Warmonger Mechanics Question

[JamesCivFan]

Hey, I have a question to ask about the mechanics behind the warmonger penalties with the new patch. I've seen this in the patch notes (I'm using the new beta version):

Make the building up of warmonger threats more exponential than linear (Minor - Major - Severe - Critical)

Now, I have noticed that the moment I declare war on somebody, I immediately get the bright red warmonger penalty with most civs, and it either fades away completely after a long time (if I don't actually take a city and simply kill units) or it at least goes to dark red. Does anyone know how much is this "cooldown" period?

Also, does this mean that in order for not everyone to hate you you either have to:

a) Get as many allies as possible to actually declare war on your target, since denouncing them isn't enough anymore
b) Declare war, wait for the cooldown time. Take a city. Wait for the cooldown time. Take a second city... and so on? Because it's gonna take a long, long time this way...

Of course, if there's anything I am missing, do tell me.

 

[Makavcio]

I can tell you about my experience with the system.

The most important thing is that warmonger's penalty ruins all neutral relationships. If a civilization is not friendly towards you, every hostile action towards anyone will make them act unfriendly towards you, with denouncement on the horizon. If you are friends, not necessarily DoF'd, this will have much smaller effect.

Alliances are important because they extremely reduce warmongering penalties, though only allies at war count for that.

I know nothing about cooldown period and from what I've experienced, it's either 30.000 years or 45.000 years for the slightest incident... If a civ started chastising me for warmongering, it never went away. There is exception to it, however. You will get huge warmonger's penalty reduction for freeing city states and capitals. The bonus for other cities is also sizable.

 

[JamesCivFan]

Well, in my experience, I have had 3 to 4 civs denouncing me all at once, while we were friends. This chain denouncement reminded me of the old CiV Vanilla games. And it happened right after I took a city.

There are other gray areas as well. For example, do you get a bigger warmonger penalty if you take a city, the AI recaptures it, and you take it again? Or is the diplomatic hit applied only once per city? The only sure-fire way of not getting a diplomatic hit, is to get allies to declare war on the civ you want to get to war with.

I'm really not sure how the whole thing works, though. If anyone knows, you're welcome to answer.

 

[blackcatatonic]

Post-patch, it seems to be a lot harder to make or keep friends.

I was denounced and then declared on by Ramkhamhaeng and Gandhi, apparently because I was expanding too aggressively (at this point, I was already at war with Elizabeth, who had declared on me for pretty standard reasons - she was my neighbour and she wanted my lands). Then I took two of Elizabeth's cities and was chain-denounced by everyone else in the world on that basis. Bit harsh, I thought...

 

[Cromagnus]

The irony is that the AI is MORE likely to attack now, and expands more aggressively, but hates you for warmongering, even if you're fighting back against someone who DoW'd you. This patch feels somewhat... broken.

 

[EEE_BOY]

On the contrary, I think this patch makes it right to punish early warmongering. Most AIs will dow you if super aggressive, like beating civ after civ, even got AI friend dow me in a game and even undead civs will now dow, which is super fun to go world war against almost every AI.

 

[Cromagnus]

Why is it right to punish early warmongering? Because it's more fun to have the whole world DoW you? Um... ok. What about all the civs whose UUs are built for early warmongering? Is that fair to them?

 

[Bjornvader]

yeah it's ridiculous what they did with warmongering.
I'm playing a small continents game and in aprox. 1,000 BC i took ONE city state for its pearls
and pacal decides this means he gets to call me a warmonger for thousands of years.
I even let him spread his religion to all my cities, he dropped the warmonger nonsense.
I hover over him and we're all green. then he waits for the world congress to form, denounces me to everyone and all of a sudden we're all red again and he's calling me a threat and a warmonger all over. this isn't even fun. why am i not playing Civ4?

I've got the game on steam, all the expansions and all the DLC except the new crappy map pack and I've tried to just accept it
as the new version of the Civ Series and it's awful. It's just awful. It's like watching Star Trek : Insurrection. You want to enjoy
it because hey, it's Star Trek but it's just awful.

 

[Ninakoru]

Warmongering is less profitable than ever. Once you conquer most of the cities of any civ, you're set on the relationships. Conquering a CS is an enormous hit you won't recover form it ever. At least you can make very early aggression and hopefully little civs know of your, but if you care to explore to its fullest, you are doomed.

 

[apocalypse105]

Fall patch has broken the game i offically stopped playing it i am donne with firaxis

they made the AI more agressive so even peacefull civs will dow you its back to gods and king
trade routes are uselless know only intern trade routes are usefull

warmonger penalties are to strong its olmost impossible to go for a domination victory you better just try a other victory
Once you declare war and take cities you start a chain reaction of dows and denoucements its just not funny anymore.

 

[Blodo]

Well the city state conquering warmonger penalties are a bit harsh, but for the most part I would say it's all in order - the only thing is that the warmonger penalties are more transparent now. You can actually tell what kind of a penalty you'll receive for what from the tooltips which helps immensely.

