Advice for playing a non-warmonger

[Heinz_Guderian]

Yeah or manually increase the difficulty or something. It is more satisfying to warmonger with a civ that is built around doing that IMO, but YMMV

 

[MIS]

IMHO things are out of whack where in a peaceful game you have to be at your cap. Might as well go to war with 50 units!

 

[LifeOfBrian]

MIS, my advice on being at your cap comes from playing at Deity difficulty, where it's normal for the game to be very difficult. I imagine on lower difficulties you don't have to be at your cap to have a peaceful game.

 

[MIS]

MIS, my advice on being at your cap comes from playing at Deity difficulty, where it's normal for the game to be very difficult. I imagine on lower difficulties you don't have to be at your cap to have a peaceful game.

Understood. So my point is at Deity only.

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Yeah, but at Deity it's understandable that you'll get harassed if you have a weak army and if you have a neighbouring Shaka that went Authority and has 10 cities to your 5 cities, with an army at his cap, it's logical he'll attack you if you have an army only 1/3/half his size. That's why your best bet to be able to play a peaceful game on Deity is to have a big army. And still there's benefit to not going to war when you're at full cap: your trade routes don't get pillaged, you don't have to risk losing your units (which would require hammers to rebuild) & a city if you start losing the war, you don't lose trade deals with that AI, your tiles don't get occupied/pillaged, your CS allies aren't at risk of being conquered, you don't suffer from war unhappiness,...

 

[dragof2]

Having played a bit more, I still think, at least for my mileage, that there's a balance problem here. Not just warmonger civs, but warmonger civics and strategy are like night and day. I finished a game as Mongolia on the Communitas map on king difficulty, and despite most of the continents being snaky and filled with mountains, honor, the ai's trouble fighting mongolian horse archers, and boosted city state bullying yields were enough. I actually found an ai Korea in that game who had a continent to himself, but we were at tech and policy parity. Everyone else was considerably behind us. And even though I had eaten 3 civs by that time, the size of my army was enough to scare people away from wanting to pick fights with me.
Maybe it's different in multiplayer (since a human will know better than to feed an honor player an endless stream of casualties, and will react more appropriately in coalition against a runaway warmonger), but it really feels like regardless of which civ you pick an overall warmonger strategy is always seems to be the best way to go (of course when you get lone continent starts and the like you want to build peacefully, but once you can cross the oceans you want to cross gears back into conquest). When I play a non-warmonger I feel like I'm playing the game wrong, and when I'm playing a warmonger I feel like I'm cheating (and of course warmongers end the game as fast as the map will allow, so they tend to cut out content). Which is a bummer. The content in this mod is neat, but it is often frustrating.

 

[andersw]

Peaceful and warmonger are different in several aspects and once you have gone deep into one path I find its diffictult to adjust and play the oppposite.

 

[Melchizedek]

I wonder if many people agree with dragif2's point above that warfare feels like dominant strategy? I also find that playing peacefully feels suboptimal, primarily because any opponent you don't proactively cripple is bound to attack you later.

The strategic question is whether we like having the AI behave like Civ is a zero-sum board game or like real civilizations might. In the former case, declaring war has to happen and nobody should expect to play peacefully, period. In the latter case, it would make sense for civs to have realistic friendships, affinities, and personalities strong enough to enable us to win peacefully without the hate. I lean toward the latter being possible (not easy) but that does break away from the strategy game mold toward the sim mold, because an objective player trying to win should definitely declare war in a lot of cases. Should AIs always play to win or should they have more character? Should there be ways to build peacefully and successfully without becoming a pariah?

 

[stii]

I think it is just a lot safer. You have to pick your policy pretty early, before you really know where all the AI are and where their early cities will be. So when they are close and all expand towards you authority gives you a chance to attack and secure more cities. If you have plenty of room tradition is fine but when you only get three cities it is a bit of a struggle. I think progress is just weak in general.

but if there is space it is generally fine. They AI sometimes attack you but not always, I've played games where I never fought a war.

 

[Stalker0]

I wonder if many people agree with dragif2's point above that warfare feels like dominant strategy?

If by dominant do you mean the only strategy that works at certain difficulties, no plenty of peaceful games have been won even on deity. If you mean is it the "superior strategy".... that answer is yes.

