AI refuses to make peace?

Rohili

King
Joined
Mar 7, 2005
Messages
727
In my current game, 7 civs ganged up and declared war on me within 1-2 turns of each other. 4 of the civs were too far away from me to be of any consequence, while I fended off the attacks of the remaining 3 civs and took at least one city from each of them.

After something like 15 turns of war, those civs far away me decided to make peace and even gave me cities and gold for it (even though I did not attack them at all, not even take a single worker). However, the 3 civs near me whose units I have been destroying and whose cities I have been taking simply refuse to make peace. I've taken at least 5 cities from Catherine and she stills wants to fight. What gives? Do they hate me so much that they will never make peace for the rest of the game? We have been at war for at least 20 turns already!
 
If your military strength is less than their's, it doesn't matter how many cities you take or that you keep killing their units, they won't make peace, because they think they're winning. The amount of gold you have on hand is a big factor in your military strength. In fact the cash is worth more military strength then the units you can buy with it.
 
If your military strength is less than their's, it doesn't matter how many cities you take or that you keep killing their units, they won't make peace, because they think they're winning. The amount of gold you have on hand is a big factor in your military strength. In fact the cash is worth more military strength then the units you can buy with it.
I'm making more than 200 GPT and have plenty of money; I just keep spending it on buying units and bribing city states. So you would advise me to just hoard my gold and wait for them to recognise my military superiority?
 
If your happiness is OK (i.e. you don't need to trade with them) then I'd say it isn't really a problem unless you don't like being at war. In my experience these alliances soon crumble and then you can negotiate peace terms with the first one to bug out whilst continuing to slap the other two. And so on. Personally I wouldn't overly hoard my gold - If I'm doing OK for cash I tend to only keep back enough for the next promotions/upgrades because there is always something useful to spend it on (Science building, new unit, CS bribe). I didn't know that gold counts towards military strength, never read that before, but I would still buy stuff anyway. Also I suspect the AI mechanic won't let the Civ agree peace if you just captured a city that turn, but I'm not sure about that one.

Something else: If I find myself in a war that I don't particularly want but isn't causing me problems I just only attack units that come into range - the AI seems much more inclined to offer peace terms then.
 
Problem here is that the AI only looks at the numbers behind your strength and theirs, but there's problems, such as not recognizing the strength of UU's(like the fact Chinese X-bows can shoot twice) the terrain between you an them, and not the unit types (EG they have more warriors than me, making a larger army, but I have comp bows, which can sit and snipe the warriors from safety)

Only way to make the AI consider peace is you reduce their strength to about the same as you, or less. You can see this in action in an offensive war, as you start crushing the AI, they make more and more peace deals (although the offer seem to start to get worse and worse :cowboy:)
 
AI's largest factor as others has said is current realtive troop strength. Per the flawed calculations of the military advisor.

Second consideration is "economic damage"; that is if the AI loses a city.

There actually is a "unit loss" but it peaks out at a very small factor; if the AI thinks it has 3:2 ratio in its favor, that more that offsets the AI having lost 100 units and you none,

If you really want the war to end, you need to capture an AI city.
Often cheaper to just ignore the war and get on with building more standard buildings and researching to a tech that would allow upgrading your army.
 
Thanks for the input guys, but nothing that has been said really addresses my issue. Like I described, I had been completely owning Catherine by taking more than half of her cities. I had killed many of her units and my military strength was far superior to hers. However, she simply refused to make peace no matter what (she did eventually, more than 20 turns after war was first declared).

Then there is also the ridiculous situation of overseas civs offering cities to me in return for peace even though I had made no attempt to attack them and haven't even taken a single worker from them. These civs are more powerful than Catherine simply because I had not been decimating their troops or taking their cities, so by right they should be less willing to make peace, right?

Clearly there is something more to the AI peace-making calculus than relative military strength and war losses.
 
i was in a similar situation where everyone declared war. the distant civs eventually offered up the 2nd cities for peace even tho I was no where near them. but the 1st one just would not talk peace. it was not until i had his capitol down to its last hit points that he offered peace, even tho he had long ago lost his last military unit. it seems that the ring leader of these gang up on wars is in it until you or they die.
 
Then there is also the ridiculous situation of overseas civs offering cities to me in return for peace even though I had made no attempt to attack them and haven't even taken a single worker from them. These civs are more powerful than Catherine simply because I had not been decimating their troops or taking their cities, so by right they should be less willing to make peace, right?

Clearly there is something more to the AI peace-making calculus than relative military strength and war losses.

Is the code for V available like it is in Civ IV? In IV there are some absolutely ridiculous factors that go into peace calculations, such as whether a mutual war ally shares 8 tiles border, who made the declaration, the AI script used to make the declaration (Total war vs limited war vs bribed in etc)...all to go with power and "war success" (and you got more war success for attacking and killing than defending and killing). It was completely convoluted and in more than one case rather objectively asinine.

It was also made by the same company as Civ V, and many of IV's basic flaws carried over. I wonder how much the AI peace-making decisions have? Your own story + civ's past suggest there are indeed some unforeseen factors in this equation. In fact, I would suspect AI proximity to you actually makes it *less* likely to want peace, all things being equal...and when you capture its cities it's definitely bordering you and then some, possibly making it even more of a factor than before the war!
 
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