Diplomacy still seems broken?

anytime brohammad

If you take any Cities, you may be considered a warmonger. Makes at least some sense, I think.

Dogmouth said:

What difficulty do you play? In Emperor and Immortal, I cannot maintain the peace unless I have an isolated start. The AI is just too bloodthirsty, and the rewards for war are too high to give up.

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I've found GK to be more peaceful than ciV, mostly playing Emperor. I keep having these lovefest starts where everyone wants to DoF me.

wobuffet said:

If you take any Cities, you may be considered a warmonger. Makes at least some sense, I think.

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I dunno, maybe I'm taking the term literally but to me 'warmonger' means someone who relishes in war. Someone who is *continually* agressive and violent.

If a civ declares war and you capture one or two cities I'd consider those reparations (they had it coming). Otherwsie every country who has ever been in a war and gained territory would be considered a warmonger which is patently false.

Sure context changes over time and nowadays even having a military presence in a nation is highly contentious. But in the middle ages and beyond gaining territory through war was commonplace. After all even civ calls its players 'Empires' and I'm not sure there are any Empires founded which didn't expand through war-like means.

If you don't want to be a warmonger then don't take any cities by force...fairly simple. "But an AI wanted me to go to war with them!?!?!" Ya, go to war to clear out some units, not take 2-3 cities along the way. The AI doesn't like it when you have more cities than them, friend or not. It makes for a more challenging game.

IMO the diplo works. And this is coming from someone who got DOW on in the last GotM 40 by the whole world on the same turn. I expanded too fast and took a city by force, so I deserved it. But after 70 turns of world vs me, the world made peace and half became good friends. Why did this happen? Because the AI caught up to my # of cities and also respected my above average military #s.

IMO if you think the diplo is broken, then you don't know how to play the game that the devs made for us.

The best way to repair relations with a civ you have utterly trounced?

Give back their cities. I once did it to Augustus, when he had just entered Modern and then declared war on me for "settling too close to him". He became a life-long friend afterwards, even voted for me at the UN (also helped that I saved his civilization from becoming a Korean puppet).

Gamewizard said:

If you don't want to be a warmonger then don't take any cities by force...fairly simple. "But an AI wanted me to go to war with them!?!?!" Ya, go to war to clear out some units, not take 2-3 cities along the way. The AI doesn't like it when you have more cities than them, friend or not. It makes for a more challenging game.

IMO the diplo works. And this is coming from someone who got DOW on in the last GotM 40 by the whole world on the same turn. I expanded too fast and took a city by force, so I deserved it. But after 70 turns of world vs me, the world made peace and half became good friends. Why did this happen? Because the AI caught up to my # of cities and also respected my above average military #s.

IMO if you think the diplo is broken, then you don't know how to play the game that the devs made for us.

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Wow, I think you spat your dummy out there. There seem to be others on this forum who have similar views so just take a breath and count to 10.

I think the general consensus is that a bit more feedback would make for a more fun game. A few more notifications or diplo points whatever could be useful to make the game appear less jarring in certain circumstances.

What bugs me most is the frequent AI's idea of declaring war, then not being successful trying to conquer one of my cities and the following development into a hot "cold war", where war is still the state of politics, but nearly no units are ever crossing borders.

If the AI considers itself strong enough, it will offer peace every twenty or thirty turns with ridiculous conditions (all my money, several cities and all that stuff). Only solution is to conquer one of the AI's cities.

I had a 250 turn war in a recent game (Emperor), i did not want to end it because i did not need to. Ended in an ugly nuclear war. And this is another point: There should be severe consequences for using nuclear weapons, especially the first strike, like a massive drop in all diplomatic relations (which is not taking place as far as i noticed). This goes along with the real warmongering by AI's which seems not to be penalised as well (as mentioned before).

A bit of improvement is still needed, although it got a lot better in G&K:

Juanholio said:

Wow, I think you spat your dummy out there. There seem to be others on this forum who have similar views so just take a breath and count to 10.

I think the general consensus is that a bit more feedback would make for a more fun game. A few more notifications or diplo points whatever could be useful to make the game appear less jarring in certain circumstances.

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+1 absolutely correct, IMHO. The game should do a better job of showing us the diplo modifiers we have. Particularly when you have a DoF or are otherwise friendly with an AI, the game hides most of the negative modifiers you may still be racking up with them.

