Warmonger penalty ideas thread.

Ok people.

There is a huge amount of discontent with the way that warmonger penalties are handled.

The purpose of this thread is to collect and discuss ideas for how to fix this problem.

Obviously, the vanilla system does a great job of punishing truly aggressive civs, whilst it doesn't give any room to manoeuvre for peaceful civs that fight one or two small 'border wars' over the course of the 6050 years that a game can last.

So, ideas?

My idea would be to create a 'causus belli' system where the declaration of war and subsequent capture of any city within a 6 hex radius of your 'original' cities would be ignored if you had a reason to go to war.

Examples could include;

You attacked one of my city-state allies

You demanded tribute from one of my city-state allies

You settled a city within a certain distance of my capital

and so on.

Yeah, I have some ideas on the matter. Think the "warmonger gets progression on city conquest" was a great improvement, however how it is calculated and the totally missable recovery per turn make penalties to harsh, specially on early stages.

The casus beli is a great idea tu, but would be complementary.

Currently these are the variables taken into account for the warmonger penalty:

- Size of the map: Bigger map = less warmonger score.
- Total number of cities on the map: More cities = less warmonger score.
- Original city owner total cities (before conquest): More remaining cities = less warmonger score.
- If you conquer a capital doesn't matter, only matters with the diplo hit with the owner.

To me, more accurate variables would be:

- Number of remaining civilizations of same range (using different counts on Civs ans C.States): More civs/CSs = less warmonger score.
- Conquered city population (before pop loss due to conquest): more population: more warmonger hate.
- Original city owner total population (before conquest): more population: less warmonger hate.
- If the conquered city is capital, more warmonger score.

This way we get the following benefits:

- Conquered player have two cities, one with 18 pop and other with 9 pop. With the new variables, taking the big city would impact much more than taking the little one. With the original formula, doesn't matter.

- With the original formula, warmonger gets easier as game resolves and civs expand through the map. On lower diffs, AI is more reluctant to expand, while on higher there's a point the map will be filled with AI cities. With the new formula is just the contrary, as civilizations are killed by others, warmonger gets more relevant.

- As CSs are counted reparatedly, warmonger score of conquering a CS will be high due to losing all his population, but it will be lowered by the usual 2 CS for each normal Civilization setup rule.

Imo. a good warmonger system should take into consideration several factors:

1. Major penalty for DoW act, but should be modified by casus belli and third party relations.
2. Minor penalty for capturing cities.
3. Additional minor/moderate penalty for razing cities.
4. Diplomatic modifier for warmonger score should take into account warmonger actions of the third party civ also.
5. Much faster decay rate than currently the case.

With regards to #1: Declaring war on someone should be a major part of what makes other consider you a warmonger. However, there should be actions that will give you justification for ar in the eyes of others. For instance, if someone attacks a City State you've pledged to protect, this should give you a major casus belli (like warmonger penalty reduced by 75 %) while someone breaking a promise to you would give you minor casus belli (for instance reduction of 25 % if someone breaks promise not to settle near you). Also, if you DoW someone, any third party who have denounced the attacked civ should be more forgiving of your act, giving you perhaps a 25 % reduction of warmonger penalty.

With regards to #2 and #3: Capturing a city should NOT be major cause for warmonger penalty. That's just silly and destructive for how game turns out. However, razing a city, particularly razing it to the ground, should give a significant warmonger penalty, as this is a brutal action.

With regards to #4: When game has calculated your warmonger score, civs who have themselves a greater warmonger score should not hate you for being a warmonger. It's completely destroying immersion when Shaka or Genghis Kahn, who have often been in dozens of wars over the game, come up to me and denounce me for being an uncivilized brute because I entered ONE war a thousand years ago.

With regards to #5: Speaks for itself, really. I'm fine with people dislike me for making war. But not for entire game, please, unless it's a repeated action.

I'd love to see a more complex Warmonger system in future versions - something that takes a lot more factors into consideration when calculating, and although it may be more difficult to execute I think the effort would be worth it. Instead of just having a simple (x+y/z^2)*a formula (which for all its variables still lacks a human component), Warmonger calculations should run queries to gather certain information about the situation. It should also be calculated differently for different civs depending on their respective Friendly/Hostile status towards both me and my enemy, rather than simply relying on a good diplomatic score with my other allies to balance out the negative points from Warmongering.

