Perhaps this can shead some lights on all the anti-warmonger feelings out there

Bulldog Bats said:

I just started playing V - years ago played II and III. The whole game mechanic has changed. It used to be about building an empire/world power - expanding and swallowing up lesser civs, and trying to become the strongest kid on the block.

Now it is about forming a little country, and then making nice with all the others. Seems like you used to try to be like the Roman Empire, now you try to be part of the EU.

I also think it is really silly that if you take a city in a war, no matter the reason for the war or who started it, you get condemmed. But go to war and take cities as part of the peace agreement - a lot less hatred. I don't get the difference.

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I agree, I also believe that micromanaging corruption was much more interesting than the world congress system.

Bring back the corruption mini game!

Bulldog Bats said:

The fact is, you have two choices - go the 4 city model and trade with the world, or be a "warmonger", and go alone. That ain't realistic, and the gameplay is stilted.

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That's a rather limited view... I've played several BNW games since the fall patch and in none of them was I limited to those two choices. I tend to have an empire of 15-30 cities (some conquered and some rebuilt near the ruins of cities I razed) and usually have at least 1-2 friendly empires (a numerous not-so-friendly but not outright hostile ones). After a certain point (usually mid to late Medieval) even though several AI list Guarded, none DoW me because my military strength is 3-4x the next contender.

I use wars to grab choice cities (or just their locations, leaving the former a smoldering ruin), to impede my opposition by ravaging their empire a bit, to gain a monopoly on specific luxuries or just to break up the tedium of pure empire management with a little action.

Despite all my warmongering (and I'm quite the warmonger), I've never had to "go it alone". My empire's strong economy and scientific breakthroughs make the AI WANT to keep trading with me, especially once I have them addicted to my surplus luxuries.

So, if your only choices appear to be tall/peaceful or lonely warmonger, I don't think it's the game mechanics as much as your lack of understanding or total disregard for them.

EK834 said:

It's not a workaround, it's part of the redesign to make warmongering more strategic in the game.

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The mere fact that AI thinks that it is good idea to give its own cities, and make you not get warmongering penalties for them, in order to get peace, makes this exploit.

Its a double bonus. Both non-devastated city plus no penalty to conqueror. Isn't it bit too much?

The whole idea of creating zombie civilizations, where you take out all units and wait for AI to give you peace treaty for cities, seems silly in Civlization universe.

It's exactly exploit. Doing something completely unintuitive to game the badly designed system.

Not to say that there is no strategy involved. Sure there is. As is for all civ exploits, until they get nerfed in some patch for being too good.

player1 fanatic said:

The mere fact that AI thinks that it is good idea to give its own cities, and make you not get warmongering penalties for them, in order to get peace, makes this exploit.

Its a double bonus. Both non-devastated city plus no penalty to conqueror. Isn't it bit too much?

The whole idea of creating zombie civilizations, where you take out all units and wait for AI to give you peace treaty for cities, seems silly in Civlization universe.

It's exactly exploit. Doing something completely unintuitive to game the badly designed system.

Not to say that there is no strategy involved. Sure there is. As is for all civ exploits, until they get nerfed in some patch for being too good.

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If there were a lower penalty for actually taking cities and other factors were considered, like the total amount of damage done to the enemy in their own land, plus extra for capturing civilians and pillaging tiles, regardless of who declared war, that would fit with the "moralistic" description the OP of this thread gave, and perhaps be more like the "realism" some people would like to see...after all, pillaging tiles reflects wrecking infrastructure, stealing crops, killing noncombatants and a lot of the terrible things that happen in real-world wars. It also would probably mean you'd get a worse penalty for most in-game wars than people are getting right now.

However, the "warmonger threat" is just a means, simplified for the AI, to represent the evaluation every player should be doing, which is to be cautious when dealing with an opponent who's growing by conquest.

Again, another flaw.

Let's say you live in a city involved in an international war. You are going to get conquered. According to the game, as a citizen, you would rather that the winning nation burn everything to the ground and kill everyone, and start their own country, rather than working with the people there to make them feel like a person, and part of the new country. Either way it is a war of conquest.

Sounds like you would prefer to be conquered by the Nazis than the Romans. Again, makes no sense. War does suck, but it happens. Rome at least made the conquered part of their empire - just as legitimate as those in Rome. It is one of the reasons they got so big and lasted so long. If they had not expanded beyond what they could control, they would have lasted even longer.

