Is it worth being passive?

[Archon_Wing]

Warmongering penalties actually encourage more aggressive warring. It has not actually stopped anyone from warring, and only punishes people that don't want to war as much.

* Warmongering penalties are lightest during ancient era, encouraging you to rush early and grab land violently. This overwhelming skews the focus to war early to get what you need to win and be done with it. This also means that taking cities in later eras or going to war at all is not as advantageous. So if you were to retaliate against a particular aggressor not early on, then your diplomacy will suffer.

* If you're going all out war, it's not like you care what people think anyways. Besides declarations of friendships, people hating you a lot means very little if your military is stronger.

*Joint War Mechanic. Currently the only way to get an ally is to joint war is to initiate the war, which once again, favors the aggressor. In previous games of Civ, you could receive help after you get attacked. In Civ 4 and 5, the AI leaders would care if you attack their friends; here it is restricted to the agenda of a few leaders, and rarely results in any action-- they will just ignore it as you pick them off one by one.


* "We are winning. They fear us". At this point, if they're going to hate you anyways, well, who cares?

My suggestions:

* Normalize era based warmongering penalties to be closer together. While this may not be as realistic, it is dumb to favor early warring in a game that already favors it so much.

Reasoning: Early War is too good.

* Allow War Colations. Joining a war in progress on behalf of the aggressor counts as a formal war and joining on behalf of the defender counts as a protectorate war. Unlocked at Political Philosophy.

Reasoning: Getting someone to join in a war in progress shouldn't be that hard. Also, I feel that in Civ 6, wars between other AIs are irrelevant. Both 4 and 5 had AI leaders trying to drag players into their conflicts.

*Protectorate War should be unlocked at Defensive Tactics.

Reasoning: It comes wayyyy too late.

*Allow Defensive pacts with declared friends.

Reasoning: Should be more common.

* Mandatory Occupation time regardless of peace or not. Captured cities lose all "gained" tiles that were bought or gained through culture. Districts and wonders excepted.

Reasoning: Captured Cities tend to work as good as the ones you built really fast besides those pillaged districts that you may not even need.

*Greatly reduce War Weariness in lands you own (but are not occupied). No War Weariness for defending on your own land, if you didn't initiate the war.

Reasoning: Give more advantage to the defender.

* Eliminating a Civ results automatically spawns Rebels in all their previously owned cities.

Reasoning: A small disincentive to wipe out your neighbor early, most likely not relevant later on. Genocide tends to be a good reason for revolt.

* As in Civ 5, City States will band together if you attack them to much.

Reasoning: City States get wrecked too easily.

* Cap, "We are winning. They fear us" to -10, but also allow Civs to adopt deceptive stances as was in V where they may backstab you anyways if it's in their agenda. All civs will attack anyone they have denounced if they are going to win.

Reasoning: Better managed diplomacy should result in a smoother ending, while ignoring it should be punished. Also, make the endgame more exciting.

* Resurrecting a dead civ gives +50 with the resurrected civ (decays 1 per turn), and +5 globally if you didn't wipe them out in the first place.

Reasoning: Why would you resurrect a dead civ anyways?

 

[Kimurae]

If they wanted to offset the strength of early conquest but keep it semi-real:
* Change Domination victory to be population/land mass percentage.
* Improve the combat AI.
* In ancient era: cities are automatically razed, including the capitols.
* In medieval era, add a mechanic that lets you fabricate a claim on a city, so you don't get warmonger penalties for taking just that city.
* After ancient era, you can still choose to raze even capitols. Any occupied city, is still considered the enemy's until they give it to you via diplomacy.
* Adopt some sort of warscore mechanic like Paradox has, to use in diplomacy. (If they already do, make it easier to see).

 

[Archon_Wing]

Change Domination victory to be population/land mass percentage.

Oh that. Yea would be nice, or have it as either or conquest capital or enough land.

 

[universecreep]

If they wanted to offset the strength of early conquest but keep it semi-real:
* Change Domination victory to be population/land mass percentage.

* Adopt some sort of warscore mechanic like Paradox has, to use in diplomacy. (If they already do, make it easier to see).

Excellent suggestions.

 

[Victoria]

I would disagree however, that peaceful play is passive play.

Agreed, I was being cheeky with my words, it is misleading, apologies

I've caused rivals with too big cities to spawn rebels just by declaring war on them

Something else must have happened, you get no war weariness from declaration of war.