For example, Russia declares war on my Ally England with whom I have a Defensive Pact, and in order to save my imperiled friend I march a Blitzkrieg through four of Russia's cities to provide a corridor to reach the Brits. When calculating my Warmonger points for France, who is also friendly with both myself and England, it equates to very little since it understands that I went to war due to

1. Defensive Pact
2. England was my Ally
3. I provided useful support to England (not just declaring war and doing nothing, though it seems that's what the current model encourages us to do)

If Russia had an ally or friend who was less inclined towards me then I'd expect my Warmonger level to be higher with him. At the end of the day, my biggest problem is that it calculates most diplomacy-affecting actions the same across all other civs, so that by simply playing the game normally, even my friendly civs with similar interests and no conflicts will still end up becoming unhappy with me, maybe even hostile.

I'm assuming we're trying to make the AI a better simulation of playing the game of Civ 5 rather than trying to make the game a simulation of what actual leaders who actually care about people will do, because I feel that way lies madness (though I also have some ideas on how I'd do that, they won't be included here.

• Do something to make City-States not count as civs-of-one. My preferred option: calculate the penalty as if all CS of a particular type were one civ. Taking the last cultural CS would be like taking the last city of a civ, for example.
• Prevent infinite chain denunciations: have the diplomatic penalty for being denounced decay rather than staying at full strength during the entire duration. Not technically a change to warmonger penalties, but this is the source of most problems people have with warmongering.
• Give the AI the ability to assess the types of wars you engage in. If you have a habit of attacking weaker civs, your penalty with stranger civs will be less but weaker civs will be more wary, vice versa if you have a habit of capping the strong kids with a blitzkreig of assymetrical warfare.
• Make trade balance count in the diplo mechanics: making generous trades (including just plain giving stuff away) will make the AI like you more, driving a hard bargain will make them like you less. Since peace deals are trades and cities are valuable things to be traded, you'll have the ability to give back captured cities in order to repair your reputation.
• Make military action count for something: track damage done by your units inside another's territory vs. damage they do inside your territory. Whichever civ in a war does more damage inside the other's territory suffers a worse diplo penalty.
• Improve in all areas the feedback the player gets about what their warmonger penalty is and why they have it.
• Include a World Congress or UN resolution that labels a civ a "rogue state," and reduces the diplomatic penalty overall for attacks on that civ.

Things I would not do:

• Reduce warmonger penalties overall: the system does a pretty good job of making the AI wary of players it should be wary of.
• Try to introduce a causus belli system that removes warmonger penalties beyond the specific cases outlined above. Most "causus belli" examples boil down to "there's something over there and I'll use force to take it," which is exactly what the AI should be wary of.
• Make the warmonger penalty at all reliant on who actually declares war. Humans are just too good at gaming the AI into declaring, and there should be a difference between a defensive war that forces an aggressor out and one in which you do that and then conquer them.

Its good to see some serious ideas being brought forward. I quite like some of the following;

Do something to make City-States not count as civs-of-one. My preferred option: calculate the penalty as if all CS of a particular type were one civ. Taking the last cultural CS would be like taking the last city of a civ, for example.

Click to expand...

- I was trying to come up with something like this, though I didn't think of grouping City-States by type.

Also, the size of cities being factored into the warmonger calculations. I definitely agree that the conquest of a 2 pop city in the Arctic should not carry the same penalty as conquering a core city with a wonder or two and a population above twenty.

I also wholeheartedly agree with defensive pacts not carrying any penalties; historically their purpose was to prevent wars from breaking out ( WWI is a special story about why they don't work)

Though I would still stand by a causus belli system that allows players to defend their local interests, without giving the excuse to start a series of major conquests. Certainly if you are chasing the domination victory you should still suffer a huge warmonger penalty.

As a further thought, to allow for peaceful players, to engage in some warfare perhaps a scaling system should be used;
1st warmonger act = gain 10% of the standard warmonger penalty
2nd warmonger act = 50%
3rd = 100%
4th = 120%
and so on...

Also as a last thought, perhaps a system where returning captured cities to their owner after the war (during peace talks?) should mitigate a large amount of the penalty for seizing them in the first place.

Thoughts?

How about a warmonger bonus (decrease in warmonger total) if you liberate a city. Also if you give a city to a civ which I sometimes do because they are about to be wiped out by an AI civ.

I've been actually working on a diplomacy mod that deals with this somewhat.

So far for warmongering I've changed it so the AI only applies it to nations when the victim nation is above neutral with them or in the case of CSs if they have any opinion other than ignoring them.

I can post the source code and/or dll if anyone wants to take a look at it.

Sarpedon99 said:

How about a warmonger bonus (decrease in warmonger total) if you liberate a city.

Click to expand...

This is in the most recent patch.

