aimlessgun
King
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2010
- Messages
- 783
So the conventional wisdom seems to be that diplomacy doesn't exist, or is impossible/hopeless/stupid.
I'm currently playing a game where that is not the case at all, and I'm wondering if that is a fluke or if anyone else has replicated this (or if people already know all this stuff and don't think it counts as 'diplomacy').
It's a large fractal map that generated a pangea somehow, and I'm smack in the middle of it. I was messing around with the "large city games" thread objective, and in the spirit of being a builder put a "no offensive war" rule on myself. So I'm not allowed to DoW the AI or to invade an AI that has DoWed me.
Only 151 turns in, but completely surrounded by AI's and still have not been DoWed.
The key seems to be Pacts of Secrecy and bribing the AI into wars. Not rocket science. At the start you'll generally get a couple PoS requests. Figure out a neighbor you can isolate and maybe turn into a target, and just try to get a PoS against him with everyone.
Pretty soon in the game the AI is going to start thinking of attacking you. You'll need to bribe them into attacking someone else, and if you've set them up with a PoS against a target or two, this should be fairly easy (cost me one luxury).
Now here's the beautiful thing: the AI you just bribed into a war gets tagged as warmonger by all the other AI's! I bribed England (who had an army marching in my direction) to DoW Russia, then I turned around and PoS'ed the hell out of England. Pretty soon all my other neighbors were declaring war on England.
Cooperation Pacts are also pretty useful for buffering you from a DoW, since they will always cancel it in preparation. Later in the game Ramses cancels a PoC, so I slap him with a bunch of PoS's and then sic the Mongols on him. And then of course my neighbors, after dismembering England, go after the Mongols because of their warmongering.
Anyways, I had a pangea game before where I made it to the modern age without war, but I didn't really know why: thinking back that game followed what is happening in my current game except I got lucky and didn't really do it intentionally. Basically you can channel the AI's aggression into other AI's for the whole game if you play your cards right.
Of course, one AI may end up dominating and overrunning the whole world, but that should take a sufficiently long time for you to win
Important note: the AI seems programmed to settle in your direction. This is incredibly annoying, and a big cause of early DoWs since they're all like "hey don't settle near us (even though we just put a city 3 tiles from your cap). The usual (and best) way to deal with this is build Horses or Swords and just kill everyone around you. The peaceful option requires championship settler blocking. I had my entire (small) army running around settler blocking for the first 80 turns.
I'm currently playing a game where that is not the case at all, and I'm wondering if that is a fluke or if anyone else has replicated this (or if people already know all this stuff and don't think it counts as 'diplomacy').
It's a large fractal map that generated a pangea somehow, and I'm smack in the middle of it. I was messing around with the "large city games" thread objective, and in the spirit of being a builder put a "no offensive war" rule on myself. So I'm not allowed to DoW the AI or to invade an AI that has DoWed me.
Only 151 turns in, but completely surrounded by AI's and still have not been DoWed.
The key seems to be Pacts of Secrecy and bribing the AI into wars. Not rocket science. At the start you'll generally get a couple PoS requests. Figure out a neighbor you can isolate and maybe turn into a target, and just try to get a PoS against him with everyone.
Pretty soon in the game the AI is going to start thinking of attacking you. You'll need to bribe them into attacking someone else, and if you've set them up with a PoS against a target or two, this should be fairly easy (cost me one luxury).
Now here's the beautiful thing: the AI you just bribed into a war gets tagged as warmonger by all the other AI's! I bribed England (who had an army marching in my direction) to DoW Russia, then I turned around and PoS'ed the hell out of England. Pretty soon all my other neighbors were declaring war on England.
Cooperation Pacts are also pretty useful for buffering you from a DoW, since they will always cancel it in preparation. Later in the game Ramses cancels a PoC, so I slap him with a bunch of PoS's and then sic the Mongols on him. And then of course my neighbors, after dismembering England, go after the Mongols because of their warmongering.
Anyways, I had a pangea game before where I made it to the modern age without war, but I didn't really know why: thinking back that game followed what is happening in my current game except I got lucky and didn't really do it intentionally. Basically you can channel the AI's aggression into other AI's for the whole game if you play your cards right.
Of course, one AI may end up dominating and overrunning the whole world, but that should take a sufficiently long time for you to win
Important note: the AI seems programmed to settle in your direction. This is incredibly annoying, and a big cause of early DoWs since they're all like "hey don't settle near us (even though we just put a city 3 tiles from your cap). The usual (and best) way to deal with this is build Horses or Swords and just kill everyone around you. The peaceful option requires championship settler blocking. I had my entire (small) army running around settler blocking for the first 80 turns.