The reason for this is quite simple...that's the way Civ 5 mechanics work. The first notion, when I conquer someone's city...I am not only gaining benefits, but I am denying an opponent those same benefits. 1+1 is better than 1 so to speak, so already there is a big bonus to war.

The second comes down to the cost of war. Initially, war has a fairly significant cost, it takes a lot of hammers to build up your military, hammers that could be used for economic infrastructure. However, once that is done, the cost of engaging and maintaining wars is relatively low for human players. Humans learn as they go up in difficulty to maximize unit efficiency....to ensure units are not killed. While the AI begins to lose unit after unit, the human does not. Healing is "free", so other than the cost of upgrading your armies and unit maintenance, warfare is relatively free for the human after a certain point. So from a pure economic standpoint, warfare + an economic engine is better than just an economic engine.

Now you can tweak numbers and the like....but the superiority of war is baked into game, and was long before VP got a hold of it. Honestly if you wanted to change that paradigm you would probably have to make some pretty radical changes. For example....remove unit upgrades completely. If a civ had to remake its military every era to go kill someone....warfare would not be nearly as beneficial as it is now. But upgrading is a ton of fun, and there would be numerous balance considerations for such a radical change...but its an option for those who might want to modmod. Another radical idea, make it cost gold to heal units...again now warfare has a much steeper economic price...but lots of considerations for such a big change.

**And just to be clear, I am not advocating those changes in the core mod. I do not think they would be a benefit, they are just ideas for mod modders who might want to tinker.

 

[Melchizedek]

I meant dominant strategy in the sense of a strategy that is nearly always optimal. I don't think that taking Authority/Autocracy policies, or pursuing a domination VC is currently dominant, but I do think that fighting is. I think Stalker()'s post pretty well explains why. I disagree that fighting was a dominant strategy in Civ V vanilla, but that might be because I tend to measure the difficulty of winning by number of clicks instead of by turns. War in vanilla was pretty well guaranteed to succeed but it took forever. Four city tradition SV was also just about guaranteed, and less tedious. In VP the AI is better, and investing in defense is mandatory. Not only that, but effective late game defense seems to depend on early-game warfare. It's the only way to go into late-game wars with some citadels/generals and promoted units.

I sort of love the ideas of removing unit upgrades and introducing a healing cost. Agree it is too radical to put into the base VP, but I would like to try the game with those conditions. Another way to go -- just hypothetically -- would be to leave the military system intact as it is but introduce significant rewards for remaining at peace. Here are some ideas:

• City states could have quests for periods of nonviolence.
• Grant GA points for having space below your unit cap.
  
• Make territory of a captured city neutral while it is in resistance and make healing outside home territory deplete a civ's cumulative culture. This is a spinoff from Stalker()'s idea of a gold cost that I think is a bit more thematic. This would make aggressors more vulnerable to culture victory later in the game. It wouldn't make warfare less immediately effective (or cost any immediate culture / SPs) but would just introduce a long-term tradeoff.
  
• Denote aggressor(s) and defender(s) in each war.
  
• Allow civs to capture cities with a smaller warmonger penalty if their war was defensive.
  
• When a war is declared, grant scaling benefits to the defending civ(s) only if they have not recently been the aggressor in any war. These benefits should be fairly small and oriented to help them defend themselves, such as giving a free GG or unit spawn.
  
• Let cumulative culture contribute directly to defense, as it did in Civ 4. It could work like this: record the order in which tiles are added to a civlization's territory and let there be a combat malus or HP cost to enemy units stationed in older tiles. The idea would be to make late game defense easier for civs that haven't gained a lot of secondary benefits from early-game wars. Reduce this benefit by some % whenever a civ launches a war as an aggressor.
• Create a supply cost (food and/or gold) based on distance from the nearest owned city in addition to the supply cap. I would average this over a long period to make it still possible to launch an attack, but create an incentive to usually keep the military home. [Conquered cities would only count as home after constructing a courthouse.]
  
• Only allow units to be promoted for two or three eras. I should never have a tank that started out as a chariot archer.

All this is meant to keep warfare fun and viable, but also create an alternative path that is also viable, so that warfare isn't a dominant strategy. The benefit of war should be conquest itself, but currently there are too many powerful secondary benefits from being at war, such as making future defense so much easier with GGs and promoted units. I am also only speculating about what modmods might do, not suggesting this should be part of VP at this late stage.