Polisurgist said:

Things I would not do:

• Try to introduce a causus belli system that removes warmonger penalties beyond the specific cases outlined above. Most "causus belli" examples boil down to "there's something over there and I'll use force to take it," which is exactly what the AI should be wary of.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure I agree completely with this. I do understand what you're aiming at, and I agree that one should be careful about not opening that door too widely, but it does kill immersion a bit when first, everybody denounce someone - say, Shaka - and come running talking about how much they agree with me that Shaka is the scum of the earth and can do absolutely no good and yada-yada, and then next, when I DoW him, they come all running like "HOW COULD YOU?", "No way, we SO can't believe you just did that" etc. etc. and then chain denounce me. I mean, come on, we must be able to do better than that.

Reduce the warmonger penalty of the aggressor if you capture it's cities. The bonus could be equal or a bit less to the liberation bonus but kind of in reverse. Let's say the Huns take 3 cities and others attack them and take back the 3 cities. The Huns warmongers penalty then drops as if they had themselves liberated 3 cities.

This alone would go a long way preventing the scenarios where everyone gangs on someone who took couple cities in the early game for 200 turns.

kaspergm said:

I'm not sure I agree completely with this. I do understand what you're aiming at, and I agree that one should be careful about not opening that door too widely, but it does kill immersion a bit when first, everybody denounce someone - say, Shaka - and come running talking about how much they agree with me that Shaka is the scum of the earth and can do absolutely no good and yada-yada, and then next, when I DoW him, they come all running like "HOW COULD YOU?", "No way, we SO can't believe you just did that" etc. etc. and then chain denounce me. I mean, come on, we must be able to do better than that.

Click to expand...

I'd generally like to stay positive in this thread, but it's worth noting that that bit in bold actually isn't how the penalty math works since the most recent patch. Other AI might do that after you start taking their cities, but not for the declaration of war itself.

But sure...an adjustment perhaps in the penalty you take with a leader for warmongering on a third party if the third party has been denounced by them. An extension of the current -50% among leaders who are at war with the target, basically, would make sense.

Why don't make the modifer related to the victory screen?

You have to catpure capitals so basicly if you capture more tehn 1 capital the AI thinxs you are going for a domination victoy and will hate you for it because they don't want you to conquer the world simple as that.

thresholds like this:

one capital early penalty only high flavored AI like polynesia , ghandi who hate warmongers iwll hate you
2 capitals captured mayor penalty most leaders hate you except warmongers
Take third capital everyone hates you

probel solved.


Its like when the Ai regognise you are winning a culture victory they don't open their borders

I would argue that the mod/fix should be as simple as possible. It should reduce rather than add to the current system. Complex AI behavior calculations just appear to the human player as random AI schizophrenia anyway. This unpredictability leads to most of the frustration with CiV diplomacy imo. Replace BNW's complexity with simple hard rules that attempt to get the same thing done (throttle actual world conquest)

Example simple rules would be:

-aggressive AI personalities don't denounce for warmongering. I don't need Napoleon to denounce me for war in a any video game ever, that's just totally bonkers. Aggressive AI should act like cut-throats and stay out of petty diplomatic maneuvering which just discolors player experience and immersion. Napoleon/Genghis/Attila et.al can hate me and try to destroy me for warmongering, but don't denounce me. Ugh.

-peaceful AI personalities are indifferent to DOW/conquest against civs they regard as warmongers by civs they don't yet regard as warmongers. Reduce the path to being seen as a warmonger by a peaceful AI personality to only one action: DOW or conquer someone they didn't see as a warmonger (or bully CS obviously). This should be relatively simple. Common-foe positive modifiers can still be in place on top of this, but now those modifiers won't be discolored/negated by the "omg u conquered Attila how could u" effect mentioned above, which again leads to schizophrenic-seeming reactions from Selassie/Gandhi/Rammy.

This simplicity will no doubt lead to situations where every civ has become "dirty" and all bets are off, but that kind of "diplomacy crash" is already a frequent outcome of the current balance (since peaceful and aggressive Civs alike will attack a weakened AI player 100% of the time).

Therefore a final proposal which is more complex: the "brave new world" modifier. The AI players should sense when diplomacy has fallen apart and abandon all warmonger hate at that point. Something like, "hates 6 of 8 players for warmongering > no more warmonger hate" or even simpler, "would hate self for warmongering" > no more warmonger hate. If Gandhi is going to become the Hun in game, he should act like it. Remove warmonger hate so the game can continue post-diplomacy-crash with simple who's-on-who's-side pragmatic alliances.

apocalypse105 said:

Why don't make the modifer related to the victory screen?

