Forcing an AI to peace with a human player in LAN

[Pongwa]

Hello there !

First of all, I've been lurking around for some time now and would like to thank you all for sharing your knowledge and experiences of this great game. I really improved a lot by reading all your great posts and playing a few Noble's Club (with random success ).

Ok so to my question.
I play sometimes in LAN with a friend and several AIs to kill. At first we were teaming up but there are some frustrating mechanics involved in being in the same team, so now we play in separate teams.
So in the last game he was surrounded by 3 Hinduists fanatics and switched to Confusianism despite my advice not too. Of course a few turns of plotting later, one of them declared war on him... with the 2 others soon to follow.
I wanted to bribe some AIs off this war but could not because "you need to contact them first" (I'm not sure this is the exact text in english). I was actually in contact with all the civilisations on the map, including my dying friend, had open borders with him and some AIs, even some resources trades going. I also had a pretty nice techlead i wanted to use to bribe them off.
Needless to say he got crushed in a few turns as he was totally unprepared.

Is there something I am missing tobe able to bribe the AIs off the war against my friend ?

Thank you for reading this, this is a much longer post than I expected it to be.

Cheers !

Edit : Dang ! Wrong forum, thought I was posting in the multiplayer section... Sorry about that.

 

[leif erikson]

Moderator Action: Welcome to CivFanatics. Moved to appropriate forum for discussion. Good luck.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I don't have much experience with your given scenario, but here are some thoughts:
1. If you and your friend have met each other and you aren't involved in the war, your friend could (temporarily) gift you his Cities except for his capital. You could then gift your friend one of your Cities which is far away from the enemy combatants to keep him or her alive, and you could ask your friend to pull all of his or her troops back to his or her capital
2. I don't know the exact case when that message gets returned, but I suspect that it has to do with the other player (in this case, your friend) being "ahead" of the AI somehow, perhaps in Power, perhaps in technological progress, such that the AI thinks it is losing and thus won't agree to your request. It is possible that as your friend makes himself appear weaker, by giving you a couple of his or her Cities, that the AI will feel that it has the upper hand and thus might be more easily bribed out of the war
3. Take control of the Apostolic Palace's votes, ensure that each AI in question has a City with that Religion in it (settle junky Cities close to those AIs and spread that Religion into those Cities, if necessary), gift a City with that Religion in it to your friend, and get your friend to switch to the Apostolic Palace's Religion as his or her State Religion in order to get the "Force Peace on my Friend" Resolution to appear: https://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/game-mechanics/the-apostolic-palace-guide/
4. Bribe another AI to go to war against one of the AIs that is harassing your friend; doing so may cause the combatant AI to either redirect some of its troops toward that new AI or might make the combatant AI more willing to negotiate a Peace Treaty with your friend, either directly with your friend or by being bribed off by you
5. If you have Open Borders with the combatant AIs, witch into Slavery, whip some good defensive Units, and send them to your friend's lands using the Road network of the combatant AIs... when the troops arrive within your friend's Cultural Borders, due to having used the combatant AIs' Road networks to arrive there quickly, you can gift those troops to your friend

 

[Pongwa]

Thank you for your advices Dhoomstriker !

1. I did not think of him giving his cities to me. That is indeed a clever way to make him survive.
2. I don't think he was ahead of the AI as he could not buy peace from them.
3. AP... again a pretty good advice. I usually don't bother trying to build it in my solo games as I can't compete with high difficulty AIs. But in this case I was in Noble I think so I definitly could have built it. Definitly a good way to solve this problem.
4. I thought about that one ! but it was a huge love fest between all these hinduists and I couldn't bribe anyone
5. Yeah I was too far for this unfortunatly and my friend died pretty quickly.

There are indeed some ways to deal with such situation. I think i'll try to build the AP quickly in the next game, maybe send some defense to my friend even in peace time.
Still, I don't understand the "you need to contact them first" message and that kind of bothers me

 

[MAvL]

Sorry for the necro.

I think what happens is that you simply can't ask an AI to make peace with a human player.

When (as P0) bribing P1 to make peace with P2, it's as if you made a gift to P1, then P1 makes a blank peace offer to P2 which he accepts.

But you shouldn't be able to force P2 into peace without him having a word. The message you get is for when P2 would not accept a blank peace, or when the game cannot tell, because it is a human.

It is really a shame as it breaks (one more time) the symetry between humans and computer. I'm pretty sure there would have been solutions to it, like having P1 contact P2 and ask for a blank peace and only return the error message to P0 if P2 refuses.