Then out of the blue, you get denounced by a friend. It sucks because you have no idea that you need to change your behavior.

Yeah a little more transparency regarding diplomatic modifiers would be great.

Gamewizard said:

If you don't want to be a warmonger then don't take any cities by force...fairly simple. "But an AI wanted me to go to war with them!?!?!" Ya, go to war to clear out some units, not take 2-3 cities along the way. The AI doesn't like it when you have more cities than them, friend or not. It makes for a more challenging game.

IMO the diplo works. And this is coming from someone who got DOW on in the last GotM 40 by the whole world on the same turn. I expanded too fast and took a city by force, so I deserved it. But after 70 turns of world vs me, the world made peace and half became good friends. Why did this happen? Because the AI caught up to my # of cities and also respected my above average military #s.

IMO if you think the diplo is broken, then you don't know how to play the game that the devs made for us.

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Because you know, taking one city when you're playing on a huge map with probably dozens of cities all over the place is totally a good reason for the entire world to declare war on you. It doesn't make for a more challenging game; it makes for arbitrary diplomacy where you're far more likely to be punished than rewarded and the second you're punished, you feel like you have to kill all your neighbors. One city shouldn't result in a Dwarf Fortress-esque tantrum spiral that destroys the entire world.

I think there should be severe consequences for waging a war for an extended X period of time, i remember an over 200 turn game where i was in war with China since turn 60-70. Are you kidding me? A war which lasts from the classical age almost to the modern era is pretty silly. The funniest thing was that i needed CS's for diplo vc, and guess who had the most of them, my warmongerer neighbour .Civ 3 had war weariness, what happened to that? It's a bit more logical for a populace to get tired of aggression than indefinitely feud with an adversary for centuries.

None of us could really make any military progress, i went for a peaceful vc, and didn't build military units that much, especially in the beginning because she was friendly and didn't seem to be pissed. The city she attacked was on an hill and could be attacked only from one tile from her territory, unless she went into water to access my territory(it was an archipelago map). Eventually the AI cities grew so big and were so close to each other that sending units there was a royal pain in the butt, especially because of the narrow passages and proximity of ranged attacks, plus she had an allied CS near her border cities aswell. I annihilated every single unit she sent to my border city(must've been over 10 or 15 units, possibly more). She pretty much did the same with my units - a total stalemate -, but not even once did i get a reasonable peace offer which wouldn't bankrupt me, just ludicrous.

Dogmouth said:

What difficulty do you play? In Emperor and Immortal, I cannot maintain the peace unless I have an isolated start. The AI is just too bloodthirsty, and the rewards for war are too high to give up.

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We should turn this thread into a philosophical debate. After all, aren't we all like the AI once in a while? We as humans can sometimes be irrational, illogical, sporadic, schizophrenic, sociopathic, bloodthirsty, or any number of things. But it is the balance of these things that make us human. The AI just does it all at the same time.

May all of your turn timers be healthy and long, my brothers.

Sonereal said:

Because you know, taking one city when you're playing on a huge map with probably dozens of cities all over the place is totally a good reason for the entire world to declare war on you.

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If that's something that happens, it's so far waaaaaaaay out on periphery of the bell curve of things that it doesn't really work as an example/basis. At least in my experience, it's never happened or come close to happening. Maybe you've fallen into a single-cause fallacy scenario.

To OP: two main things- you went to war at their behest, thinking you were doing them some favor, and helping your friendship with them. Going to war would have been ok, if you just did nothing and nonchalantly stayed in your own borders. That would have given you the 'we fought against the same enemies' bonus with them. But as soon as you take cities and do serious damage to another civ, even your 'friends' will see you as a warmonger, even if they were the ones who asked you to jump into the fight. Yes, that part is broken, in my opinion. The game should have better accountability for everyone's actions, so responsibility is factored in. A civ that asks you to attack somone else, should NEVER think less of you for doing so, no matter what. But the diplo still has some sucky parts, and that's one of them.