Bulldog Bats said:

Let's say you live in a city involved in an international war. You are going to get conquered. According to the game, as a citizen, you would rather that the winning nation burn everything to the ground and kill everyone, and start their own country, rather than working with the people there to make them feel like a person, and part of the new country. Either way it is a war of conquest.

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Are you talking about the happiness hit or the warmonger penalty here?

Increasing happiness by burning and starving people does seem a bit...counterintuitive. But Happiness is a game-balancing mechanic, so

Many players, in my opinion, are defending the game, and saying it is realistic. My points are this:

1. The penalty for engaging in war is far too strict. You get hit regardless of why you got into a war. If you take a city, even if the other person started the war, or you are fighting for what was taken from you, you are a warmonger.

2. The fact that if you raze and rebuilt, or take a city as part of a peace treaty, you get less of a penalty is unrealistic, unfair, and counter-intutitive.

Nations have gone to war over land since the dawn of time (read the Bible lately?). Very few nations become pariahs for that, like what happens in the game. Heck, the US and USSR were engaged in regular, and even trade, even during the Cold War.

Bulldog Bats said:

Many players, in my opinion, are defending the game, and saying it is realistic. My points are this:

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The AI's behavior in this area is a decent approximation of how a player playing a game to win might act. It's not a 100% perfect representation of actual leaders of actual nations, for the twin purposes that doing so would be impossible and not a very good idea even if it were possible. Anyone saying it's "realistic" is referring to the former and not the latter.

Bulldog Bats said:

1. The penalty for engaging in war is far too strict. You get hit regardless of why you got into a war. If you take a city, even if the other person started the war, or you are fighting for what was taken from you, you are a warmonger.

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If you take a city, you've just taken a city, representing a pretty big jump in the relative resources of both you and the civ you took it from. Regardless of whether you started the war or whether you read a forum thread about how to manipulate the AI's algorithms into starting the war with it, it's now that much less in the interest of the other players in the game to help you build up a military you may want to use against them.

There is not a warmonger penalty for taking a city back that has been taken from you (though that may be a fairly recent addition).

Bulldog Bats said:

2. The fact that if you raze and rebuilt, or take a city as part of a peace treaty, you get less of a penalty is unrealistic, unfair, and counter-intutitive.

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You're definitely confusing two types of penalties here.
Warmonger diplomacy penalty: you get a far worse penalty for razing the city than for keeping it.
Happiness: you might eventually net more happiness after razing the city and building it back up to its pre-razing population, but the time suck of doing that is far worse than just annexing and building a Courthouse, which you should be doing if you actually want a city there.

Bulldog Bats said:

Nations have gone to war over land since the dawn of time (read the Bible lately?). Very few nations become pariahs for that, like what happens in the game. Heck, the US and USSR were engaged in regular, and even trade, even during the Cold War.

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Diplomatic relations (apart from a state of actual war) have no bearing on trade routes. Never did.

player1 fanatic said:

Not to say that there is no strategy involved. Sure there is. As is for all civ exploits, until they get nerfed in some patch for being too good.

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The tactic was documented before the patch, and yet they haven't touched it when they revised the warmongering penalties. It seems far more an intentional design than something they failed to take into account in the new philosophy of the game regarding wars and conquest.

You can't repeat that tactic too often without getting into diplomatic trouble (the city taking doesn't get you warmongering points, but the DoW itself still does and enough to give you modifiers if you have enough civs with a high hate factor for warmongers in your game, and it takes 50 turns for each one to completely fade away). It can be mitigated if the Civ you attack is the friendless black sheep, but then so is pure conquest against him as it's easy in both cases to bring with you war allies and halve all the penalties.

But if you try to exploit this by attacking a neighbor, get a city, then attack another and get a city etc. than rinse and repeat you will still get in much the same diplo problems taking cities by force gets you in, unless you have a lot of very good friends or are so strong the warmonger-haters don't dare even to denounce you.. If you rise your amount to 700-750 (for three consecutive wars over 25 turns, say), it's higher than the warmonger amount for taking a city when a standard map is half settled (around 400 points), and beside acquiring big cities that way also pisses off many AI as you are expanding too fast to their taste. Even puppeting a city as Venice gets you that modifier. I got the "our advisors are worried about your expansion" followed by a denouncement for buying a big CS a few times from the less friendly AIs while playing as Venice, or for taking big cities in peace deals). Another factor that balances out that tactic is that taking a city this way doubles the unhappiness that hit you compared to capturing it, since the population isn't halved. That often stops you from exploiting it, precisely because you can't afford to expand this way too much or very fast. Over the course of a game or a long period of it, you can acquire slowly most of the land of a rival, that's true enough. But it's not an exploit, it's a valid expansion strategy, one that mimicks the expansion of several empires or nations, incl. the Austrian one, and Venice's, and for that matter France's slow territorial expansion.

