Asoka & Capitulation...

[obsolete]

I just lost a game I was 100% guaranteed to win, because I lost UN diplo vote by a couple votes...

No, that part isn't what pisses me off, I KNEW the votes were coming soon and were close.. so I attacked Asoka. I even took out his capital the previous round, and ALL other cities but ONE was left... I purposely didn't kill his last city as I wanted him as a vassal...

Despite I nuked him down to a population of just 4... every single tile was irradiated... and non-workable... and I whittled him down to just 1 defender... he STILL WOULD NOT CAPITULATE!? I had a whole army parked right outside of his city.

He was happy to talk peace, but he would not vassal.

I've been away too long... what did I miss here to prevent getting screwed so badly? I thought I knew the mechanics inside and out but I must have still forgot a few little secrets.

 

[lymond]

Were you in other wars? Did Asoka cap to someone and you did not realize it?

post the save

edit: And if this is in regards to the game I think it may be, capping in OCC is much harder since you only have 1 city. Your relative power is may be the biggest impact. I've seen that before quite a few times when doing OCC war games, and it is pretty frustrating.

 

[futurehermit]

vassal mechanics are one thing I would've liked to have seen improved before support for the game was complete

 

[obsolete]

Holly f($@.... it's Futurehermit!

 

[Dhoomstriker]

You need 40 or more War Success.
Losing battles means a reduction in War Success (-2?), while winning offensive battles means a gain in War Success (+3?), and winning defensive battles means a gain (+1?), but a smaller gain, in War Success. Capturing a City means a gain (+10?) and you probably had the right idea with nuking, as I believe that Nukes also add some War Success (+10?).
So, if you lost a lot of battles, that AI won't capitulate to you until you find a way to increase your War Success. If that AI can't produce more troops, and you don't have Nukes, you won't be able to easily and quickly earn additional War Success.

You need to have enough Power.
Asoka has a iVassalPowerModifier value of 0, in a range from -20 to 50.
AIs at -20 include Catherine, De Gaulle, Gandhi, and Mansa Musa.
AIs at 20 include Alexander, Augustus, Julius, Justinian, Napoleon, and Shaka.
AIs at 50 include Genghis Khan and Sitting Bull.
I'm not sure what the ratio is, but a recent thread on Land Targets may explain why you need a ridiculously larger amount of Power if you don't have some of your squares being adjacent to an AI's squares (although I wasn't clear if this point applied to both Capitulation and Peace Vassals, I have to assume that both cases apply, as I remember reading that a lot of the same code gets reused for either type of Vassal arrangement).

You cannot be too close to Domination Victory.
I think that 50%+ Land Area or 50% World Population might have the AI telling you a misleading statement along the lines of: "You are too powerful for us."

You can't create an impossible Peace or War situation.
So, for example, if a AI #1 is in a 10-turn Peace Treaty with AI #2 (sometimes AIs Cease Fire and sometimes they sign Peace Treaties--I think that if a tech gets exchanged, it will definitely be a Peace Treaty, but I'm not sure how the AIs choose between these two options) and you are at war with AI #2, then AI #1 is unable to get into a war with AI #1. Since becoming your Vassal means following your War and Peace statuses with other AIs, including AI #2, AI #1 is unable to become your Vassal as long as its enforced Peace Treaty with AI #2 hasn't worn off and as long as you continue to remain at war with AI #2.
Other, subtle diplomacy might come into play here, too, that may prevent Vassallisation, such as a Defensive Pact that you'd be asking AI #1 to break by becoming your Vassal.

The number of irradiated squares is not used in the Vassal calculation.

 

[elitetroops]

You need 40 or more War Success.
Losing battles means a reduction in War Success (-2?), while winning offensive battles means a gain in War Success (+3?), and winning defensive battles means a gain (+1?), but a smaller gain, in War Success. Capturing a City means a gain (+10?) and you probably had the right idea with nuking, as I believe that Nukes also add some War Success (+10?).
So, if you lost a lot of battles, that AI won't capitulate to you until you find a way to increase your War Success. If that AI can't produce more troops, and you don't have Nukes, you won't be able to easily and quickly earn additional War Success.

