Your units are at my borders...

L

Loucypher

King
Joined
Jun 3, 2012
Messages
797
Seriously, of all the little nitpicks one can have with Diplomacy...this might be the stupidest of the bunch. I'm positioning my army near Persia's shores (as Denmark), and he tells me that he has spotted my army and tells me to get out or declare war. Now since I wasn't positioned properly yet and he had a pretty well-sized fleet, I decided to stay away. So I go to another continent, invade Siam, take 3 of their 4 cities, and thus we're a few 100 years further when my fleet returns...and STILL I can't invade without the "You broke your promise" penalty?

Seriously, this is so STUPID. I can see HIM amassing a huge army at MY borders but I can't tell him to either man up or leave, but they can do that to me? What's the reasoning?
 
Pretty sure it's around 50 turns or something, like the same period of DoF/denouncement.

But I'm surprised you still have the happiness to continuously DOW on other civs AND still care about the diplo hit. It seems like you could easily dominate the game without having the worry about diplomacy at this point.
 
Loucypher said:
Seriously, this is so STUPID. I can see HIM amassing a huge army at MY borders but I can't tell him to either man up or leave, but they can do that to me? What's the reasoning?
Click to expand...

While I agree it's pretty senseless on the face of it, I can see a reason why they didn't let the human player pull the same 'attack or get off the pot' BS as the AI does, with the same resulting penalty. Because the AI is so incredibly tactically stupid and controls the movement of its units like a terminally brain-damaged ADD victim, they are always trolling random units along the edge of the player's borders for no particularly good reason, even when they are not even thinking about attacking us- and it would be much too easy for us to just call them onto the carpet and force them into a war they aren't ready for or a long diplo penalty period just over their inability to move units even remotely intelligently. We are the victims of the AI's stupidity, either way- because we (mostly) know what we're doing when we're moving and positioning our units around on the map, while the AI sure the hell doesn't.
 
Smokeybear said:
While I agree it's pretty senseless on the face of it, I can see a reason why they didn't let the human player pull the same 'attack or get off the pot' BS as the AI does, with the same resulting penalty. Because the AI is so incredibly tactically stupid and controls the movement of its units like a terminally brain-damaged ADD victim, they are always trolling random units along the edge of the player's borders for no particularly good reason, even when they are not even thinking about attacking us- and it would be much too easy for us to just call them onto the carpet and force them into a war they aren't ready for or a long diplo penalty period just over their inability to move units even remotely intelligently. We are the victims of the AI's stupidity, either way- because we (mostly) know what we're doing when we're moving and positioning our units around on the map, while the AI sure the hell doesn't.
Click to expand...

Since they've obviously built a minimum number of units which will trigger the AI to warn you off of its borders, it couldn't be too difficult to apply that same standard (or a higher one) towards demands from a human player. So one or two units won't trigger the option to come available, but the AI's usual massive head-on assault force would.
 
When the AI is really intending to attack you, they do not actually position their troops carefully near your borders - they just hoard the whole army your way, and DOW you as soon as the first unit comes in contact with your borders (usually near your capital).

So setting a certain lower limit on the amount of units needed to trigger the option to make the ultimatum to the AI wouldn't work properly. The only similar option that might be implemented is to put forward such an ultimatum when you uncover intrigue of the style 'AI is marching an army towards your city X' (or some other AI uncovers it and shares with you).
 
Lakissov said:
When the AI is really intending to attack you, they do not actually position their troops carefully near your borders - they just hoard the whole army your way, and DOW you as soon as the first unit comes in contact with your borders (usually near your capital).
Click to expand...

My experience has been the opposite. I've sat there and watched the AI march an invading army up to my borders, skirt around an outlying city in order to surround a more developed one, wait for other units to get to the front, etc. The closest I've ever seen to an AI DoWing with only one or two units is when some other factor causes them to DoW (like when two or more DoW at once) and they just happened to have those one or two units wandering around near my borders.
 
Smokeybear said:
While I agree it's pretty senseless on the face of it, I can see a reason why they didn't let the human player pull the same 'attack or get off the pot' BS as the AI does, with the same resulting penalty. Because the AI is so incredibly tactically stupid and controls the movement of its units like a terminally brain-damaged ADD victim, they are always trolling random units along the edge of the player's borders for no particularly good reason, even when they are not even thinking about attacking us- and it would be much too easy for us to just call them onto the carpet and force them into a war they aren't ready for or a long diplo penalty period just over their inability to move units even remotely intelligently. We are the victims of the AI's stupidity, either way- because we (mostly) know what we're doing when we're moving and positioning our units around on the map, while the AI sure the hell doesn't.
Click to expand...

This is the best explanation/phrasing I've seen in a while on this. Even if the human players could only try a "Your units are near my borders" attempt when the AI has 3 or 4 units on a border, it still would be a mess for the exact reason Smokeybear is giving you: you'd be able to exploit weak AI by constantly pulling them into diplo hits or unwanted wars, all because of those wandering units.

Moreover, the AI isn't sophisticated enough to determine if a diplo hit is worth it to attack you, so even with better coding, I could still see the AI being exploitable by a human player using the "Your units are near my borders" diplomacy button to make the AI promise not to attack and end up either not attacking when they should have just gone ahead and taken the diplo hit, or attacking when the diplo hit won't be offset by any real military gain.
 
And of course, even though the AI claims to see units near your borders and can give you that ultimatum, I don't know how well they can actually prepare for an attack that they have 'seen' coming. The AI's advantage comes in the form of giving you a diplo penalty for sneak-attacking, where the human advantage comes from seeing the AI's troops massing and being able to respond appropriately.
 
This is one reason why England's UA, the Great Lighthouse, and the commerce +1 movement bonus are so underrated. The AI doesn't appear to incorporate these movement bonuses when it's calculating how close you are to its borders. With one or two of the above three bonuses, you can easily prepare a massive sneak attack by waiting far enough away to be out of "normal" range that causes the AI to call you out but well within your extended range.
 
Harv72b said:
My experience has been the opposite. I've sat there and watched the AI march an invading army up to my borders, skirt around an outlying city in order to surround a more developed one, wait for other units to get to the front, etc. The closest I've ever seen to an AI DoWing with only one or two units is when some other factor causes them to DoW (like when two or more DoW at once) and they just happened to have those one or two units wandering around near my borders.
Click to expand...

I find they usually do this dance when you have a decent army size. If you have a scout but their army is way bigger, and I mean humongous, than yours, then they don't really care if your scout could see them coming. In fact most of the time they'd just kill your scout/warrior/archer in one shot with all those units. Or when you obviously have like 3-4 archers they can see within your borders ready to bombard them.
 
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