Diplo-wise It takes longer to get in trouble that way, true, but you also acquire cities much slower than if you launched a campaign to take 2-3 or more in one war... So it's balanced. The only thing that isn't balanced in this and that should be changed is that if you raze the city you're given you escape the warmonger penalty. That isn't right. It's no longer taking control of a city peacefully in a diplomatic exchange following a war, it's still a massacre and destruction. There should be razing a small penalty added to the present warmongering one, and if you do it after getting a city in a peace deal, you should then receive the full warmongering penalty just as if you took the city by force + the modifier for the massacre of the population. It would be logical to even add a hit for backstabbing, since you accepted a city peacefully than massacred it.

Calling this "an exploit" is a bit for me like saying that when the Papal, French or Imperial forces were moving armies in Italy, fought a big battle or two, took fortresses, layed siege to a few cities in order to force Milan or Venice to sign 5-6 cities and their lands away in a peace treaty it wasn't the right way to fight a war or seek to expand your territority, and it wasn't better to fight this way than sacking cities and killing its population. Countless time in history nations have signed away cities and territory to stop a foe from hammering them, to prevent a massacre of the population, or because they had run out of money for mercenaries or to pay their forces, or because they were getting so weakened they needed the peace to rebuild or another foe my exploit their weakness and attack them (eg: Venice signing cities away because they couldn't afford the costly war with the Pope and preparing for an eventual Ottoman attack on their colonies at the same time. Typically this leads to other wars to regain the territories signed away, or to claims they were unjustly gained and still rightfully yours). Getting cities in treaties is pretty much the way territories kept switching hands for much of European history.

(A mechanics I wouldn't mind added is that in peace deals you might offer control of cities for "x turns" - getting the science, production, luxuries etc. for those turns, but not permanently). That was also done quite often historically... and most often not honored when time came. The AI could come tell you "You promised to give us back City X after 30 turns. It is time", with the choices : "Of course, we will honor our word" and "If you want it, come and get it".)

You'll notice that when the AI perceives itself weak and has too many enemies (e.g. it's been chain denounced) or you have war allies it doesn't take much for it to give you a city for peace, while if the AI doesn't fear you and his other enemies enough, it won't accept, or force you to wage war long and hard before it gives up, sometimes you even need to take a city to get another in the treaty. It's all quite logical. It doesn't look like a flawed mechanics to me, I'm pretty sure it's in the game by design. I'm not sure what convinces you so much it's a loophole and exploit. They haven't removed war and conquest from the game, they just made it more strategic so that you can't focus mostly on units, go and steam roll everything while having Consulates for happiness, and still be able to retain decent alliances with other Civs in between the waves of conquests, which definitely was an exploit of the AI's lack of perception of the threat such players represented - now that loophole is closed as the AI spots this strategy early, and after not very long will try to stop you. It's nothing new, that thinking was introduced when they stopped making domination be about conquering everything, BNW just took another step in that direction, and I'm quite sure it's not to "punish" those who still played the game as strictly a war game (it's more like they didn't let that play style be a priority to them, nor did they let its crippling get in the way of making the game more complex and better for those who play it more in the various ways they designed the game to be played).

Bulldog Bats said:

1. The penalty for engaging in war is far too strict. You get hit regardless of why you got into a war. If you take a city, even if the other person started the war, or you are fighting for what was taken from you, you are a warmonger.

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If you are the founder of a city, you don't get a warmonger penalty for re taking it. If you get DoWed and take back a city perhaps getting another in the treaty as war compensation, there's no penalty at all. If you do DoW and retake a city, you only get the penalty for the DoW.

2. The fact that if you raze and rebuilt, or take a city as part of a peace treaty, you get less of a penalty is unrealistic, unfair, and counter-intutitive.

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Only partially true. Where I agree it's unfair is if you get a city in a treaty then raze it. You should get the full warmonger penalty then, as whether you kill the population by taking the city or slaughtering it afteward it's the same. It's something they overlooked and it should be changed as it's illogical. There is an extra warmongering penalty just for razing itself and you should escape the warmongering penalties at all only if you keep or sell the gifted/relinquished city.

