Need help on noble game - Ragnar declaring war

[silk1976]

I'm trying to learn some of the nuances of the game so that I can win on a level other than the easiest. I'm currently playing a game on noble, and thanks to this site, I've managed to do pretty well in the game. At least, that was what I thought.

However, I'm running into an issue. The current year is 1902, and Ragnar declares war on me in 1909. Once he declares, then Saladin joins in, as well as Kubla Kahn. I've tried going to free religion, thinking that maybe if I wasn't a heathen, he wouldn't be so upset with me - but he still goes to war. I've tried giving him tribute (I had him up to cautious, giving him money and goods), and he still declares. I didn't try both at the same time thouhg - but since he declares when I bribe him to cautious, I kinda think that perhaps the train has left the station and there is no going back. The only thing I can think of is that around 1750 or so, he asked for a tribute and I refused. Also, I did go to war with his friend huayna cupac way back when.

I've attached the save game, but here is a summary to set the stage:
- BTS 3.17
- Playing as the Byzantines
- I've got Brennus, Hammurabi, Hannibal and Huayna Cupac on my continent. Everyone but Huayna has converted to my religion, buddhism. I tend to keep Huayna on buddhism via spy whenever he tries to convert to christianity.
- I declared war on huayna a couple times, each time getting a city of his. That is why I have the two cities on the southern portion of the continent. During one of those warns, Hammurabi took a city of Huayna's also. At one point, Huayna was a threat, which is why I went to war on him.

Perhaps the best option is to fend off all the attacks as much as I can, and wait until I can bribe peace. But I'm curious if there is anything I'm missing that might prevent war in the first place.

Thanks!

 

[Jewman]

i havent checked your save
but my best guess is that your power rating is relatively low, or lower than ragnar
and ragnar is crazy, and he will invade everybody
once he invades you it just causes everyone to take advantage of the weaker civ (being you).

 

[silk1976]

i havent checked your save
but my best guess is that your power rating is relatively low, or lower than ragnar
and ragnar is crazy, and he will invade everybody
once he invades you it just causes everyone to take advantage of the weaker civ (being you).

You must be clairvoyant.
I spend about 10 turns with the sliders down to 0, to maximize gold production, and spent every last penny upgrading my outdated longbowmen, pikemen and cats to riflemen and cannons. My power rating curve went way up. I can't see ragnar's for some reason, but apparently it went up enough.
1909 came and went and no war was declared.

Thanks!

 

[CCRunner]

If you know war is imminent, try trading one gold for one gold or something. This will give you a ten turn peace treaty and time to prepare.

Try getting somebody to declare war on Ragnar before he declares on you also.

In general though, just try to be on the biggest, baddest, team. If you're not, make your team the biggest, baddest team

 

[JujuLautre]

If you know war is imminent, try trading one gold for one gold or something. This will give you a ten turn peace treaty and time to prepare.

Does not work. The only thing that works is that if you or the AI asks the other for something (gift or tribute) and the other party accepts, there will be a peace treaty. trading is not enough.

And as far as I know, demanding tribute to an AI preparing to invade you is not the smartest move there is

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Does not work. The only thing that works is that if you or the AI asks the other for something (gift or tribute) and the other party accepts, there will be a peace treaty. trading is not enough.

And as far as I know, demanding tribute to an AI preparing to invade you is not the smartest move there is

The psycho warmongers declare @ pleased though. @ pleased, they'll give it to you "as a friend", even though they're about to pull a . This can indeed buy you 10 turns, so it's worth noting.

 

[silk1976]

So while 1909 came and went with no declaration, the year 1911 did not. It just delayed him declaring for a few years.

However, only ragnar declared. After a few turns of beating down my frigates, and once he captured a city, the other AI's followed suit.

I'll have to beef up that city and try to stack the frigates I do have, and hopefully keep him at bay and keep my power curve from diminishing so much that others declare.

But its a start in the right direction. I hate the fact that I pretty much have a spoiler and know what is going to happen - but its better then having to start a whole new game over, only to run into a different problem

 

[Rusty Edge]

Well, you could dedicate this one game to learning and experimentation, and keep this thread rolling.

You lost sight of Ragnar's power rating because you zeroed your espionage slider.

I'm guessing Ragnar used an amphib assault with Berserkers upgraded to Grenadier marines... One approach is to let them take the port city, hope they don't raze it, then weaken and deystroy them with a waiting stack of seige and mixed forces.