There is nothing really important that stops you just leaving a war footing in place for 200 turns just in case you want to attack someone again.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Even as a chain-attacker, I will say that the concept of a defender suffering more WW and warmonger penalties for performing identical actions to the attacker is broken by design if it's true. What kind of inane BS is that? Someone attacks you for a city, and winning + taking a city instead gives the defender MORE penalties? That's implausible bullcrap, but it also throws a wrench in risk/reward proposition of building up to attack someone even when considered strictly for gameplay. If Firaxis is okay with choices like this there's little reason to hope for better design/implementations in the future. Maybe it's just bugged? I know...we should check the civlopedia for the rules, surely it will tell the player how the game works...

...

 

[Victoria]

if it's true

Oh, its true. I can show you log pastes of both situations if you want proof

I am more neutral in feeling than ye.
I mean I denounced France for looking into my parlour but she ignores my denouncements anyway. So I get tired of this, plan an attack and then formally announce it. My country is ready was aware and hates France for her sneaky attitude. The French people however are suddenly at war and surprised by my formal attack. The human logic is there but does it translate well into a game... not really but hey ho, I'll just go to war with everyone at the beginning when war declarations are free and just refuse peace... after all the real stupidity is there is no punishment for prolonged war (as in real weariness)

As the WW thread shows, its easy enough to ditch WW anyway, who need ED?

 

[Archon_Wing]

Something else must have happened, you get no war weariness from declaration of war.

Well, I think I may have shot at their city a bit, but the damage was superficial. Don't think I killed anything. All I know is that my spy could see rebels in their capital all of a sudden.

I guess they must have attacked my scouting units? Or maybe they shot back at my ships?

 

[Victoria]

I guess they must have attacked my scouting units? Or maybe they shot back at my ships?

As I understand it, rebellion is based on chance so they may have been miserable to start with. Also amenities are not just for war, pillaged luxuries, overgrown cities etc will cause this.

 

[stealth_nsk]

If they wanted to offset the strength of early conquest but keep it semi-real:

Realism is a bad, bad goal for computer game. Gameplay first, immersion second. Chess are the best strategic game of ages, after all.

* Change Domination victory to be population/land mass percentage.

Tall gameplay should be not optimal, but still possible. This suggestion lets tall players to lose to domination without ever going to war.

* Improve the combat AI.

Could you clarify what you mean by "improving" the AI? Current combat AI works quite well in its goal of providing challenge.
The only problem with it is - the challenge level of various acombat areas (naval, land and air) isn't even on the same difficulty level, but that's the problem of priorities, not "improvement".
Making AI look smarter (similar to Vox Populi) is huge work for some immersion and zero gameplay value. Definetely not a goal. If developers will want more challenging gameplay for selected users, they could add more difficulty levels with more AI bonuses.

* In ancient era: cities are automatically razed, including the capitols.

Different game mechanics for different eras are not great thing. Complexity for the sake of complexity.
Ability to raze capitols is a good thing, but it requires significant changes in domination victory conditions and all other victory conditions tested in Civ games before have much bigger problems.
Also, I don't see the value of auto-razing cities. If tha'ts some form of limiting early-game conquest, I'd say bigger unrest would work just as fine.

* In medieval era, add a mechanic that lets you fabricate a claim on a city, so you don't get warmonger penalties for taking just that city.

Sounds exploitable as hell to me. Let me guess, a EU series fan?

* Adopt some sort of warscore mechanic like Paradox has, to use in diplomacy. (If they already do, make it easier to see).

Oh, yes. Guessed it right. Paradox games are good historical simulators but they are much less strategical games than Civ. Let those be different - Sims are played by more people than Chess, but that's not the reason to convert Chess games to Sims.

 

[Archon_Wing]

As I understand it, rebellion is based on chance so they may have been miserable to start with. Also amenities are not just for war, pillaged luxuries, overgrown cities etc will cause this.

Probably they were miserable to begin with. Though starting a war and killing a few of their units may be enough to push them over the edge I guess.

This happened similarly in my most recent game. China was incredibly ahead (well, more like I was really behind) and was ahead in culture and despite being behind in science built more space projects. And despite him having no real army, I didn't really have a means to easily invade him especially since I was caught up with England was pretty aggressive the whole game despite being inferior; she must have suicided like 20 crossbows into infantry or something.

since his city defenses were already decently high and most of his best cities were inland-- not to mention I had no ports towards him either. I could attack those outlying cities to the west which were on coast but losing those isn't really slowing him down. So I attacked his outlying cities to the west and then my spies sees this... mission accomplished. His army strength and science was decimated (though honestly, I think it is stupid that rebels can have the most advanced things you can have.... sometimes that can mean a stronger army than you could actually have.)

