ancient era war/peace

[Tekamthi]

a civ/VP thought experiment... what if all civs started at war rather than peace?

to make this work, we'd maybe need a few additional conditions:

1. war weariness is disabled until a peace treaty has been broken (ie these initial wars dont incur any weariness, only wars between civs that previously had a peace agreement incur weariness) OR game advances to renaissance era (or first discovery of printing press)
2. to make a peace treaty for the first time, one civ must have discovered at least one the opponent's cities
3. AI adjusted to seek initial peace only for specific purpose rather than as default state

the case in favor of this concept:

1. logical consistency:
   • consider the case where player declares war the same turn as meeting the opponent... the war declaration prompt implies we are breaking an agreement, but how could an agreement exist if neither knew of the other's existence?
   • from the opponent's point of view, if a group of ppl show up in the wilderness, you've never even been to where they are from (not just never been to their city, you don't even know the land it stands on exists!), you cannot write nor record anything beyond your memory... how do you even remember you're at peace with these people if you encounter another group of them hundreds of years later? if they attack you, how do you know what city they are from to also be at war with it? how do you know they're not barbarians? these early interactions only makes sense if war is the default state via which you treat everyone you encounter, and peace the special case once you've learned a little about them, and them about you
2. improved value of ancient era UU's:
   • ancient era UU's tend to be underperforming and/or need major imbalances in combat abilities to make useful, as there is not much purpose to early war declarations and many competing interests to building military
3. historical alignment:
   • as far as wikipedia and the other google-able sources are concerned, the first recorded peace treaty only occurred around 1300 BCE -- ie classical era
   • concepts of international law and well-enforced treaties truly only became commonplace in the middle ages or later
4. partial fix for stuck recon
   • if peace treaties are only formed on an as-needed basis, recon will become trapped by borders less often
5. better representation of ancient naval interactions
   • nobody used to respect ocean/coast borders, even if at peace -- the notion of water borders becomes all the more strange when we think of the situation where borders of a yet undiscovered civ with borders belonging to a non-coastal city sometimes block further travel, and even discovery of said civ
6. human/AI parity
   • to best observe this effect, try spawning 43 civ on a huge continents map -- everyone is right on top of each other from the start, and you can likely use your highly-mobile VP recon to snuff out an AI settler, as they're prone to moving them adjacent to their warrior, if they do not found immediately -- conversely the AI will never ever declare war on you to take your starting settler even if you walk it right up to them -- starting in a default at war state means the more optimal set of AI instructions are active during these early turns, when they should be
7. exploration depth
   • exploration will be drawn out and interact with diplomacy -- status quo recon can wander too freely, even the surge in barbs in recent versions don't really make exploration feel dangerous so much as a time sink -- the IRL ancient world was a dangerous place to go on long-distance adventures in
8. diplomacy depth
   • negotiating the first peace treaty becomes an achievement rather than something taken for granted

 

[balparmak]

I don't think this can ever make into VP, but I like Endless/Humankind approach where everyone starts in a cold war, and there are no closed borders until a certain tech/era.

 

[Tekamthi]

Endless/Humankind approach where everyone starts in a cold war

i'll have to give these a try -- recently picked up civ 6 on mobile its my 1st new 4x in a decade lol

the vp war AI is probably a little too biased towards combat for this early era to really feel right in a default war state... past versions of civ had a 'ceasefire' iirc which sort of served this role, if that were possible i'd be in favor

 

[detroitrex]

one concern would be that international trade predates peace treaties by millenia. As mentioned, really what is needed is a ceasefire/cold war state and borders that work like city-state borders--permeable, but people get cranky if you're camping in their backyard. All the antics you could get up to should ideally funnel back into the diplo system and the disincentive should be escalation: as peace treaties should be locked behind a tech, so should formal wars.

 

[Fluffball]

From memory wasn't there a similar system in in an earlier game in the series, gonna say 3 but could be wrong...where you could attack other civs in neutral territory without declaring war and you could walk through borders and the owner had to tell you to declare war or get lost.


From memory this was just generally annoying, particularly the open borders part where I remember having to kick the same unit out of my borders each turn. And also better exploited by the human. e.g. the human was better at fighting outside of borders without having to DoW and if you had a fast unit it would kick the unit to the nearest neutral tile and thus as long as you made it over half way you would get put on the other side.

While it was more 'realistic' I think these concepts were scrapped for game balance reasons in that realistic vs simulation balancing act.

I.e. sound realistic and would be nice to have, but when it is actually in the game it is not actually that fun so you simulate the idea/concept.