You have to catpure capitals so basicly if you capture more tehn 1 capital the AI thinxs you are going for a domination victoy and will hate you for it because they don't want you to conquer the world simple as that.

thresholds like this:

one capital early penalty only high flavored AI like polynesia , ghandi who hate warmongers iwll hate you
2 capitals captured mayor penalty most leaders hate you except warmongers
Take third capital everyone hates you

probel solved.


Its like when the Ai regognise you are winning a culture victory they don't open their borders

Click to expand...

I think scaling it up when the AI realizes that a domination victory is in progress is a good idea...there probably still needs to be some level of "this guy is expanding by force, look out," but as it stands right now, the taking and accumulation of capitals doesn't really increase the warmonger hate beyond what you get for taking those cities.

The fact that the penalty is determined by the number of cities a civ has is silly. Are the AIs humanitarians now that don't want to see their competitors wiped out?

What should contribute to warmonger penalty is

1) Declaring wars
2) Capturing many cities in succession
3) Capitals should contribute highly to the penalty
4) Razing cities

apocalypse105 said:

Why don't make the modifer related to the victory screen?

You have to catpure capitals so basicly if you capture more tehn 1 capital the AI thinxs you are going for a domination victoy and will hate you for it because they don't want you to conquer the world simple as that.

thresholds like this:

one capital early penalty only high flavored AI like polynesia , ghandi who hate warmongers iwll hate you
2 capitals captured mayor penalty most leaders hate you except warmongers
Take third capital everyone hates you

probel solved.


Its like when the Ai regognise you are winning a culture victory they don't open their borders

Click to expand...

Polisurgist said:

I think scaling it up when the AI realizes that a domination victory is in progress is a good idea...there probably still needs to be some level of "this guy is expanding by force, look out," but as it stands right now, the taking and accumulation of capitals doesn't really increase the warmonger hate beyond what you get for taking those cities.

Click to expand...

Game already does that. There is a separate Warmonger Thread evaluation that counts not the score you get from DoW's and capturing cities but counts how large a percentage of overall civs on map you have eliminated. If you have eliminated 25 % of civs (+/- 50 % depending on their attitude towards warmongers) you get a permanent "warmonger severe" status. If you have eliminated 40 % (+/- 50 %) of civs you get a permanent "warmonger critical" status.

... and to my knowledge, AI doesn't close their borders to you if you're winning cultural victory (sadly). If they are closing them, it's because they dislike you for other reasons.

If I may add something here

In my opinion, something should be done with:

1) "You took to many cities comparing to the total urbanization of the world". This maybe makes sense if in modern era Adolf Hitler captures 20 cities out of 200 cities in the world (by the way, I very rarely see 20+ city empires, and I have never seen empire bigger than 28 cities American madness) because that means true total war and massive warmongering over continents. If somebody conquers 20 cities, he is true warmonger and true danger to the entire world - also, all civs can see that in the modern times.
But I don't think 20/200 cities in the modern times are equal to the 3/30 cities in the ancient times, somewhere in the deep jungle when nobody knew about the war. Conquering 20 cities is total war, conquering two cities is simply only possible solution if Hiawatha is near but the warmonger mechanism views them as exactly the same thing.
Though I have no idea how to balance that.

2) "You took the last city of a civilisation!"

To be honest, this idea seems so silly for me, that I would love to completely delete it. It makes no historical and gameplay sense - let's imagine giant terrifying war, in which the entire empire is massacred, nuked, pillaged, loses capital and stays with one city somewhere far away - currently the civ thich would take that one city, can receive bigger penalties than all those warmongers which destroyed the entire empire. Why? Because that was the last city.
And?...
If big power falls and is destroyd by other rising power who is bigger threat to the stability - that rising power which captures 10 cities, or one little poor state, which takes one last city of the fallen empire?

3) "You took the city state!"

Rule 2) makes war with city - states impossible, that messes with a balance... When Hitler was regarded as bigger threat - when he took "city state" Austria, or when he took Capital of the French Empire? This game would regard conquering half of Europe as little penalty, while conquering Vienna - extreme penalty.

Is Firaxis aware of this topic? Or at least of the massive, planetary-wide repulse we all have for the way warmonger hate is implemented?

Also, the "you have a large number of units near my border" has to go, period. It was just a wounded soldier and a boat I sent to escort him through the barb infested area, not a large number of units. I checked twice, I had no other unit anywhere near his borders - not even inside my own nation, my troops were on the opposite side. But did Darius consider that? Or the fact all our caravans are with each other? Nooo, all he cares is to force me into being unable to DoW him, so he can resume his dirty missionary spam ¬¬

Sorry for this off-topic, I had to let the bad hatred come out...