As for getting cities in treaties, I totally disagree. It's a trade deal in the end - the AI gives you a city to stop you, much like it would give you 25 gpt for the same, or luxuries. If the AIs are afraid of you, they will give in to some demands, or agree to better deals, and this reduces the odds they'll dare denounce you. Waging war to destroy its units or pillaging its land is just the next step in such bullying. You do get the penalty for the DoWing, and you have double the unhappiness from a gifted city that capturing the city with half its population remaining would have.

As for realism, this could be argued to death as both sides of the arguments have valid points and it's a matter of perspective. It's not very realistic that classical units capture each and every city of a neighbor by force, for eg.. Even in classical times you destroyed the rulers and military, perhaps massacred a city or two to frigthen the rest and got all the rest to surrender, even long before it got to that point often enough. Even Rome wasn't waging its wars like Attila the Hun or Hitler, there's very little point in sacking cities you intend to rule, aside from bloodlust and hatred. You try to take them as intact as possible. Many horrors in history were also overlooked because of racial or cultural hatred or religions and other factors too complex for the current diplomacy system to reflect well. The warmongering system still make sense to me as a compromise between historical realism and good game mechanics.

I think it's balanced fairly well. I would just add one more mitigating factor beside having war allies: in the first half of the game it should also carry full weight only with those with common borders with you, then 75% for other continental neighbors, and fall to 10 or 15% with those you can't even reach before Astronomy... as if from distanty tales of horrors impossible to ascertain. Because this is mostly about threat evaluation, or should be. A friend should be as worried as a foe, the game already make it have less impact because you have several green modifiers with a friend and the effects are thus mitigated, and it might stay that way until the warmonger penalty is gone.

What doesn't work so well right now isn't the warmongering system. It's the "chain of denoucements" problem. Those have way too much weight in the early game, as if the ancient world already had a UN and global relations. At first it should have full weight only for those with a DoF to the denouncer and none with the denounced. In between there should be degrees depending on status. If you stand well with the denounced and not as well with the denouncer, you wouldn't give much credit to the denouncer. If things worked more like that, it would take much more warmongering penalties before it lead to multiple denouncements. Your friends would tolerate the warmongering much longer if they were not influenced by the multiple denouncements as well (for taking a city on standard in classical time you might get around 20 points, while being denounced carries 35 points... it's the combined 55 that truly hits people). Warmongering penalties do fade away, 5 points per turn, and you get about 1/20th on final diplomacy points, so every five turn you lose a real point. What doesn't go away so easily is that one AI denounces you as a result, it undermines your relations with all the others, enough to trigger another denouncement, and another... and when AI#1's denouncement is over, the effects of all the others still in place triggers it to denounce you again even though it doesn't have a current logical reason to do it, etc. That is the stupid mechanism, not the warmongering penalties. The way the game works now, you'd have the US giving weight to denoucements of Israel by Iran...

Another possible change would be to lower a bit the penalty on trade. The AI should be more pragmatic about such things. It needs a luxury, it should deal for it even with a civ it doesn't like. It's fine they offer worse deals to foes, perhaps halved or so, but flat refusal or insane offers like 1 extra lux for 4 unique lux, gpt and OB is just ridiculous and "broken" since no one in his right mind accepts such deals and it's merely a way to prevent any deal.

Heck, the US and USSR were engaged in regular, and even trade, even during the Cold War.

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Bad example, despite the name this was no war. An ideological struggle, with a military and espionnage escalation and a few proxy conflicts that never lead to open war between the two superpowers. Both sides stood at "afraid" and didn't dare go too far knowing the other side would retaliate.

What I was trying to do was give an example. In the game now, it takes very little before it is impossible to get anything even approximating a fair deal in a trade. Everywhere in the world, nations who are not held in the highest regard can trade 1-1 if they have something someone else wants.

I know there are two schools of thought, and neither is likely to convince the other.

I just wish rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater, they took the best parts of the older CIV games, and improved on them rather than inventing a new game. Let's hope CIV VI brings back more of the good stuff from the past.

However, the "warmonger threat" is just a means, simplified for the AI, to represent the evaluation every player should be doing, which is to be cautious when dealing with an opponent who's growing by conquest.

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The voice of reason.

It's still somewhat more realistic in a limited sense as it makes the players act more like the great conquerors/empire builders (especially those of the renaissance/early modern times) than like Attila the Hun or Hitler all the time in the way they "conquer", and the AI is more "sensible" when it comes to abandonning a territory before it gets too weak to play the game anymore.

