Should there be more benefits to warmongering?

Matthew. said:

War-mongering itself doesn't need a buff. The AI is terrible as is when it comes to the war-side of this game. And when you take one of its core cities, such as the capital, it generally is out of the game for good unless they were a massive runaway to begin with.

In other words, other than map control or role-playing reasons, war-mongering is more about tearing down your opponent's empires than building up your own.

I do think the war-monger penalty system needs a complete overhaul.

1. You shouldn't get any diplo hit for simply declaring war unless you have a declaration of friendship. Struggles happen all the time world-wide and they are typically not a world-wide concern until cities/land is actually taken. Not to mention if you declare war on a common foe, the Civ you are attempting to help will often label you as war-monger. You should have the freedom to help fight battles with your own allies--if no cities are taken, you shouldn't get penalized world-wide.

2. You shouldn't get any diplo hit for liberating a city other than from the one you are liberating it from. It is illogical that you can liberate 3 CS's from Genghis Khan and you end up as the war-monger.

3. war-monger penalty shouldn't be a simple yes and no scale. It should be based on something like city size. For example, you declare war and take a puny 3 pop. city in the middle of no where. Whatever. It shouldn't give the same penalty as taking another Civ's core city.

4. You should, however, get diplo hits if the enemy is attempting to sign peace and you keep refusing. To counter players from being at perma-war farming a Civ for exp and keeping it drained of military without penalty.

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I agree. I find warmonger to be beneficial enough as it is, but the warmonger penalty is overkill. If I was constantly declaring war on other AIs and completely conquering them, I can understand getting a diplo hit from the rest of the civilizations, but it makes no sense to me that taking a city or two from an AI who declared war on me makes me the warmonger to every other player in the game. Even other civilizations who dislike the one i am at war with will often penalize me.

Domination victories have become more difficult than other types of victory due to the fact that you can't find any AIs to trade with you for something that you did thousands of years ago. It's not fun in the gameplay sense or realistic in the real world sense.

Yeah, the huge deal is that you just can't make it to Education by turn 120 if you do any puppeting at all or expand past 4 cities on a Standard map. Trade routes help small cities get bigger, but much, much more helpful is getting Great Scientists earlier. Really, the game was already pointed in that direction anyway before. Investing in CB's was worse early than investing in Libraries because of how big the snowball effect was of getting techs like Education 10 to 20 turns earlier. The only reason to build military on Science victories was to defend yourself, and the best times were always done with 4 or so cities. Now things have been tilted much further in the direction that they were already leaning.

And whether people think it's realistic or not in a historical sense, this is totally unintuitive for a strategy game. You have to fight your opponents tooth and nail to get more territory, and now you get punished for overcoming that challenge. Want to win? Ignore everything that happens in the game beyond founding your first 3 cities, be friends with everybody, trade with everybody, and spam end turn. The game punishes you for being aware of game developments and taking on challenges, while it rewards you for playing passive, granting every AI's request, and ignoring what they're doing. It just doesn't feel like a game anymore as much as it just feels like an experience that development designed for you.

You can be very militaristic and win by domination without being a giant sprawling empire! Just raze all the cities you conquer and give all the capitals to a friendly civ, and leave them for last. I don't get why people think that to play militaristic you have to go wide. I won domination as Portugal, I've only had 3 cities throughout the entire game.

The only thing they need to add in is the ability to raze capitals, or turn former capitals into city-states allied to you. It would give another civ the possibility of liberating it, while not having it bloating up your empire. If liberated, the liberator can turn the city-state back to a full civ.

I agree with much that was said in this thread.

Warmongering doesn't fit with BNW new features : trade routes (though you can make internal trade routes, so that's not the worse problem) but first and foremost diplomacy.

When they said they removed the diplomatic hit for taking the last city, I thought they had found a cleverer system to calculate warmonger score.

But...
Look at Putmalk's explanation :
http://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1i1q7l/keeping_one_ai_city_alive_no_longer_spares_you/

To sum it up, three parameters determine how much warmongering points you get after taking a city. The size of the map, the size of your opponent before the conquest and the total number of cities in the game.
Your warmonger score increase more when you take a city on a smaller map, from a small opponent with few cities and when the total amount of cities in game is low.

Which means that early warmongering really cripples your diplomacy.

Your warmongering score actually decreases but very slowly. It takes 50 turns for the AI to forget about a declaration of war (that's OK) but...
If you wipe out a three cities wide civilization early in the game, on a standard map, your "warmongering gauge" will take 500 turns to get back to 0 !

As a consequence, civilizations who have early aggressive units have a pretty much linear future : everybody will hate them (at least on their home continent), war will go on, and if they try to counter attack after a lot of people DoW'ed them, then the diplo hit will get even worse.

That's a shame.

Making the warmongering score decrease faster would be a good start. It would allow early warmongers to breath and sit on their conquests. But on the other hand, late game conquests, who already bring few warmongering points, would not harm enough your reputation.

Because I like the intention of the developers : making so that AI league against a berserk scourge. But I think it's poorly implemented.


My suggestion : make warmongering gains dependent of both the size of the city conquered, and of the era (the mean era of the game, the way it is calculated for the World Congress).

First, taking a little town, like a new colony, is not the same thing as slaughtering half the population of a metropolis. When you conquer a small city, you simply affirm your right to rule on an area which is sparsely populated, and over which the owner has few right. Colonial wars don't make warmongers.