My entire "invasion" army. All 5 units. And no, I never even managed to take Beijing. The defenses came down but Qin offered a bunch of art for peace and the damage was done anyways.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Tall gameplay should be not optimal, but still possible. This suggestion lets tall players to lose to domination without ever going to war.

There is nothing wrong with that. Not even from a gameplay perspective.

If you allow a runaway and don't stop it, you lose, "tall" or not. Playing tall doesn't protect you from religious, space, or culture and there's on clear reasoning why it should protect you from domination either. If someone gets outplayed they should generally lose. "Tall" could still win by getting space or another VC done before domination threshold is reached.

Sounds exploitable as hell to me. Let me guess, a EU series fan?

If Civ is going to lift the casus belli process from EU, it should probably do so while bringing some actual gameplay benefits that system gives to EU, rather than just making the system because reasons.

Frankly, the CB system in Civ 6 is a joke compared to EU 4, in spite of all EU 4's problems it still handles this thing better. CB in Civ 6 means little, has no impact on what you can take, and at present only minimal impact on the consequences of you taking it. It doesn't change the tactical considerations of war (like war goal can in EU 4), doesn't change the relative cost of demands, and has precisely zero method of compelling a peace deal from the losing side beyond completely wiping them out. Civ 6 implemented a CB system without bothering to actually bring along the mechanics that give a CB system meaningful strategy for the player.

It's not like EU 4 is particularly good at this. They made the stabhit offer model worse than it used to be in earlier patches, and the AI's modifier for "length of war" is cancerous to EU 4, serving as a stopgap at best and otherwise creating annoying situations and causing AI vs AI wars to waste tons of resources. And you know what? It's still better than Civ 6, probably because it's still an active attempt at a mechanic rather than the Civ 6 CB system .

Rather than having "no warmongering for taking the city", however, it would make more sense to force the defender to cede the city if they lose it and the attacker holds onto it for enough turns. That kind of thing would make a "claim" CB different from something like "holy war" or "we're going to beat down you backwards primitives" type CBs.

BTW, Beyond Earth introduced a war score system. It failed precisely because it lacks the ability for a winning side to force peace regardless of what happens in the war. Civ 6 takes this nonsense a step further, by creating penalties for city occupation (if it weren't bugged) that give defenders incentive to not cede cities and no reason in particular to make peace.

As it stands, this aspect of the game objectively has less strategy consideration than EU series. It's civ 6 that's more like the sims right now. That shouldn't be the case, but that's the reality. The CB system in Civ 6 is just that badly designed. It SHOULD be adding tactical objectives that otherwise don't exist, and forcing players to make sometimes tough choices on which one to use depending on the situation. Instead it accomplishes nearly nothing and EU's implementation wins by default. What is Firaxis going to do about it? We'll see.

 

[Victoria]

it would make more sense to force the defender to cede the city if they lose it

that give defenders incentive to not cede cities

I hate to dampen any optimism you may have left about civ6 but the only current benefit I can find with regard to ceded cities is they count towards a points victory while a non ceded one does not.
This is perhaps another reason why the score Dom players get at the end of the game is so low, well lower than the paltry score they could get.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Wait, so how do you "unoccupy" a city? Is it just after a peace treaty or what?

 

[antimony]

One of the big benefits of taking cities right now is that all the "Build X" eurekas trigger when you just take X. It's not irrealistic (empires have gained science and culture from people they conquer), but it would be nice to counterbalance this by some passive tech gain from trade routes or open borders with Civs who have the tech.

 

[stealth_nsk]

If Civ is going to lift the casus belli process from EU, it should probably do so while bringing some actual gameplay benefits that system gives to EU, rather than just making the system because reasons.

Frankly, the CB system in Civ 6 is a joke compared to EU 4, in spite of all EU 4's problems it still handles this thing better.

No, Civ has it's own Casus Belli system, which is totally different from EU. In EU you invent Casus Belli out of thin air and while it's totally exploitable, this doesn't bother anyone, because EU has no deep strategy layer.

CB in Civ 6 means little

I don't think we play the same Civ6

It SHOULD be adding tactical objectives that otherwise don't exist

Actually quite the opposite. In Civ6 you can't conquer many cities without being total warmonger and ruining the whole diplomatic game. You have to carefully pick, which cities to attack not only in terms of easy attacking, but also in terms of their strategic value. That's much more planning, than just the game pointing you at particular cities.