Pre-BNW you could play the kind of limited war/peace treaty deals strategy to expand your immediate borders, but you much more often had to capture some cities or crush the AI solidly to get it to give you valuable cities, especially if you wanted to pick and choose which one(s). Now the hammered AI is more likely, or seems to from my games anyway, to agree to give you the big city next to your capital in a treaty than 3 x 2 pop cities on ice terrain far away. Its instinct of survival is also better from this: it needs its TR back up, it doesn't have the units left to defend the city it gives you properly anyway, and it's often now weak enough to fear another foe will attack before it can rebuild its military to protect what it has left. You can even get decent peace deals (gpt, at least), and set an AI back quite a bit, by pillaging all its trade routes.

I quite agree on the question of ."morality". I doubt it played much part in the redesign, or they'd have made it far more punitive still, covering many more "immoral" actions (at best Italian Renaissance style expansion by limited wars and treaties is purely cynical and machiavellian, if less violent than city sacking and massacres.) This was largely done IMO to make warfare more integrated with global strategies for the game, and probably also as a kind of handicap to give the AI more chance to grow and become more competitive for the mid-game. I don't see many games anymore in which you place 13 civs in the game and by the middle-age half or more are crippled and several have vanished. The '"middle pack" is bigger now, and it's often by Industrial or Modern that some Civs are left behind for good. In most of my recent games, there's been no more than 1 civ or 2 that got wiped out early by a warmonger, and it's often only after ideologies that I see several Civs collapse and be wiped out. And that's probably quite the intent. The new systems like tourism and ideologies are designed to make the late game more interesting and it defeats their purposes and effects if by that point too many Civs have been crippled through unstoppable conquest, and even a system like Trade is fun mostly if the AI can also use it, and thus if there are less wars at a time rebuilding the TR is a gruesome task and major setback.

A lot of the other changes seem to follow the same general idea of giving the AI more chance to still be competitive by the mid-game, like the nerf on Consulates (that left the player ally with much less efforts, or befriend for major benefits and no cost all the CS way too early, or the nerf on RA that let the leading player abuse them to further widen the gap between him and the backward civs. This all seems designed with the intent to make the mid-game and late game more important and intricate, and make the early game more a phase of preparation, planning and expansion/building - that even includes preparing a solid army, as you can perfectly well wage limited wars to get promotions and GG for citadels and eventually be ready for pure conquest once the map is filled out or you have a good enough economy to get very strong and thus the AI won't dare block your conquering by diplomacy.

Bulldog Bats said:

What I was trying to do was give an example. In the game now, it takes very little before it is impossible to get anything even approximating a fair deal in a trade. Everywhere in the world, nations who are not held in the highest regard can trade 1-1 if they have something someone else wants.

I know there are two schools of thought, and neither is likely to convince the other.

I just wish rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater, they took the best parts of the older CIV games, and improved on them rather than inventing a new game. Let's hope CIV VI brings back more of the good stuff from the past.

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I agree trade decisions should be a little more pragmatic than emotional. I'm not a huge fan of the AI calculating all diplo aspects as one global number either, but there's processing power and what not to take into account.

OTOH it's also what I meant by keeping a good balance between realism and game play.

That would be more realistic if trade was less influenced by diplomacy, but Civ is also too wide and complex a game to devote too much processing time strictly to war tactics, since it's not the main focus of the game but only one aspect of Civ. There are much better war strategy games than Civ, but they don't have its depth or so many different aspects. An experienced player becomes very good at exploiting the AI's weaknesses in warfare. Forcing the player to rely less on early conquest and more on planning and strategy before the mid-game is one way to balance this out.

The warmongering penalties are also a more realistic emulation of human players. If a player starts conquering left and right and you don't yet have the means to stop him on your own, what would you do? Get him DoWed, try to get him chain denounced, try to deny him trade advantages, try to fight him with allies etc. That's what the WP allow the AI to do now, that and identifying such a play style in the first place.

The rest is a matter of taste anyway. Personally I think BTS and BNW are the two best iterations of the franchise so far, though to my taste the diplo system is still too simplistic.

EK834 said:

It's not a workaround, it's part of the redesign to make warmongering more strategic in the game...
It's a fairly coherent design, not quite perfect and not perfectly balanced, but on the whole it works.

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Are we even playing the same game? This and all your following posts make me think that you do not play on high difficulty, and you have not ever played a domination game.

