Defence Pacts: not worth the effort!

[ExpiredReign]

For the 2nd game in a row now I have had defence pacts with all the civs except the most aggresive. Doing so to help keep them at bay until I can build up my own forces.

Everytime they, the aggressor, attack me noone comes to my aid. But as soon as someone gets attacked I am immediately in a war with the biggest military force on the map.

Am I missing something here? Is there some trick to having these pacts? Or are they just not worth the effort for the human player?

 

[jwerano]

I regularly bribe the AI into attacking another AI so that I can sneak attack one of the warring parties. This rarely turns out as well as I'd expect though. Even if the 2 AIs are adjacent to each other on land they only skirmish lightly and never launch an all out attack. I can only guess that because the attacking AI had no intention to conquer a city it restricts its army to defensive purposes.

I guess one benefit of the defensive pact is that it will make the AI attacking you more amenable to peace once 10 turns have transpired but that hardly feel worth it to me. How hard is it to achieve these pacts?

 

[Thalassicus]

Defensive pacts should cause your allies to declare war on people who attack you. This is how it's worked for me in my games. Maybe an unmodded-game patch broke that, or your ally was recently at war with the attacker (and has a forced peace treaty).

 

[emperorhadrius]

1 be in a war

2 make defensive pact with ally

3 make peace treaty
Have a condition being that your enemy declares war on said ally (voids treaty)
Throw down every turn based item you have ( the fools gold)
Have said enemy give you cities and potentially hard gold

Make sure you capture the capital before this.
Added tip, take everything but a city your enemy conquered, liberate that city; diplomatic bonus for extermination! !!!