Then, it's obviously ridiculous that AI behave as 21st century rulers in the ancient game, but tolerate large conquests in the atomic era !
In ancient times, conquests were common. That's it.

Note that these two proposal combine together : in the early game, cities are smaller, so they would give you also less warmongering points.

I agree that there should be a multiplier as the game goes on and it really shouldn't kick up too high until modern times. Actually, it shouldn't really affect anyone who is outside of your immediate area until World Congress is created, when the warmonger penalty should then be global.

I shouldn't be getting denounced by a country half way across the world during the Medieval era. Those people probably have little idea or care what's happening across the world.

Wow, thanks for the link. Didn't realize the formula was changed in BNW (been super busy last couple of months, difficult to keep up with all the changes).

I don't think that warmongers need more benefits, but I do agree that the penalty to diplo is too harsh right now.

Its understandable to hate some civ that conquers another, but that penalty should probably go away after 1000 years.

Just fyi some of the mechanics have changed.

1. A civ that is at war with another civ with you with not give you a warmonger penalty.
2. If they AI doesn't know either of the civs, they won't know about the war.
3. The penalty is based off of taking cities, not off of war declarations.
4. The penalty appears right away, but seems to affect some civs more than others ( they tolerate warmongers is now shown)

These probably address some people's issues.

Many of the points here should really be implemented or included in a mod. I can see how early war prevention might limit runaways but it also eliminates early "unification" of regions. Which was fun for the game and historical.

I was dow'd by two civs at once, lost and retook my cap, took one city by force and another in peace deal, now I'm the warmonger. Not to rail on civ5 but much of the gameplay is how to limit negative effects rather than creating positive ones.

1,2, and 4 were already in G&K. Well, the individual flavor for 4 was in, but it wasn't shown.

Perhaps they could add a mechanic to help reduce war-monger hate more quickly? For example, people get annoyed by the US's war-mongering, but the US spends billions each year in investing in other countries, so they aren't seen as completely evil (I add this only as an example, please don't de-rail thread commenting on US's diplomacy).

Example: Maybe you could pay gold to reduce the war-monger penalty much quicker.

Matthew. said:

? For example, people get annoyed by the US's war-mongering, but the US spends billions each year in investing in other countries, so they aren't seen as completely evil (I add this only as an example, please don't de-rail thread commenting on US's diplomacy).

Example: Maybe you could pay gold to reduce the war-monger penalty much quicker.

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Maybe we'll win a diplo victory after everyone we invested in proceeds to ignore everything the country has done and gives us a free pass to the UN chair.

Good info here. Since the DOWing penalty goes away with time, it would seem to me that starting wars just to steal workers (or settlers) and kill missionaries are pretty strong options now. Did I miss something or is that right?

chazzycat said:

Good info here. Since the DOWing penalty goes away with time, it would seem to me that starting wars just to steal workers (or settlers) and kill missionaries are pretty strong options now. Did I miss something or is that right?

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That is essentially correct. There is no good reason not to steal workers.
However that is not the problem. The ultimate purpose of warmongering is to gain benefits through conquering cities, however the new unhappiness and money system makes it so only very few cities are actually worth taking, meaning that it'll be substantially harder to just take a continent from the get go and still be powerful in the late game. Without taking bases, waging war itself is a lot harder since you can't just retreat to a city you conquered and heal up.
Stealing a worker or killing a missionary isn't warmongering.

Matthew. said:

4. You should, however, get diplo hits if the enemy is attempting to sign peace and you keep refusing. To counter players from being at perma-war farming a Civ for exp and keeping it drained of military without penalty.

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That should only hit if the Civ was offering to surrender. I happened to me very often (in G&K), that someone attacked me (sometimes multiple times), lost all or the majority of their attacking units without or with less casualities on my site and then made a peace offer that was basically: "Oke, Dude, we attacked you twice and lost our army, now give us all your cities and everything else you own." I was really wishing for a "Laugh-into-face"-Button when that happened.

I just declared war on Egypt, the most liked civ, leader of world congress, science leader, second 3rd highest military, friend of all nations, and owner of the most city-states. No one denounced me as I took 7 of his 18 cities.

In fact, i was told, "me and egypt go back long ways" maybe 3 times. How?

For one, I made friends with everyone too being the second most liked civ. I jumped on the denounce band wagon to make new friends. Then the enemies of Egypt, i friended right before war. I denounced Egypt then attacked. 3 turns later, all the enemies of egypt denounced him. Soon everyone was like....maybe Egypt had it coming.


Then some former allies of Egypt starting defecting when I started curb stomping him. God i love diplomacy. This political coo took 2 eras to do. I was extremely patient to get all the allies on the map to turn on Egypt. Without it, i could have been backstabbed a bunch and would have had no way to defend.

The Man Wood said:

Also discovered that you become a "warmonger" a lot quicker in BNW. I declared one war and all of a sudden I was the scourge of the world. It seems like the world has become a very sensitive place.

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Yes, but it doesn't colour their judgements as harshly and the tooltip now tells you if the Civ likes/tolerates or dislikes your warmongering. Maria of Portugal considered me a warmonger for DoWing on a CS to take a free worker and she disliked it, but still friended me a few turns later.

Yes, late warmongering is efficient. But many people complain about early warmongering.