 

[Victoria]

Wait, so how do you "unoccupy" a city? Is it just after a peace treaty or what

At peace occupation goes, its a normal city
The joke is that in the peace deals the civ considerers ceding of value, so you can get other things instead of a cede because cedes are pointless

 

[stealth_nsk]

At peace occupation goes, its a normal city
The joke is that in the peace deals the civ considerers ceding of value, so you can get other things instead of a cede because cedes are pointless

I assume little effect of cede to be a bug and expect it to be fixed at some point. The general city conquest framework is great in Civ6, it just need a bit of numbers tweaking.
I'd add some rebels spam for warmonger penalties (even with razed cities) to rely less on diplomatic penalties and make it harder to do mindless conquest.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I agree with TMIT that CBs are by and large kinda useless. Warmongering penalties are too big in later eras that you'll get denounced anyways and when you rush in the ancient era, it doesn't matter anyways. And rarely do you want to actually start a war where it's long and drawn out. Either you decisively strike and take what you are aiming for, or you just don't invade at all, and try to just pick off their strays and weak cities, hoping to slow them down more than it slows you down. If you're accruing too much war weariness, that means your attack wasn't very well planned to begin with.

It can be of use in the classical/medieval era, but then most of the CB aren't even available and if the game doesn't want to give you iron, then you're probably not worth bothering unless like all their cities are coastal and you went straight square rigging. But joint wars are better.

And that is the ultimate problem. In almost every case where you have a CB, I'd rather joint war because at the least you keep an ally, instead of just pissing off everyone a little less and then they end up hating you anyways.

Of course, there are times where you have no friends where Holy War becomes useful but that requires you to bother with religion. And then there are colonial (basically for games you've already won) and territorial wars that sound good on paper, but usually come too late to really matter and depend too much on what the AI does. I mean, it's one of those things that you click if it's there; there's rarely much planning to it.

There are of course ruses where you convert their cities or do other shenanigans to annoy them so they will denounce you, but a lot of these times, I'd rather just extort like 30 gpt from them and call it a day.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I hate to dampen any optimism you may have left about civ6 but the only current benefit I can find with regard to ceded cities is they count towards a points victory while a non ceded one does not.
This is perhaps another reason why the score Dom players get at the end of the game is so low, well lower than the paltry score they could get.

I was aware of that, but my impression given the implications in the game was that it's bugged and that non-ceded cities are supposed to have further penalties. Was I mistaken? Even if I was, it would still give the CB system more actual function if it worked that way.

I don't think I was mistaken though; if civ 6 peace deals assign value to cities being ceded that should therefore have tangible in-game value. I don't think a bug conclusion is off the table yet; look at what happens when you're brought into war with city states and want to make peace :/. I doubt they'll roll up in here and tell us THAT's WAD, ceding cities might be similar.

No, Civ has it's own Casus Belli system, which is totally different from EU. In EU you invent Casus Belli out of thin air and while it's totally exploitable, this doesn't bother anyone, because EU has no deep strategy layer.

Considering that CB matters to outcome to at least some degree in EU 4 wars, I find it interesting to assert civ 6's version with less strategy is somehow in a better place.

I don't think we play the same Civ6

You could easily refute my point by actually demonstrating aspects of considering which CB to select in civ 6 --> matters to the outcome of the game.

But you didn't do that yet.

Actually quite the opposite. In Civ6 you can't conquer many cities without being total warmonger and ruining the whole diplomatic game.

That's true in EU 4 with aggressive expansion. CBs influence that too (yet another concept that is oddly familiar in name and function to EU's superior implementation), except ruining the whole diplomatic picture in EU 4 has massively greater consequences to your nation's future than it does in Civ 6, where AIs rarely act on it and can be hammered easily enough if keeping fronts defensive thanks to 1UPT restriction neutering their production advantage.

You have to carefully pick, which cities to attack not only in terms of easy attacking, but also in terms of their strategic value.

Not against the AI you don't. And in PvP, CBs are even more of a complete joke in civ 6. They're also weaker in EU 4 in MP, to the detriment of both games, but once again EU 4 at least has a system to compel sore losers and mechanic gamers alike into peace so it's still better even in this regard.

Tactics have regressed in the civ series, probably by design to make it more accessible. That's actually true in EU 4 earlier patches vs now as well, seems to be a trend in strategy games to include less strategy lately.

But when it comes to CB, civ 6's system resembles EU 4, but is a weaker implementation. Slightly more or less contrived butthurt ignoring the global picture of the game doesn't make a CB matter.