In general these are my observations:
- Wiping out a civ or city state will get you a huge penalty (as it been since always)
- Seems also like the higher a military advantage you have against a civ, the higher the penalty (not sure about this but in my recent game Shaka attacked me while my army was relatively small but I was in a decent position to take one of his cities for which the game told me i'd receive a MINOR warmonger penalty - however I decided to play it safe and expanded my army a bit, killed some of his units and the penalty changed to MAJOR, although that might also stem from the below point)
- As a follow-up from the above point, the more cities you take in a short amount of time the greater the penalty for taking more
- Joining a war when asked seems to give you a smaller penalty
- Denouncing before declaring war also seems to give a smaller penalty
- If the AI you're going to war with has been denounced by someone else, there's a good chance you wont get a penalty from them, also a declaration of friendship might have some impact here
- Penalties actually do go away after about an era unless you do something substantial like wiping out a civ
- Liberations have the potential to basically wipe out your warmonger status

All in all I myself don't have too big problems, except for the CS penalties (poor Genghis still can't use his UA to the best of his abilities without becoming a huge pariah - especially with the BNW trade system). The only thing I'd suggest for future patches is to decrease the warmonger penalties for city state warmongering, I mean considering the science penalty you get for owning more cities already, we might as well put in a little bit of cynicism into the game ("if they can't defend themselves they have no right to exist" etc.) for those early warring civs, especially considering how big an impact liberations have on the world stage so that it wont be a no brainer tactic to just invade all the neighbouring CS. Because it definitely isn't now, and yet it should IMO be an option.

 

[JamesCivFan]

In my last game, I declared war, started killing units, and waited at least 20 turns before taking one capital. Then, I got chain denounced by 4 civs at once... I really don't understand why, since I only took 1 city.

 

[Ninakoru]

Yeah, to me a neat solution to both deal with Gengis Khan ability, or wiping out a civ would be that the warmonger calculations could be made like if the victim has always a minimum of 2 cities (even if it isn't true, just for warmongering hate calculations). So killing a CS or wiping a civ once isn't such a huge deal.

 

[Cromagnus]

I think the CS issue was unintentional. They changed the equation to be based more on the target's total number of cities than it used to be, which probably accidentally made killing CS a super big diplomacy hit, since you're always capturing their last city. If this isn't an accident, then they just made it really hard to play Genghis the way he was intended to play. Look at AI Genghis... he immediately starts taking CS. If a player did that now it would be perma-war with every AI. LOL

Not to mention how imbalanced this is if you look at Venice and Austria, who can take CS at will with virtually no diplomacy hit. Genghis just got screwed. ;-)

 

[txgregory]

Fall patch has broken the game i offically stopped playing it i am donne with firaxis

they made the AI more agressive so even peacefull civs will dow you its back to gods and king
trade routes are uselless know only intern trade routes are usefull

warmonger penalties are to strong its olmost impossible to go for a domination victory you better just try a other victory
Once you declare war and take cities you start a chain reaction of dows and denoucements its just not funny anymore.

They certainly closed all the loop holes I used to use to beat the game on higher difficulties. I guess I am kind of sick like, but now I want to find some new loop holes they made with the patch.

 

[CrispyCritter]

I agree that that the war-mongering penalty is not necessarily bad at all, except for the ridiculously large penalty for a city-state conquest.

I've been playing Genghis on immortal completing honor (sometimes after tradition opener) and the only problem I had was the game I actually conquered a city-state - never again until they fix that! Declaring war (and leveling up ranged Crossbows and Keshiks) on city-states was fine.

As long as I kept my conquests to one city plus the capital, I was able to remain friendly with all the rest of the AIs that I hadn't attacked yet. I denounced in advanced, declared war myself (well, sometimes it was being honest about the intent of my troops on their borders) and didn't backstab. In my last game, even after capturing 4 of the 5 other capitals (and at least one, sometimes 2 other cities), I was still firm friends with Catherine, and finally had to backstab her in order to win the game.

 

[njmfff]

Warmongering is less profitable than ever. Once you conquer most of the cities of any civ, you're set on the relationships. Conquering a CS is an enormous hit you won't recover form it ever. At least you can make very early aggression and hopefully little civs know of your, but if you care to explore to its fullest, you are doomed.

Yes, but I would not want to conquer CS now in BWN, even with Mongols. CS are much more valuable now. The only exception is knocking out some CS to render some civ's abilities useless, like Greece, Austria and Siam.

and yes, they need to tweak warmongering diplo a bit. I find it very annoying that AIs can attack each other, attack you all the time, and be happy friends, while you'll get big diplo hits just by declaring war once. and AI can be rather annoying, he settles right next to your boarders, you ask him not to do it, he either promises not to do it or simply refuses, then drops five cities around you anyway.

then yeah, it's time to arm up and go capture some Capitals. You'll be branded a villain, so you might as well play like one.