The recent patch included a penalty for owning a capital as a negative permanent modifier of -5DF per turn. Probably to prevent Domination to be used as a DV path. However, the penalty is not well balanced for the following reasons:
Scale the penalty by the number of capitals. Or take other factors into account (who started the war or how many cities were taken).
Negative penalties fade slowly (1-2 per era). In addition, no penalties for the ancient era.
- If a player that is not a warmonger but also not a pacifist. Conquers, for example 2 capitals. Would have -10 DF permanent modifier. Which means, would have 0 DF for the majority of the game. This makes WC resolutions meaningless, as the player would be pushed to completely ignore the WC system, would not be able to include any proposal on the WC for the entire game or influence in any voting. Including the ones to earn VP.
- The player would be discouraged to participate in any competition of emergency, since their DF will drain very fast, with a negative permanent per turn DF, making the whole system meaningless for many players.
- The design of the game intentionally removes grievances from early game. This system completely negates early game aggression. Since it will be hardly penalized. Or will push many players to totally ignore diplomacy as it will be far easier to just commit to warmongering.
- If the player conquers an enemy capital early game (turn 50). It will cost him -5DF per turn for the rest of the game. This could be a penalty as high as 1000 DF points for the entire game. As the AI values 1DF as 1GPT, this would equal to a 30000 gold penalty for conquering a city in the ancient era. This is clearly too much.
- The system is not proportional. Does not take into account casus belly, the age the war was in, and actively punishes early aggression the more. Also in practice, conquering 3 capitals is punished in the same way as conquering 10. 0DF would still be 0DF.
- Also, it is worth thinking, how this would affect an AI that manages to conquer a capital. I don’t think they would consider the penalty at all. And probably will make them very easy to exploit, selling them DF they will not be able to use anyway.
- If you take an enemy capital via loyalty flipping, you still take the diplo favor penalty. That does not make any sense.
- Ancient era, no diplomatic penalty.
- -1 diplomatic penalty per capital or city state taken or razed (no penalty for loyalty flipping), -1 additional penalty for wiping out a civ (Classic era). -1 extra penalty for each subsequent era up to renaissance (-3 diplomatic penalty per capital or city state taken, -3 additional penalty for wiping out a civ in renaissance eras and later).
Scale the penalty by the number of capitals. Or take other factors into account (who started the war or how many cities were taken).
Negative penalties fade slowly (1-2 per era). In addition, no penalties for the ancient era.
