Hard to make peace?

[sinenomine]

I'm playing on cheiftan, and I'm ahead in research. I ended up starting a war with an anemic civilization to get access to coal since I didn't want to give them a boat-load of advances just to bring them to the point that they can trade (They've got a cluster of coal resources). The lightning strike of four galleons full of cavalry was succesful, but.....

I ended up starting a world war. Before this things were completely peaceful. Now all of a sudden Russia (the invadee) decides to sign a mutual protection pact with France (quite a populous nation that I was on good terms with). Now the French declare war. Then everyone joins in on one side or another.

Here's my problem. I've got what I want so I want to meet and make peace. So I contact the Russians and settle with them. I even gave them a little extra for goodwill.

But the French woudn't see me.

So next turn Russia declared war again. They woudln't see me. Made peace with the French though....

Next turn France declared war again.

Waited a couple of turns when no one would see me. Then the same cycle happens again. Argh!

It took more than 100 years to finally stop the wars. Observations:

1) Passive defense doesn't help. Unless I was about to attack a city, no one would talk to me.

2) 3rd party peace treaties or 3-way negotiations would be useful.

3) The sudden descent into warfare was interesting. Perhaps true to life, but I think a little too hard to do anything about.

Any suggestions? Anyone else have this trouble?

 

[malphigian]

I'm no expert by any means, but I'd say the best way to avoid this situation is:
-Make sure you don't do any backstabbing (I think this means things like sign a peace and then attack the next turn), the AI remembers this.

-Make sure ANYONE you are dealing with is bribed up to at least polite status. Handing them small amounts of gold, world maps, etc will do this. Even just doing regular trade deals will do this. If you make peace, but they are still annoyed with you, its unlikely to last long.

Thats about all I can think of.

 

[treadwin]

Research is not everything (just almost everything), you need culture as well.

I've noticed however that if you get too far ahead the AI will turn against you, to try and slow you down. You need to hurt them to make them stop. Take one of their cities and then see what they say ! You cannot just be passive.

 

[Xevion]

On chieftan you can be passive. Watch as the enemy longbowmen run aimlessly into your mechanical infantry and shrug . As long as you have at least 2 in each city, you can completely ignore 99 percent of attacks against you in chieftan if you advanced quickly enough.

 

[sinenomine]

It's not so much that I couldn't handle the attacks. In fact they weren't really doing much to me.

My comments about being passive were just saying that being passive doesn't seem to encourage them to speak to your envoy.

I was just a little annoyed by the mechanics of trying to make peace against two mutually-protected countries. When one would talk to me, the other wouldn't (even I wasn't doing anything to them). They'd ping-pong back and forth making it impossible to stop the war.

 

[ironfang]

The one thing that I have noticed is that unless the country you are invading is extremely disliked by the world, you will need to grease palms and make military alliance pacts against the target civilization. Even if you dont expect them to be any help, you still need to get everyone you can get on your side. Reason being. If you dont, you may find yourself at war for a long time against kingdoms you never have contact with. This brings on war weariness/culture slow down. And the worse part about that is you cant contact the warring civ to make peace. So... in the style of WWI... make alliances prior to actually attacking.

ironfang