 

[stii]

The denfensive/offensive war is already in unless I'm mistaken. You get lower warmonger penalties if you can bait them into declaring on you.

 

[Ranslee]

Warfare is a useful tool whatever VC you are going for. Even if I'm playing Korea, I tend to bait AI into declaring war on me because I know that I can kill many of their units without losing mine, I will get promotions and GGs. All relatively safe if you have a good defensive point with medics and forts.

Even if playing peacefully, you need an army. Civilizations that didn't have any got swept up by those that did.

As for domination being superior... it's true that it is, but it is also much more time-consuming and difficult in execution than other victory types.

 

[Melchizedek]

As for domination being superior... it's true that it is, but it is also much more time-consuming and difficult in execution than other victory types.

I don't think it's true that domination is superior, but that warfare is. Generally you gain the most benefits from being constantly at war with someone, even if you're not interested in conquering them.

 

[DeAnno]

With regard to not having a full army up to your cap while playing less aggressively, I find it's often something Tradition kind of baits you into doing. You have few cities, the tree only gives you +1 hammer per city (as opposed to 2 for progress or lots for Authority) and your capital is often busy with wonders. The net effect makes it very tempting to cheat on military and run low, and this can be a snowballing problem where you keep having trouble finding the time for investing in a full size army, even at the modest cap Tradition civs have.

Compare this to playing Authority, where even if there is nothing much to attack at the moment you usually have oodles of production just coming out of everywhere, enough to fund all kinds of boondoggles and speculative projects. In the early game especially the compound effect of having more cities and having all the bonus hammers per city as well really adds up, it's elegant how Authority is tempted into filling out their army and then will look around for something to do with it.

 

[chicorbeef]

Going up to supply cap is hard in the early game, but by the midgame, a Tradition players supply cap will be easy to fill, and it's likely much smaller than an Authority civ's supply cap, so you spend less production on units overall (which makes sense, since you need less critical mass for defending territory than you do for taking cities, and your territory is smaller as well).

That being said, I do struggle as Tradition to defend myself in the early game when I'm near a warmonger or expansionist civ, and I'm often pretty reluctant to sacrifice Settler production or wonder production/infrastructure to build an army, so I feel pressured to go Authority and/or warmonger just to defend myself. I'm sure it's possible to war to consolidate yourself without Authority, but I just like to commit to the warmonger route by going Authority in these situations.

 

[Stalker0]

I'm often pretty reluctant to sacrifice Settler production or wonder production/infrastructure to build an army, so I feel pressured to go Authority and/or warmonger just to defend myself.

So this is a bad habit you will want to break, and believe me as a peacenik myself its hard to do! But realistically, and as you go up in difficulty especially, warmongers gonna war. So if your next to a Zulu or Japan don't expect to stay quiet for long, yes having to delay infrastructure feels really bad, but being dead is even worse.

Also, even if your holding your own, there are little things like extra pillages they get off if you don't have your full army, which can also eat at your infrastructure in ways you may not think about. So it really is worth the investment.

 

[Noob Fanboy]

In the early game, I like to invest into two archers and one additional warrior and proactively clean barb camps even as progress (unless my start is really isolated). Then i get some army normally after completing the basic infrastructure of classical on one city (Library and Forge line). If i need i snatch one or two skirmishers after getting library barracks in the city, depending on my research path. We can all agree that in the early game it's difficult to be up to your supply cap, but in the mid game is important, just to avoid being seen as easy prey (or to fill the necessary number of cities that you need on progress for example)

 

[stii]

You don't always need units but sometimes you really do and the key is working out when you need to make defesive units and when you can get away without.

If you have a DoF with everyone bordering you, then you can safely build nothing the AI will never break a DoF early game and attack you. Same applies if there is only a narrow choke connecting you, they might attack you but they simply can't hurt you if there isn't enough space to push units through.

The AI doesn't like sharing borders with you so early on you can avoid this by settling towards them enough to preventing them settling a city in the gap. A 5-6 title gap between your cities and their closest one is ideal.

Sometimes war is unavoidable, some civs are pretty aggressive so then you want to build your cities towards them on hills and with rivers blocking their attack path. If you aren't sure if they will attack you can hedge by saving up gold then using it to rush walls/units if they do attack you.