it is to see a popular title actually make it out of Early Access at some point (looking at you, Valheim), I was skeptical about this release and whether or not it would be able to deliver on the fun and silly gameplay while retaining that distinct difficulty to it. I was pleased to discover that indeed, DINAO is as fun and engaging as a lot of people in the community were hoping for.

Diplomacy is Not and Option is now fully released on Steam for $29.99 USD.

Story – Heavy is the Crown

A good RTS can most of the time hold itself up by the gameplay mechanics, and Diplomacy is Not an Option is definitely capable of keeping you engaged on that alone, but they also offered a bit of a justification for why you’re doing what you are doing. However, the story is mostly comical and ridiculous at times, which contrasts nicely with the gameplay. 

The gist of the story is that you are a feudal lord or some sort of minor ruler, and you are bored out of your mind. Then, the peasants of your kingdom rebel and want to attack the castle, which provides you with the perfect excuse to get up from your chair and coordinate the defense, and finally entertain yourself. 

For the Kingdom! Unless you choose a different path…

As the campaign progresses, you keep getting into these silly and often ridiculous scenarios that frame the next round of castle defense that is coming in the next round. Maybe you accidentally volunteered yourself for an expedition? so now you must go across the sea and that requires ships that you must build first, and good luck doing that while you also fight off the waves of attackers.

Additionally, the game doesn’t require you to stick to a single story line or even play one at all. You can play on the Endless mode, do challenge runs, or actually take different decisions on the campaign and have it go in a completely different way. These decisions don’t affect the gameplay and they may be just a few, with only a handful of different factions to deal with regardless, but the fact that you get this degree of narrative variety on an RTS game is definitely appreciated, and it adds a great deal of replayability.

A safe city is a thriving city

It is so, in fact, that you are actually going to need to replay the game a couple times and make different choices in order to play every single mission the game has to offer. Story-wise, you are easily looking at close to or well over 100 hours, depending on how good you are at balancing the play time and the active pauses. Honestly, each round takes me multiple hours because of how much I abuse the active pause.

Gameplay – Massive Scale Ragdolling

The Crown of the game, gameplay is where Diplomacy is Not an Option shines the brightest. It retains a lot of the basic, recognizable features of both the city builder and the RTS genres, but it also streamlined a lot of the more time-consuming parts of the processes for the sake of the main attraction: The base defense aspect. 

You’ll find that as long as you place your production buildings (mines, lumbermills, fishing huts, etc) and build enough storage for everything, the townspeople will pretty much handle everything on their own, which is great, and liberates you to focus on the most important task of all, the safety and security of the people. 

Map before the 1.0 release

The enemy will attack in waves. The first wave is deceiving, since you can dispatch it quite easily, with how small it is, but don’t let this fool you, by wave 6 you are going to be facing an a small sized army and it just keeps growing and growing. 

This is why the most important resource you have is your population instead, and should find a way to acquire and maintain an ever-growing population if you hope to stand before the attackers’ waves.

Surviving a large attack

The main grinding part of acquiring raw materials such as wood and stone is pretty streamlined on DINAO, allowing you to focus on the defense side of things and raising your army for the coming waves. For this purpose, you will have access to a bunch of different types of units to build your army and also access to a handful of different spells to help you against the attackers.

Replayability and Game Modes

Not counting the tutorial, which to some extent falls a little short but does a good enough job at explaining the very basics of the game, there are 4 game modes, which offer a great deal of replayability:

Campaign: The standard way to approach the game. It offers more than 30 scenarios across different narrative choices you’ll have to make from time to time. Depending on which decisions you make, you’ll be facing different factions with their own characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses.

Endless Mode: Here you’ll find some pre-made scenarios that you can tweak as far as difficulty and some other basic options and then you are simply supposed to survive as long as you can.

Not an impossibly large upgrade tree

Challenge Mode: This one right here is the actual better way to get your bearings on DINAO‘s mechanics. The tutorial will basically teach you what the buttons do, how to navigate the UI and very superficial things like that, but if you want to have an actual proper training experience, Challenge Mode is where you want to go. Surviving these short challenges will teach you heaps of what you need for successful runs in the other game modes.

Sandbox Mode: Similar to Endless Mode, but you get to tweak several options to customize the experience to the smallest details.

Graphics & Audio – Low Fidelity, Stable Frames

City builders and simulators tend to go either all the way in or pretty conservative on the graphics department, or go pretty hardcore. It is dated by now, but I can think of the classic Banished for a game that offers simpler graphics for better performance, and Cities Skylines 2 for the opposite, to the point were still a lot of the recent reviews on the steam page are still citing performance issues of varying degrees. 

DINAO is definitely closer to Banished, though. It goes pretty light on the graphical fidelity department, choosing to use rather simplistic models for your own soldiers and the attacking mobs, which at first can be a bit strange unless you are used to playing games with simpler graphics, but by the 15th or so wave, you are gonna have hundreds of your own soldiers and villages, and thousands upon thousands of attackers. 

Unveiling the fog of war, slowly

And even at this seemingly low fidelity graphics, my fps did start to have slight drops when handling the larger mobs, which makes sense. However, I don’t mind the graphics at all and even find them funny when they are all ragdolling around from catapult impacts or one of your magic attacks. I specially found the meteor impacts rather enjoyable to watch. 

As for the sound, when I was trying out the game a few days before the 1.0 release, one of my main gripes with the game was the lack of ambient music, which was jarring to play through, unless I was playing something on the background to get through it. 

Lying traps

However, since the game’s been properly out, they have addressed that specific gripe of mine and now the ambient music is actually a good fit. The music changes depending on whether you are being attacked or not, and clicking a building like a fishing hut or a fountain comes with its own set of sounds. And while the music or sound effects may not be something to write home about, they are perfectly good to help you immerse yourself in the runs. 

Diplomacy is Not an Option was reviewed on PC with a key provided by Sandbox Strategies via Game Press.