 

[Fei Kelei]

How could you not be prepared for an attack with Ragnar on the map? You know he's always going to build a big army and try to take over someone, so you should have been doing more to make sure it wasn't you (unless you were prepared and wanted a war, of course). Like someone else said, the best defense is to be a badass with a huge army yourself.

As for what to do now, if you've tried every option and there's no way to stop the war from happening, all I can tell you to do is just build up your military and retake whatever he takes from you. From your first post, it sounds like the other civs who are piling on aren't on your continent either, and the AI generally isn't very good at fight overseas wars, so I don't think your game is ruined. Also, you said everyone else on your continent is your religion, so is there no one that you can bribe into war? If not against Ragnar, then at least against Saladin or Khan. You seem really intent on avoiding war, but maybe you need to just let it happen and win it.

 

[SebFish]

Haven't looked at your save. Try and get some sort of defensive pact together, especially with someone close to ragnar. He'll be too busy fighting them, one hopes, and will attack you piecemeal.

If you can't do that, ramped your military production, naturally. If that can't stop the tide, try and pick a single tile (probably a city, naturally) and concentrate your entire force there. If he's fighting in your lands you can outproduce.

 

[silk1976]

How could you not be prepared for an attack with Ragnar on the map? You know he's always going to build a big army and try to take over someone, so you should have been doing more to make sure it wasn't you (unless you were prepared and wanted a war, of course).

Read my OP, specifically the first line. If I knew everything, I wouldn't need to post.

Like someone else said, the best defense is to be a badass with a huge army yourself.

As for what to do now, if you've tried every option and there's no way to stop the war from happening, all I can tell you to do is just build up your military and retake whatever he takes from you. From your first post, it sounds like the other civs who are piling on aren't on your continent either, and the AI generally isn't very good at fight overseas wars, so I don't think your game is ruined. Also, you said everyone else on your continent is your religion, so is there no one that you can bribe into war? If not against Ragnar, then at least against Saladin or Khan. You seem really intent on avoiding war, but maybe you need to just let it happen and win it.

Yeah I'm thinking along these same lines. I'm trying to avoid war because I'm not very good at it (obviously).

A major part of the problem is that I am used to playing a perfectionist game, due to the huge margins of error on the easiest levels. So the idea of losing a city or having major delays in research due to war production runs contrary to my natural instincts. But obviously my natural instincts are not correct either - so it's a long, hard and difficult road to go down to fix them.

Rusty Edge - the light just dawned on me RE: the espionage slider and not being able to see his power rating. I thought it was funny that I could only see the power scale for those civs on my continent - but it never occured to me that it was due to lack of espionage. Thanks for that! And yes, this one will be chalked up to a learning experience, but I'm going to keep playing it to see what I can salvage.

 

[Fei Kelei]

Read my OP, specifically the first line. If I knew everything, I wouldn't need to post.

Yeah, my bad. I guess we all had to learn the hard way which leaders would be the biggest threats. Just so you know in the future, be very wary of any leader with the Aggressive trait (Ragnar, Shaka, Montezuma et al.) as they'll almost always build a bigger army than everyone else and look to put it somewhere. Ragnar is particularly annoying because thanks to his Financial trait, doing this doesn't wreck his economy and research as much as it does for other Aggressive leaders, so it's more difficult to beat him by just having more advanced units--you actually need a decent size army.

When I first started this game, I was more of a peaceful builder and only went to war when someone declared it on me, which happened pretty often because I didn't pay any attention to the power rankings and tended to neglect my military. But a much more successful way to play is to be the bully yourself and pick on the peaceful builders. The AI just really isn't that good at war ("hey, I think I'll throw all of my units against this city even though I have no chance of actually taking it and most of them are going to die"), so the best strategies are the ones that take advantage of that.

 

[silk1976]

I ended up stealing assembly line from huayna, which gave me infantry. I also put the espionage slider to 20%, concentrating on those AI's that were on the other continent, so that I could see their demographics and power curves. I also reduced the research slider to 0%, but due to representation, I still was able to pull in decent beakers from the specialists, so my research didn't get held back more than a few turns.

I then upgraded a bunch of relevant (those close to port cities) riflemen, etc to infantry - once I got enough gold and put some machine gunners around.

Ragnar still declared in 1909, followed by his other two buddies, but I was able to fend off his land troops with the infantry. He then tried to attack the southern cities, but I already had 2 great generals down there, so that was an easy mop up.