The other thing, is that you got in the lead. If you want to stay peaceful and have lots of friends and trading partners who don't hate your guts and wish you dead, then don't get a comfortable lead (or any lead, for that matter). And if you do, then expect them to start disliking you and denouncing you, no matter how hard you try to be friendly. The game is coded to make the leader a source of envy and hate, just the way it is.

jannimanni said:

If the AI considers itself strong enough, it will offer peace every twenty or thirty turns with ridiculous conditions (all my money, several cities and all that stuff). Only solution is to conquer one of the AI's cities.

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The AI seems to always over-estimate its military strength versus the player. Maybe Firaxis thought this would make the game more challenging. The military adviser seems to use the same algorithm. Recent example. I knock out half a dozen of Darius's units for the loss of one of mine and take one of his cities. My chief of staff then informs me the war isn't going well and I should try to end it!

jannimanni said:

I had a 250 turn war in a recent game (Emperor), i did not want to end it because i did not need to. Ended in an ugly nuclear war. And this is another point: There should be severe consequences for using nuclear weapons, especially the first strike, like a massive drop in all diplomatic relations (which is not taking place as far as i noticed). This goes along with the real warmongering by AI's which seems not to be penalised as well (as mentioned before).

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I don't think that would be realistic. The only country to launch a first strike so far didn't suffer severe consequences. On the contrary, it made one state surrender and another hostile state pull its head in.

Smokeybear said:

To OP: two main things- you went to war at their behest, thinking you were doing them some favor, and helping your friendship with them. Going to war would have been ok, if you just did nothing and nonchalantly stayed in your own borders. That would have given you the 'we fought against the same enemies' bonus with them. But as soon as you take cities and do serious damage to another civ, even your 'friends' will see you as a warmonger, even if they were the ones who asked you to jump into the fight.

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That's a good point.

I'd like to see some sort of 'justified war' (since war is commonplace in history and civ emulates history to some degree) and there are times where war is an appropriate reaction to an adversarial civ. For example if a civ steals your land with a GG and then forces its religion on you (yes I know about inquisitors but sometimes you don't have enough faith to buy them and spread your own). You should be able to retaliate (and that being respected by your allies). Also in my experience unless you weaken your enemy they'll just keep on behaving that way with no penalty. I can have a small number of perfectly capable (technically advanced or well placed) units but because the algorithm calucates me weaker the AI will continually attack.

The issue for me is that in civ if a hostile civ 'sees' you as weak they will DoW and they will capture your cities if they can. They'll do it to other civs but, to my knowledge, won't be considered a warmonger. I'm not saying that sort of behaviour shouldn't warrant it - I'm saying there should be some sort of diplomatic parity. I actually miss the old 'diplomatic wheel.' It wouldn't work, though, because everyone would be considered a warmonger in every game. It just seems a bit ridiculous to me and could do with refining. I'm not against the mechanic as a whole.

Again this comes back to a discussion (for another thread) of what the AIs intentions are in the whole game. Are they actually trying to win or are they there just to impede the human player? In all the games I've played this notion comes accross very inconsistently.

qemist said:

I don't think that would be realistic. The only country to launch a first strike so far didn't suffer severe consequences. On the contrary, it made one state surrender and another hostile state pull its head in.

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That was a pretty unique situation, specific to that time. Nobody even knew anything about nuclear weapons at that time and age, we were the all-powerful head of the winning alliance, ending a long and horribly bloody world war that everyone was exhausted from by nuking a universally-hated and suicidally-determined enemy.

Today? Entirely different story. Whomever uses a nuke in this more... 'enlightened?' age... would really catch hell.

Smokeybear said:

Today? Entirely different story. Whomever uses a nuke in this more... 'enlightened?' age... would really catch hell.

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I'm not sure that's true, and if it were, I don't think the diplomacy system should be based on an "enlightened age" that would be thE last ten minutes of human history, if recorded history were compressed down to a day.

The reason why diplomacy is broken is because of the warmonger penalty its a great idea however in game it doesn't work..

FIraxis promised to fix it in the expansion but instead they made it worse!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Its been over a year and I still don't see any improvements at the warmonger penalty.;

I thinx gods and king is a great game I only feel a little bit ripped off because they promised to change it in one of their intervieuws

The warmonger penalty doesn't happen now with civs you're really close to, and it deteriorates if I recall correctly. So that's two good changes. Not where it should be, but it's not as if it went entirely unaddressed as you say it did.