Ignoring "Pledge to Protect" for stealing workers

[DocRock]

Hi guys,

In my current game I am playing a Continents Plus Map. After some research, I found out that most of the CS are on islands. And yes, that info was correct - there are only two on my continent.

Obviously, both had already someone who pledged to protect them. I decided to ignore Germanys pledge and grabbed two workers anyway. After that, I prepared for a war with Bismark. But that never happened.

A few turns later (pretty soon actually), the red modifier in the diplomacy vanished. Now we are friends.

I was just wondering - can you do this without any retaliation? It worked pretty good and I was really worth the two early workers it seems... So far, I always tried to find an unprotected CS.

 

[stormtrooper412]

I think it depends, but they hate repeat offenders more

 

[consentient]

The diplo hit for aggression against CS has been watered down since the last patch.

 

[DocRock]

Ok.. So the diplo hit is completely gone if it's not shown anymore, right? That's great... I guess I will not care about anyone protecting anything anymore when I need workers...

 

[Resipsa]

The diplo hit for aggression against CS has been watered down since the last patch.

It would be cool to get the CS quest to kill neighboring CS again it would be a good precursor to a Domination victory.

 

[joncnunn]

I'm fairly sure that aggression against CS early is just the generic one for DOWing any civ at all early, and that the EXTRA penalty for messing with a CS that a given AI has pledged to protect was not impacted at all.

 

[ThorHammerz]

Hi guys,

Obviously, both had already someone who pledged to protect them. I decided to ignore Germanys pledge and grabbed two workers anyway. After that, I prepared for a war with Bismark. But that never happened.

A few turns later (pretty soon actually), the red modifier in the diplomacy vanished. Now we are friends.

I was just wondering - can you do this without any retaliation? It worked pretty good and I was really worth the two early workers it seems... So far, I always tried to find an unprotected CS.

- "Pledge to protect" simply means "if push comes to shove, and the CS is not valuable enough to me, I won't care". If the AI does happen to care, the negative diplomatic modifier will decay and disappear after a little while anyway. However, multiple attacks against multiple "protected" city states will indeed trigger a stronger negative modifier, so it's best not to DoW all the protected city states within a short duration of time.

Declaring war on City States has 2 implications:

• You set off a "City State Warmonger Counter" (exclusive to just the City States themselves). If you declare war more than 2-3(?) times, you will be labelled an "Aggressor" - all city states will become hostile to you. This means that you will recieve quests less often (about half the frequency), and your influence will decay by about twice the normal amount. Declaring war for more than 4-5(?) times will have a chance of triggering a permanent state of war with all city states. The chance of this occuring after the threshold is reached is dependent on your distance to them.
  
• Capturing city states will have a noticeable warmonger penalty applied to you, as the formula for its calculation goes something like "(875 * Total cities in the world )/ (Number of remaining cities * projected number of cities in the world). Since "Number of remaining cities" will always be 1 (for the most part) when dealing with City states, you will take a sizeable penalty regardless. However in BNW, this has been halved.

 

[consentient]

Declaring war for more than 4-5(?) times will have a chance of triggering a permanent state of war with all city states. The chance of this occuring after the threshold is reached is dependent on your distance to them.

I tested this on a DCL save I had, where I controlled one continent, and had about 50% of the CS allied. I DoW'ed all non-allied CS and my allies just thought nothing of it. So either it doesn't happen exactly every time, or it only affects non-allied CS.

For all intents and purposes, it's suboptimal to DoW more than one CS in the early game because it affects influence too much. But with the changes since the last patch, it no longer matters which CS it is. (Although it's still best to DoW a Religious or Military CS if you meet them before any AI civ)

 

[beetle]

It would be cool to get the CS quest to kill neighboring CS again

When did this ever happen? Was it in Vanilla? Since then? I don’t remember ever seeing it!

 

[joncnunn]

When did this ever happen? Was it in Vanilla? Since then? I don’t remember ever seeing it!

Vanilla, and it was a waste of a city state quest which was so bad to fulfill due to diplomatic reasons that it basically meant once you got that quest, that city state would never give you a quest you'd want again.

It was replaced by the quest to bully a rival city state.

 

[reddishrecue]

Vanilla, and it was a waste of a city state quest which was so bad to fulfill due to diplomatic reasons that it basically meant once you got that quest, that city state would never give you a quest you'd want again.

It was replaced by the quest to bully a rival city state.

Bullying a rival city state was so complicated to me that I hardly ever did it. This city state quest, however, I did once though and Iwas using mMongolia, too. Isolated city states were so easy to do because they didn'tget any ssupport from their ally and that was also the way I got to bully that particularcity state. What Igot from it? Gold from the scared city state and city state points from the city state that asked me to bully the city state.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

it has been awhile since i did this but im curious if the diplo modifier is different when you DoW a CS YOU agreed to Pledge to. is there an extra 'backstab' modifier with the AI for DoWing your own Protected CS? Maybe if you do it too quickly after the Pledge?

This opportunity sometimes arises when I have, say, 3 nearby CSs and I pledge 2 of them knowing i plan to steal from the third, but they never put a worker out and the others do sooner or in better stealing opportunities.

 

[beetle]

No, there is no diplo penalty (with AI or CS) for DoWing a CS you just pledged. I try to avoid doing it (just because, RP), but I have looked for and failed to find any indication of effect. As it happens, I just did it recently...

If you declare war more than 2-3(?) times, you will be labeled an "Aggressor" - all city states will become hostile to you... Declaring war for more than 4-5(?) times will have a chance of triggering a permanent state of war with all city states. The chance of this occurring after the threshold is reached is dependent on your distance to them.

That is new information to me. I think before the Halloween patch this was much deterministic. With the 2nd CS dow, all city states became wary. The 4th CS dow always caused the perma-war.