Protectorate War Exploit?

[Lord Lakely]

In my latest game I was playing as Lautaro and my Khmer neighbour foolishly DOW'd my City State Ally. I denounced Jayavarman and declared a protectorate war.

I completely flattened him and took all of his cities for a total warmonger penalty of THREE. (presumably because the last city I took had exactly one population.) The two other AIs I had made contact with (Egypt and Kongo) didn't bat an eye.

This can't be how the game's supposed to go, right?

 

[Josephias]

IMHO, there is a flaw in the Casus Belli management and it is each one, by description, is subject to certain limitations that the game does not enforce.

These limitations should be enforced in some way, and if you don't follow them, switch your warmongering penalty to that of normal (or even surprise war).

E.g:
declaring a liberation or protectorate war should allow you to conquer in an X-radius of the city state. Once you try to conquer a city out of this radius, the casus belli is invalid, and full warmongering penalty applies.

 

[RealHuhn]

I can only confirm that razing cities during protectorate war doesn't add any warmonger penalty (which is also quite odd). I thought the penalty for conquering and keeping cities is applied after you make peace. Were you still at war? Have you checked one turn later?

 

[Magil]

The way warmonger penalty works, as I understand the code, is such that each city you capture is worth 50% of the warmonger penalty the original declaration of war (WARMONGER_CITY_PERCENT_OF_DOW Value="50"). A Protectorate War has zero warmonger penalty to declare. 50% of zero is still zero.

Yes, this means the tooltip for the Casus Belli is misleading.

 

[Tech Osen]

Yep, this CB is broken/bugged. It's silly that attacking someone's CS allows more retribution than attacking someone's own cities.