After several very long wall of text posts arguing about how balanced and sensible the new penalties are, you totally failed to address two major points.

1. You can not get capitols in peace deals, so taking some crappy 1 tile island in the arctic gets you no closer to winning the game.

2. On high difficulty you will never get the real powerhouses like Siam to give you a city 90% of the time unless you overproduce units to the extreme. A good domination player will not produce enough units to intimidate the AI into giving up a good city - all you get is the crap that gets you no closer to winning.

You seem to be missing the point. Domination is about taking caps, and winning the game - not about engaging in a pansy game of hit and run

joshua43214 said:

You seem to be missing the point. Domination is about taking caps, and winning the game - not about engaging in a pansy game of hit and run

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It is unreasonable to expect to play a domination game and maintain 0 warmonger penalty with the AI, just as it would be unreasonable to expect the same from human opponents.

I can maybe, if I squint really really hard, see a valid complaint from people playing non-domination games who get hit on technicalities of the warmonger system, but I doubt you'll find any sympathy from anyone because your domination targets won't sit down and placidly await the slaughter.

Polisurgist said:

It is unreasonable to expect to play a domination game and maintain 0 warmonger penalty with the AI, just as it would be unreasonable to expect the same from human opponents.

I can maybe, if I squint really really hard, see a valid complaint from people playing non-domination games who get hit on technicalities of the warmonger system, but I doubt you'll find any sympathy from anyone because your domination targets won't sit down and placidly await the slaughter.

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Nope, not everything is black or white. They penalised warmonger styile gaming too much, early warmongering on a tight difficulty is suicide. I also think the cities on peace deal is not on purpose, is a workaround originated by bad design.

To me the idea is good, on G&K was easy to work around warmonger penalties, but now, just taking two of the three cities of any civ midgame will lead to huge penalties.

I think the solution would be to find a middle ground where a warmonger is not labeled as trash too soon, but indeed is labeled as such when he is advancing into a domination game and has takes a few caps.

I like some of your ideas Amarr

Ninakoru said:

Nope, not everything is black or white. They penalised warmonger styile gaming too much, early warmongering on a tight difficulty is suicide. I also think the cities on peace deal is not on purpose, is a workaround originated by bad design.

To me the idea is good, on G&K was easy to work around warmonger penalties, but now, just taking two of the three cities of any civ midgame will lead to huge penalties.

I think the solution would be to find a middle ground where a warmonger is not labeled as trash too soon, but indeed is labeled as such when he is advancing into a domination game and has takes a few caps.

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And here's the part where I ask you whether we're playing the same game. Because this crap isn't rocket science and I honestly can't figure out why so many people seem to have such trouble with it.

Polisurgist said:

And here's the part where I ask you whether we're playing the same game. Because this crap isn't rocket science and I honestly can't figure out why so many people seem to have such trouble with it.

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Calm down buddy, I'm giving my opinion after all.

I think the wars should be a solid part of any Civ game, not an ashamed and extremely restricted and unintuivive part of it. That sums it.

joshua43214 said:

Are we even playing the same game? This and all your following posts make me think that you do not play on high difficulty, and you have not ever played a domination game.

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I play on Emperor only indeed. and I've not talked once about Domination strategies in the whole thread. It was all about expansion via conquest. When you mostly or only go for the Capitals, warmonger penalties aren't so painful unless you make a huge mistake like going after Venice as your first or targeting the tall civs with 2-3 cities only too soon. In Domination games there comes a point when you must overcome the effects of warmongering penalties anyway, it's part of the game.

I've taken 3 capitals in a recent Emperor game, one of which I got zero penalty for (I got it in a peace deal... but not from the original owner but the AI I tricked into taking it first), the other two only for minor penalties that didn't get me into trouble.

And yes I understand that not all capitals are easy to take without taking other cities fist, piling up penalties and turning the whole world against you. But it's a victory condition that rests on going against the whole world in the first place...

so taking some crappy 1 tile island in the arctic gets you no closer to winning the game.

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Of course not. I'm not an idiot. Before deciding to wage war to nearly destroy an AI's military I use spies to assess first the cities' current worth, and how much investment I'll need to pour in it to make it rapidly a good asset for science, for e.g. It's size 15+ cities with Wonders that I set my eyes on mid-game. If you refuse the first peace offer, the AI eventually gives up and lets you have it if you've hammered it enough, get that city's defenses to zero and/or manage to get other AI to DoW him.