WAR_SUCCESS_DEFENDING: 3
WAR_SUCCESS_ATTACKING: 4
WAR_SUCCESS_UNIT_CAPTURING: 1 (Workers/Settlers)
WAR_SUCCESS_CITY_CAPTURING: 10

And as you mentioned, nuking someone is worth 10.

No reduction from losing a battle, but the opponent gets war success (3 or 4) for winning the battle. To capitulate an AI you need 40 war success more than your opponent, so effectively this is -3 or -4 for you on your quest to +40 war success.

Unit capturing means capturing a worker/settler in addition to the unit you are attacking. If you kill an archer that escorts a worker, it is +4 for killing archer and +1 for capturing the worker. However, if you capture a lone worker, you get +4 for that. If you take a stack with 3 workers, it's +4 for the first one and +1 for each of the additional 2 workers. I might be mistaken here, but I believe you also get +1 for each ship you sink when you capture a city.

 

[Gumbolt]

One of the issues for vassels for me is when they look at power they look at average power of your other vassels? So keeping an AI with 1-2 cities may well slow down other Ai from capitulaing. Any Ai with 1-2 cities will have a very low power rating.

This got quite frustrating on a recent game I played as Toku required me to reduce him from 13 to 4 cities before he would cap. The main issue being his power rating was higher than nearly all of my vassels. That and fact he had nearly 100 units scattered over his land. The fact my power rating was above his mattered little. Fact I had 30-40 cities too mattered little.

 

[obsolete]

You cannot be too close to Domination Victory.

Well that is new to me, because I remember years ago I used to get domination, etc. the next turn due to someone vassaling to me... I even remember stating how stupid this was of an AI to do.

Maybe I'm getting confused with conquest here, or is that Domination thing just a rule of thumb, and the AI's don't always follow the rule?

In my OCC games, I can not CAPTURE a city, only Raze. But I wonder if a Raze still COUNTS as a capture... it should but who knows with Firaxis logic...

I will dig around in the auto-save library later and find the save...it should be there somewhere.

---
* Edit *
Well this just sucks... checked now.. I have the initial save.. and the final (where Asoka was already dead). I do not have an inbetween where he was alive and I was trying to vassal him.

I learned a lesson here, next time something weird or interesting happens. SAVE it immediately.

I will assume for the sake of sanity, that perhaps if I dropped just one more nuke on him it would have tipped the scale...(but there was really no point)... but honestly... He was down to no pop, and 1 unit, with my entire army outside... I had RAPED him.... still makes no sense. Maybe things are different in OCC I just don't know...

Speaking of, I also remember my vassals refused to build settlers after I vassaled them in previous games. I am assuming it's a bug/glitch where the AI thinks that it also is playing with OCC rules.

 

[obsolete]

Well just hold on there Gumbolt.. you mean when I used to gift my 65 obsolete cuirassiers/knights/cavalry to my vassal to up his power and let him take care of the unit-cost maintenance... it really wasn't upping his power?

 

[Gumbolt]

The issue for me is always the final AI. Sure you can gift units and cities back. I think it was just one of those games. There was a lot of land!!

 

[RedKirrHelper]

I just lost a game

Well done. Nice to hear it

So far, all delayed capitulations I saw (videos or posts) were due to heavy losses or something like this. However, if you losses were very small then there are other assumption. Can AIs not willing to talk about capitulation in the same manner like he refuses to talk after the beginning of the war? Can it be that in the first turns of the war there is an additional coefficient for the limit of war succes? Also - can it be some additional penalties because of nuking or not liking you too much?

 

[shpeka]

I learned a lesson here, next time something weird or interesting happens. SAVE it immediately.

I have a different solution:

; The maximum number of autosaves kept in the directory before being deleted.
MaxAutoSaves = 200

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 1

I don't feel the frequent saving decreases game performance significantly.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Well that is new to me, because I remember years ago I used to get domination, etc. the next turn due to someone vassaling to me... I even remember stating how stupid this was of an AI to do.

