How much war success do you need to get techs in a peace deal?

[jnebbe]

I had this idea in a game where Darius had gotten alphabet very early but was only at 3 cities. I was wondering if you could gift him a city, which he would accept no matter where it is since he's below 4 cities, then you capture it and ideally get tech in a peace deal. But when I tried it out he wanted one of my cities for peace instead.
Wondering if there's any way this could be worth doing. You'd probably want it to grow to size 2 first so it doesn't auto-raze and hope they don't build an archer before that, maybe gifting workers and immediately capturing them for extra war success? Maybe there's some way to get a high to conversion in early game by doing this

 

[sampsa]

Pretty sure power ratio matters a lot, too. With a favorable power ratio you'd rather just take his cities though.

 

[jnebbe]

Pretty sure power ratio matters a lot, too. With a favorable power ratio you'd rather just take his cities though.

Should've mentioned this, the point is that the ai is really far away but you can still gift a city since ai will accept any city if they are at 3 or less cities.

 

[sampsa]

Very interesting trickery. Cool if there is a way to make it work.

 

[Gumbolt]

There is a way to get them to capitulate from turn 1 if you have 40 war score success. You would of needed to gift 4 cities for this and recapture. Would it work for free techs not sure. You also get 3 points for each successful battle. If you lose a unit then the Ai might consider they are winni8ng the war. Think power ratio is important. How much this impacys techs for trades not sure. Try it! My guess re capturing 1 city is not enough.

Okay tried gifting 4 cities but failed. Failed! Having the AI on one city normally helps as the power and land ratios are much better.

 

[jnebbe]

I did some testing which turned out extremely interesting

There's 2 ways you could build war success, capturing cities or gifting and killing units.

I think gifting cities is the much worse option. In my tests I could gift 4 cities to a far away ai before they would start refusing them. Capturing all 4 would give 40 war success, but they would only give me Mysticism+Masonry for peace. So you're trading 400 for 210. Not good. You also have to consider either capturing cities immediately at size 1 which will autoraze them, or wait for them to grow to size 2 before capturing, which will take longer and also risk the ai builds an archer before it grows which could complicate the capture, but you keep the city.

You could maybe grow to size 2 yourself and then gift, since it will not drop to size 1 once you gift it, but then you risk the far away ai settling it's 4th city which prevents you from gifting a far away city.



The other way to build war success would be gifting scouts to an ai and then killing them.

With this method it looks like each war success gives 5-8, so each scout killed gives 15-24
The cost per war success varies a lot, it could be as much as 30 per 3 success (15 for a scout and 15 for a warrior to kill it) You could reuse the warriors but it will also cost maintenance while building up numbers. Something you could try is gifting a city on a peninsula chokepoint and then trap the scouts, which would let you use less warriors, maybe down to 20ish per 3 success?

If you wanted to try the scout method you wouldn't even need to mess with gifting cities; you can just gift scouts to any neighboring ai. In theory you could build up to 50 scouts by T100 or whatever while developing your empire as normal, then gift them to the ai to release the 1200 bomb.



Power seems to matter but not by much and you're probably better off not worrying about it. For example killing 64 scouts = 192 war success = 1622, but the same 192 success then gave me 2514 when I WBed some modern armors and my power jumped to x30.0 the ai but obviously you're not going to get anywhere near that power in a real game. That's what's causing the 2 outliers which should be ignored.

Fun test, want to try this in a real game

Spoiler :

 

[Qactus]

... Something you could try is gifting a city on a peninsula chokepoint and then trap the scouts, which would let you use less warriors, maybe down to 20ish per 3 success?...

Reminds me of last SGOTM where Home Slices used a trapped Scout to farm XP and GG points each turn with a Catapult.

 

[Gumbolt]

Nice post. You lose points if you lose a combat. 2points? Not sure what happens if a unit withdraws, In fact one lost combat can stop some ai talking for a while. Which Ai did you test this on? Did you try Toku? If you try AI like Indians they will talk peace straight away.

Perhaps it does not matter and the techs from peace deals are always the same but some AI just take longer to talk.

Yes I remember the last SGOTM well. Home Slices always find ways to break the game. Think that could be the last SGOTM now as the staff to run it have so much on. Shame.

 

[Whisker]

Do retreating catapults also gain you war success or 'only' xp and GG points?

 

[sampsa]

Do retreating catapults also gain you war success or 'only' xp and GG points?

No war success from retreating. Would be pretty over-powered if you think about it.