Collateral Damage

[ScribJellydonut]

I was playing a game the other day in which Isabella declared war on me and started to move her units through Hammurabi's territory. In a first act of defense, I naturally contacted Hammurabi, who was the same religion as me but a different religion from Isabella. Surprisingly, Hammurabi refused to stop trading with her, an act which irritated me and later in the game spelled his doomed as I captured his three major cities in under ten turns, but I digress. What ensued was a war between Isabella and myself, fought in Hammurabi's territory. I started drawing a parallel to real life, and thought:

"What if Canada declared war on Mexico, and began to fight a ground war in the United States?" It seemed silly to me, so here is my suggestion, and IMO it's a pretty damn good one, to fix that problem.

Every time two units fight on a tile there is a chance that any improvement on that tile is destroyed. For different tiles, maybe the odds are different, and possibly even dependent on the battle(if it's a close battle between two tank units, then the odds are great, but if it's a complete slaughter where a navy seal takes out an archer, obviously in this case collateral damage would be limited greatly). The same should apply for units in a city, so that if in this case Isabella were using Hammurabi's cities for defense, then maybe buildings would be destroyed in a battle. This would fix the problem of a third party not caring if someone was waring in their territory(which is a silly notion to begin with). The only problem I see is that maybe the AI players can't be programmed to weigh this factor properly into their foreign relations.

Thoughts?

 

[CivMyWay]

Sounds good.
Alternatively, if a third party civ was at peace with both fighting civs, they could automatically close borders for military units of those two civs (which is probably also realistic).

 

[Camikaze]

I think a simple solution to the obviously unrealistic aspect of warfare (examples of which include fighting within neutral cities) would be the imposition of a new type of open borders agreement, which you need to be able to conduct warfare with a third-party within the neutral nation's borders. Either that or just outright ban combat within a neutral civ's territory, although this could lead to problems such as a line of warriors across the territory of a neutral civ blocking the advance of tanks. So I prefer a new type of open borders agreement.