Once Ragnar's friends declared, I bribed Hannibal and Brennus to declare war on what portions of the Saladin/Ragnar/Kublai Khan faction that I could. Both Hannibal and Brennus are backwards, technology wise - so giving up some tech to get them to declare war seemed like it wouldn't help them enough to become a threat.

Thanks for the heads up on the aggressive trait Fei Kelei. I've looked on here before, but I haven't been able to find a compiled guide as to what different AI leaders are like. For example, I know Monty just loves war and can be a good attack dog, and I gather that Isabella can be the same way if you are aligned with her religion. Plus there are also some AI attitudes that might be predictable based on real life (such as English leaders being willing to wage war with French onces). But I've kinda felt that what would really be handy is a guide that gives a good idea of how the AI reacts to religion affiliations, war temperment, etc.
Any idea if that sort of thing exists?

 

[Supr49er]

Welcome to posting silk1976.

 

[dankok8]

Ok, I took a look at the save; a few things jumped at me:

Good Things:
1) You built a Buddhist shrine and are making great money from it. Nice job spreading your religion.
2) You have the largest pop and a fairly large land area and lead in GNP.

Bad Things:
1) Your military is very small and outdated - no wonder everyone attacks you.
2) Your diplomacy is atrocious. Only Hannibal and bottom feeder Brennus are even pleased with you. Everyone else is annoyed/furious. You must have declared war on people/their friends multiple times or stopped trading with them.
3) Sury (biggest guy) and Ragnar are "We Have Enough On Our Hands Right Now" so they will attack someone very soon; could be you.
4) You're running the espionage slider at 10% with all points going towards Hannibal. Switch this 10% to science.
5) You're running the culture slider during peace time. You should usually only run that to control war weariness during war. Switch this 10% to science as well.
6) With this state of the world, you cannot hope to win diplomatic and even score is unlikely since someone would win another way. Thus Space is the only option, but you are not even researching towards space. Stop MIl. Trad. and go for Artillery and Rocketry and then the Spaceship techs and build the spaceship. I forgot to look if someone is approaching a cultural win - hope not!!

Hope I helped you a bit.

 

[silk1976]

dankok8 thanks for the quick analysis - that is incredibly helpful.

It's funny - Hannibal and Brennus were pretty formidable at one point, early in the game - so I made sure to spread buddhism to get them on my side. Mostly so that if I needed them, they'd be happy with me. Hannibal has a high power rating, but Brennus pretty much sucks wind right now. So that long term view of things seems to have not gotten me very much.

I have played up to 1925 in that game by this point, and war is pretty much rampant. I'm at war with kublai, saladin, ragnar and possibly sury (I forget). I bribed hannibal to go to war with saladin, as well as hammurabi and possibly brennus. I forget the exact details. So everyone is taking a beating, but kublai has a destroyer on my shores and all I've got is ship of the line.

Regarding everyone else being upset with me - I did declare on Huayna, which seems to have upset the other continent dwellers - but at the time I didn't know they were friends with Huayna.

The biggest reason I was having the culture slider at 10% was because there were some culture clashes near my cities, and I wanted to make sure that if any tiles (or cities) were overtaken, it would go in my favor. I suppose that may be flawed logic.

So I think I may start a new game by now. I feel like I've learned quite a lot from this thread and this game - so those that have posted, I thank you. I think I'm going to take Fei Kelei's advice and try being more of a bully next time - and possibly experiment with someone of a specialist economy.

 

[Fei Kelei]

Glad to hear it , but remember to be a smart bully. It's less about being a jerk to your neighbors and more about just acting in your own self interest, by which I mean attack when you have the advantage (or can gain it), not just for the hell of it. Wars are so much easier to manage when you start them yourself and fight them on your own terms.

 

[Anthrax 090]

What you described here is exactly how I play Ragnar: Be the big bully, take someone else´s candy and give some to those friends you have. I love that guy,he´s just awesome!!! Oh, and I enjoy being the villain and razing holy cities. Just goes to prove we Vikings are badass!
Now for the serious part: You should always watch out for those warmongering types (like someone above said, the guys with the Agg. trait). Usually they´ll extort you for gold or tech sometime before they decide to DoW. And you can tell who plans to attack you on the diplomacy screen. Usually there is a message that goes ˝this is the price for peace˝, or something similar. This is your warning, and if you haven´t already, start preparing an army, because sometime after such a message a rival army usually pops out of nowhere and starts tearing you up. Even if you give them what they want,they´ll attack anyway. I should know, this happened to me too many times, so I switched to being the aggressor in almost every game, and it works much better .