This was my suggestion (see the second post on page 448). While it's more likely than not that you are a stronger player than me, I'm curious what difficulty this is at. I personally think it would be a terrible idea to revert this change, because WW is already a major separatism issue via unhappiness. Separatism management strictly from espionage also ignores the positive stability threshold factor one receives via happiness, while global WW is still relevant, especially later in the game when single war declarations also entail a multiplication of the global number from vassals and allies.
Just my thoughts of course, but I personally disagree and fail to see how it's not still significantly at play. In your experience with the SVN (or the last official one), are long, protracted wars never punished?
First, I'm probably not a stronger player than you, I only started playing this game two years ago.
Second, I'm playing at the Noble level. In my current game, I'm leading in points but was leading in my prior game and lost by an AI cultural victory.
I'm playing on a huge map with 35 civs.
I was thinking about this some more last night. It seems that there is a penalty for starting a war ("You attacked our friend.") but no penalty for keeping a war going indefinitely. It seemed to me that if an aggressive AI civ felt pressure to end a war due to high war weariness and then attacked the same civ again when the WW levels dropped, that would add another -1 to the relations with other civs friendly to the war target. One long, continuous, ongoing war will not cause the civs friendly to the war opponent to change their relations over time.
If an aggressive civ was determined to wage repeated wars on a single enemy, over time their relationships with other civs will deteriorate, their trading opportunities will decline, they might even have some vassals that cancel their vassalage.
I'd like to know more about the impact of war weariness on happiness. I wasn't aware of a direct relationship. I haven't noticed my unhappiness levels increasing due to war, but then I haven't really looked and I don't try to start too many wars. Can you tell me if there is a formula that ties war weariness with unhappiness?
In my current game, I focused on establishing friendly relationships, only going to war in the early game to expand my cultural boundaries or take out particular neighboring enemy civs. Otherwise, I build up a large vassal network that keeps others from attacking me. I focus on building up the cultural values of conquered cities so that they don't revolt, and I try to keep the gap between maximum happiness and unhappiness large, so I have a buffer if a trade partner cancels a deal or I move to the next technical age. IOW, I don't keep my cities at the limits of their happiness and/or health values. This gives me room when war weariness begins to grow.
This is why I asked if dropping the impact of war weariness from 100% to 10% was a kluge just to keep AI civs from fracturing after prolonged wars, or if there was a better to keep large aggressive AI civs from keeping wars going for 50+ turns, such as offering a peace treaty when WW reaches a certain level, and relying on negative relationship changes with other civs due to repeated shorter wars.
