Pakistan's threatening my borders?

[E66man]

Ok, so I'm sure everybody has at one point had some troops hanging around adjacent to an AI territory and had the AI send you the-

"I can't help but notice that you have a lot of troops on our border"

-with the-

"Yes you're right. Die scum! [DECLARE WAR]"
"Sorry, just passing through"

-response buttons.

And I'm equally sure that nine times out of ten you click the 'just passing through' box, because even if you are planning to attack, you don't want to start a war right then since the AI essentially gets a free attack on all your troops, and maybe your troops aren't all ready yet.

However, from the text that comes up when I do decide to attack such a player (lots of BS about betrayal, etc.) I get the impression that if you had picked the "passing through" choice you take a major diplomacy hit amongst all the other AI players since they react pretty badly to even the merest whiff of treachery on the part of the humans. Does anyone else find this to be the case? And if so, how long do you have to wait after being confronted with this choice before you can "honestly" declare war on that player? Is it even timed? Or would you first have to move all your troops away to reset the "troops on the border" counter or whatever event the AI used to trigger that dialogue?

Of course the thing that really gets my goat on this, is that the AI gets a free pass to call you out and stop you from doing a "sneak" attack on them, while every DoW from the AI is essentially a sneak attack against you (yes, I know, life isn't fair). The diplomacy here wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't all basically pretend diplomacy. Badly implemented features are more annoying to me than missing ones... but I'm getting off topic there.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Well, on the upside, when those AIs sneak attack you, they take a diplomacy hit with the other AIs too.

Too bad it doesn't really matter, since most of the time the human player will roflstomp them for being a .

 

[The Great Apple]

I completely agree. It's something that makes sense, but the implementation just feels anti-human to me. Means you can't be lazy and stick troops on the border, just one tile off.

 

[DaveGold]

However, from the text that comes up when I do decide to attack such a player (lots of BS about betrayal, etc.) I get the impression that if you had picked the "passing through" choice you take a major diplomacy hit amongst all the other AI players since they react pretty badly to even the merest whiff of treachery on the part of the humans. Does anyone else find this to be the case? And if so, how long do you have to wait after being confronted with this choice before you can "honestly" declare war on that player? Is it even timed?

Very good questions. I'd assume it's 30 turns but the AI seems to play by it's own rules. The same goes for "don't settle near me". The AI seem to know when these things expire and will happily send a settler back in your direction again.

The big difficulty at the moment is that a game can get quite peaceful since patch 62. This should be good but longer peace just means more spurious requests come through repeatedly from all the AI opponents. I typically lose track and end up breaking my word by accident for something I'd forgotten entirely about.

I'm playing a game now where Washington told me not to settle near him, even though I'd built on a different island with a decent sized gap, then about 75 turns or so later I declared war on him. After declaring war I stuck 2 cities on his island to make a bridgehead, razed his city between them later, took his capital, letting him surrender with an city left in the ice somwhere. The turn after he surrendered he told me that I'd broken my word about settling near him and my reputation was shot. DOH!

 

[Wombleburger]

Love the title you gave this thread. Gotta love Robocop.

 

[E66man]

Love the title you gave this thread. Gotta love Robocop.

I was hoping I wouldn't be the only one who remembered that