Questions from a noob

[Rlgruber]

Greetings, I would be Rlgruber, the n00b who is about to ask people a few things, that are likely to irritate many people in their noobishness. So, let's get down to work and start making people annoyed at me for my stupid questions.

1) What exactly does denouncing do? I mean, I have been denounced several times, even by civs that were friends, and had no real effect on other relations, I have also been denounced, and had all kinds of effects sometimes weakening a friendship, sometimes even strengthening a friendship if my friend hates the denouncer....Why does the ai denounce and what exactly does it do?

2) Why does the explore button send scouts randomly walking through all the city states on the map, as if trying to make them all pissed at me? Sometimes it seems like the scout just randomly walks in circles around a city state, and I find their anger guage is half full for no reason to my knowledge, then a few turns later see my scount seems to have been randomly jobbing in circles in their city plaza. XD Why does auto explore make them purposefully go into city states you are not friends/allies with?

3) I am confused on a situation of my current game. I made a map because I was annoyed at the ai sometimes placing the iriquois in an area with like 2 thick bands of forest, and nothing else, nothing to really actualy connect cities, so I made my own map, where 1/3 of a continent is literally 100% forest and jungle, and put a "spawn random player" in which it always seems to spawn me for some reason, not other civs. (weird as the game calls ai civs "players" quite often.

anyway, I made the iriquois? nation and had a problem. I was weak, I had like 3 warriors and a spearman, as my entire military army, and a scout that got killed later....Very far from home...Japan was always talking to me, warning me about how weak my army was. He started neutral, but by the next turn he was hostile for no real reason, only 3 civs on 1 large continent...and I guess he warred off and on with france, who was randomly friends with me, yet refused to make such a declaration.

Anyway, france randomly declared war not too long after Japan's second, "Your army is pathetic, I just tihnk I should warn you, I could easily destroy you" speeches. And he had clearly planned for it, by sending 5-7 warriors (early game, I had gotten my second city not much earlier) there before declaring war. (a nice change from 4's stupid AI's who declare war and then never bothering to send more than 1 or 2 units all the way to your cities. ( I keep getting distracted ) Anyway....so my 2 warriors and 1 spearman managed to hold off the french army literally randomly walking around in my cities borders without ever really attacking, because anyone that got too close I did my best to deal with to the point no one ever did manage to attack it. But yeah, then japan, who I had worked up to neutral, declared war on me.

(Both of them said they were tired of pretending to be friends with me, so apparently ai civs can pretend to be friends, but not really. France was friendly with me before the war.)

It seems japan expected the 5-7 french warriors to own me, and he would take whatever was left. France kept making stupid demands for peace while I somehow managed to hold off and grow my army. After I killed off his last warrior and was making the first mohawk, I managed peace with no conditions for either of us. (Oddly enough he offered) I got peace from japan the same turn.

And now, both of them are friendly with me again, japan, who was neutral, then hostile, then neutral, then war, signed a pact of friendship like 2 turns after all the wars stopped. and france is friendly again.

in summation...


WTF?

France / Japan

Friends / Hostile
War / Neutral
War / War
Friendly / Friend (pact)

what the heck is going on here. Japan just seems to be like "Well...your cool now that your army doesn't suck anymore, and you aren't a weakling, so...pact of friendship?

I essentially replied "......sure....why not.... o.o"

Does japan always hate anyone weak, then like them once they prove themselves?

 

[Raiki]

1) Denouncing does exactly what you'd think it would do in real life. Go tell some random acquaintance to eff off. S/he and all his/her friends will hate you, however, anyone who doesn't like them will be more appreciative of what you're laying down.

2) Auto-explore is weird. Technically it just sends them straight towards the nearest patch of fog (assuming it's not blocked by an AIs borders), but it does sometimes take some really strange paths to get there.

3) All civs have a magical "Pointy Stick" number. If an AI's number is much higher than your number, they'll declare war on you. But they will usually give you warning through the "Just FYI you're pathetic" comments. As to why the diplomacy fluctuated so wildly, my guess is that you had so few diplomatic bonuses/penalties with them that your respective "pointy stick" numbers were the greatest influence on their behavior.

~R~

 

[DevilHell]

It would be great if you told what difficulty you play annd on what speed

1) The only thing denouncing does is letting the AIs you know, know you don't like another
So the friends of your enemy won't like it meanwhile the enemys of your enemy will like it and therefore like you
Diplomacy is calculated with numbers, so think that if you denounce an AI you will get some kind of negative points, like a red bar on the CSs screen, that indicates they are pissed at you

2) Explore mode sends your scout to random places, not specifically to CSs, the difference is that when you order your scout you avoid pissing CSs off, but explore doesn't care so.. I think it's better to manage it yourself

3) The Iroquois will ALWAYS spawn in 2 thick layers of forest, that's called starting BIAS
Arabia will ALWAYS spawn in useless desert, with luck, near a river

On the other topic,
You are thinking of the AI like a totally reasonable adult, you should start to think about them as 8 year old primary school students combined with greedy politicians
Example: If they share borders with you, they'll attack, even if you have a DoF (declaration of friendship) with them
Another example: They most likely will attack you if you have a little army (3 warriors by turn 100 per say)
But most likely, they will attack you if they are Oda Nabunaga or Alexander of Greece or Bismarck, if you have one of the above mentioned situations, that's called AI flavours, on a topic called "Diplomacy by Numbers" search it
Now, the reason they proposed peace and the DoF after the war is that you didn't make anything bad to them, nothing that added those negative points, so after the war, due to you had a good military to defend yourself and didn't have negative points, they DoFed

 

[spider1]

2) Why does the explore button send scouts randomly walking through all the city states on the map, as if trying to make them all pissed at me? Sometimes it seems like the scout just randomly walks in circles around a city state, and I find their anger guage is half full for no reason to my knowledge, then a few turns later see my scount seems to have been randomly jobbing in circles in their city plaza. XD Why does auto explore make them purposefully go into city states you are not friends/allies with?

It's best not to explore automaticly except with caravels. Land units will do exactly what you said, and just piss of all the city states. Explore with land units manually always. Also, scounts love to hit ruins. A scout will not explore the fog right next to it if it can waste a ton of turns going all the way across the map to land on a ruin. That's very VERY irratating.

 

[vibe96]

Some leaders love to pretend friendship. Worst are caesar, bismark, alex, oda, napoleon and montezuma.

 

[Rlgruber]

That chart helped a lot. The diplomacy in this game is much mroe challenging because half the cives are insane, being a warmongerer and hating other war people, etc. etc. now at least I know what to predict for a few people.