I'm probably remembering an AI refusing to join as a Peace Vassal due to being too close to Domination. Vassalling through Capitulation shouldn't have this restriction, as plenty of players have capitulated their way into Domination, often by accident when trying to win by Conquest.

I will assume for the sake of sanity, that perhaps if I dropped just one more nuke on him it would have tipped the scale...(but there was really no point)... but honestly... He was down to no pop, and 1 unit, with my entire army outside... I had RAPED him.... still makes no sense. Maybe things are different in OCC I just don't know...

It's possible that an extra Nuke could have helped, either for increasing your relative War Success or for further reducing his Power. I don't know if Nukes count in the Power calculation, but assuming that they do, launching more Nukes would have further reduced your Power, possibly pushing you further away from climbing above the relative Power ratio needed.

Or, maybe it had to do with you not having enough Land Area compared to Asoka's? I don't play a lot of OCCs, so I haven't really had to face a case of having a small amount of Land Area relative to the AI's Land Area, but it's possible that need double the amount of Land Area that the AI has.

Speaking of, I also remember my vassals refused to build settlers after I vassaled them in previous games. I am assuming it's a bug/glitch where the AI thinks that it also is playing with OCC rules.

That's a pretty weird, but believable glitch. For all that we know, it may have even been intentionally coded that way, either to make it harder for Peace Vassals to break away from you or to prevent you from too easily winning a Domination Victory in a OCC game.

I wonder if the AI Vassal will get to keep (and use) their existing Settlers that they had already built prior to becoming your Vassal.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The mouse-over reasoning for not vassaling is pretty important to determining why the game concludes you can't make him a vassal. I would interpret answers like "we're doing fine on our own" very differently from "joining a war on your side is not possible for us" or some such.

 

[Tristan_C]

I'm probably remembering an AI refusing to join as a Peace Vassal due to being too close to Domination. Vassalling through Capitulation shouldn't have this restriction, as plenty of players have capitulated their way into Domination, often by accident when trying to win by Conquest.

My experience agrees with yours that exceeding 1 of the dom conditions prevents peacevassaling via "You are too powerful for us." I'm sure it does not-at-all apply to capitulation. Note the exact thresholds for domination are dynamic— no idea on the formula but I expect more players, fewer cities per player, and higher total land utilization shift the values down.

To make things smoother for a domination win, I expect one should try to acquire peacevassals just prior to breaking out. I hate the things, so I don't do this, but that's probably irrational. They do not renounce vassalage down the road with the mechanism for declining it initially ("You are too powerful").

I can't even figure out how to snatch a conquest win before domination. The only times I can think of would be maps with inherently low land utilization. Like OCC. Or the Terra map script with its "empty" new world.

 

[rah]

I can't even figure out how to snatch a conquest win before domination. The only times I can think of would be maps with inherently low land utilization. Like OCC. Or the Terra map script with its "empty" new world.

Yes, for OCC it's easy. The other way is when you're real quick taking out the last AIs. You have to finish them off before a lot of the cities you took come out of revolt. It can sometimes be a matter of just a turn or two. But if the final two civs had large cities that take awhile to come out of revolt, you can do it. (I usually play with no vassals so that doesn't muck it up)

 

[Pangaea]

You can also start razing cities, but then you run the risk of settlers popping up and triggering domination at some point, which happened to me in a HoF game that was otherwise going quite well

 

[rah]

Of course you could just disable the dom victory condition.

 

[Pangaea]

Of course you could just disable the dom victory condition.

True. For regular games that would work well. For competitive games, not so much

 

[rah]

yep.

I leave it enabled in my regular games because it usually saved time in the end game, but thanks to religious reading of the advice here, I'm getting quicker in the end game and am actually getting some conquest wins prior to triggering the domination limits.

THANKS TO ALL OF YOU FOR THAT. (even you freaky HOF players )