There's a serious flaw in diplomacy

Bibor

Doomsday Machine
Joined
Jun 6, 2004
Messages
3,124
Location
Zagreb, Croatia
An allied civ declares war on a city state I'm a suzerain of. This alone is bad.
It's Auckland, so it's kinda important to me.
Our alliance ends, I denounce & declare a protectorate war (zero grievances). Just want to push the AI off Auckland.
The next thing I know, a world congress votes (overwhelmingly!) to declare an all out betrayal war on me.

A betrayal intervetion lasts for 50 turns and the only way to end it is to win a domination victory, because the AI simply refuses to drop the issue (and demands basically all your money for peace). This part must be a bug, because if I raze 9 out of 10 cities of an AI, that's a good indicator they should accept a peace deal. And it's not even that this is the reason they refuse.
 
but you get extra grievances against them.
Suzerain is not ownership.
If the CS is so important, levy the troops and encircle it.
CS powers like Auckland are quite strong and it is one of the few areas of the game there and is risk and excitement when the AI declared on the CS.
I personally would like some teeth left in the game and it’s not like you get no warning and can do nothing about it.

Alliances lull you into a false security that quite often can be broken.

As long as allies cannot attack your suze CS, fair enough I s what I think. The betrayal should apply to them attacking your CS is missing in my view.
 
but you get extra grievances against them.
Suzerain is not ownership.
If the CS is so important, levy the troops and encircle it.
CS powers like Auckland are quite strong and it is one of the few areas of the game there and is risk and excitement when the AI declared on the CS.
I personally would like some teeth left in the game and it’s not like you get no warning and can do nothing about it.

Alliances lull you into a false security that quite often can be broken.

As long as allies cannot attack your suze CS, fair enough I s what I think. The betrayal should apply to them attacking your CS is missing in my view.
I get your point, but from a logical point of view, it still feels pretty immersion breaking that your ally can attack your suzerain without you being able to do anything about it. After all, a suzerain CS is somewhat akin to an allied or at least declared friend civ, and you don't just go around attacking your ally's allies without them getting upset.

I think a good compromise would be that if an allied civ attacks your suzerain CS, you can cancel the alliance. This will give the (former) allied civ a minor to moderate negative diplomacy modifier with third party civs (basically as if he did a betrayal, but less severe - they dislike them for giving you reason to break off your alliance), but would also make you suffer a major diplomatic penalty from the (former) ally (they hate you for breaking off the alliance).
 
If a City State is important to you, leave a couple of your own units near it to break up any invasion attempts, even a Scout or Builder can be enough.
 
My main issue is with the betrayal mechanism and the resulting neverending war - not with an AI being opportunistic.

Yes, I had grievances against them (75, to be exact) and the AI was *not* a friend, since an alliance ending drops the status of friendly relationship.
This happened to me twice in a row, and basically ruined both my attempts at a peaceful game.

You can't send aid to city states, yes, you can game the system by blocking enemies from reaching the city. That's not the point. If an AI (or you the player for that matter) declares war on a city-state you're a suzerain of, you should be able to do something that doesn't break your game.

Yes, I guess I *could* wait for the AI to capture the city state and then *hopefully* vote in an emergency, but then WHY is there a protectorate war Casus Belli in the first place?

Perhaps instead of trying to prove I can circumvent the issue... perhaps you could look at the problem at face value and we could discuss and present our case to Firaxis instead.
 
I wish players could "loan" troops to a CS in suzerainty, as sort of a reverse levy. That way if an important CS ally of mine gets attacked and I have troops nearby, I can aid in their defense without having to declare war myself. Does that make sense?
 
I wish players could "loan" troops to a CS in suzerainty, as sort of a reverse levy. That way if an important CS ally of mine gets attacked and I have troops nearby, I can aid in their defense without having to declare war myself. Does that make sense?

You could basically do that in V. You could "gift units" to city states to get them to like you more. It doubled as a means to buy city states' good will but also give them units for defense to keep. I wish that would make a comeback in VI.
 
You could basically do that in V. You could "gift units" to city states to get them to like you more. It doubled as a means to buy city states' good will but also give them units for defense to keep. I wish that would make a comeback in VI.
Do city states have waived resource requirements? Obviously it won't do to gift a dozen tanks only to watch them helplessly suffer for not having gas.
I would totally abuse this to churn out huge forces of fuel units to my Suze, then declare a war and let them run over people for me. For example, Auckland now has 5 GDRs. Good luck.
Do CS fuel units cost you resource maintenance if you levy them? Either way, I would totally just levy the GDRs back and eat the -10 penalty. (But would have to be careful with units like infantry, tanks)
 
The issue is that Protectorate wars are useless.

Also people that play on Emperor are people too; please give those CS's walls. Or really just any difficulty.

tl;dr Civ 5 did it better.
 
Also people that play on Emperor are people too; please give those CS's walls.

I play on Emperor and I can't play without "Walls for City states" addon even after the patch.
In this particular case, Gitarja went ham on city states because she couldn't expand otherwise. If was bad enough she already overran two city states I was suzerain of, but when she went after Auckland I lost my nerve.

Yes, apparently Protectorate wars are useless for anything but having a 0 grievances CB at hand.

It works the other way too - I can declare, conquer and raze a state that's under the suzerainity of my neighbor and nobody bats an eye. Something's not right.
 
If you are an ally you have to physically block the AI units from the city state with your units.

Also I think you need to denounce before you declare a protectorate war. On a true Europe map as Rome on King I did this to protect Geneva from Eleanor who I was on friendly terms with.
 
I believe they changed that

I did denounce, but perhaps I should've waited a turn before declaring the war. That might've been my mistake, but also, not very well communicated by the AI.
The diplomacy UI already locks out certain things (for example, you can't shop favors and ask/demand things on the same turn, altho this might be another bug).
 
you can't shop favors and ask/demand things on the same turn, altho this might be another bug)
While I tended not to demand, shopping favours and asking for things I have never had an issue with, can you be more specific?
There are some rare cases I have had to close the diplomacy window and reopen but not since GS.
Quite a few diplomacy things are updated at the end of turn which may be some of your issue.

Quite a few of the diplomacy mechanisms have a settings table that controls how likely civs are to perform or accept certain actions but certainly areas like demand and trade are being dealt with in the dll a lot.
 
While I tended not to demand, shopping favours and asking for things I have never had an issue with, can you be more specific?

Yes. I buy favors from one AI, and the moment I complete that transaction, the "ask a favor" button completely dissapears from all AI leader windows.
If I reload the turn autosave, the "ask a favor" button is there again for all leaders, until again I shop for favors.
 
I did denounce, but perhaps I should've waited a turn before declaring the war.
Not sure about the protacterate mechanisms, but yes in general, nothing updates until next turn with regards to denouncing etc., so denounce-DOW on same turn is same as just DOW afaik.
 
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