Warmonger Penality Question

[hans510]

I'm not sure if this is something changed by CEP.

Playing as Korea, King, and about turn 30 Askia drops a city about 5 tiles from my capital and starts putting spearman and bowmen all over the border. I'm sure he will attack soon so I start building up my military. He attacks and I manage to hold off the wall of units he sends and start moving on his city. Now he wants peace. I know if I leave that city there he'll attack again later so I decline his peace offer and finally take that city.

I have three options when I take the city which are be nice, be forceful, and raze the city all of which incur a Major Warmonger penality. Since he started it, seems like the nice option might at least offer a Minor Warmonger penality.

I've never seen a city capture result in anything other than a Major Warmonger penality unless liberating it, is there even a Minor Warmonger penality option? How long does the Warmonger penality last? Shouldn't there be a difference in the penality if I start a war vs. getting attacked and then retaliating?

As a Civ going the science route I've found the Warmonger Penality really hurts, I'll spend so much time fighting off attackers I won't have time to build the infrastructure I need to keep science up. May just have been one of those situations where there wasn't a good course of action.

 

[Kivin]

Strange, I've never seen capturing a city incur a Major Warmonger penalty.

I do know that the Warmonger system is highly criticized (and with good reason) and has a tendency to be very opaque and convoluted. It also exists either wholly or largely within the game DLL instead of the scripting, so changing it is difficult.

If you think that the Warmonger system is too punitive, like many others, perhaps consider using this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=192953436
It does not alter the mechanics of warmongering, but makes it build up slower (-40%) and decay faster (+40%).

 

[hans510]

Thanks, I will try out that Mod. The current penality seems way too harsh.

 

[Delekhan]

I agree that the warmonger penalties often drive me crazy, especially in situations like you mentioned where a crazy AI settles a tiny crappy city right near my borders and causes problems with it.

Also I wish that liberating cities could send warmonger penalties into the negatives. Right now the minimum value is zero.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'll see what I can do to adjust the warmonger penalties.

 

[jwerano]

I have seen minor warmonger penalties but I don't understand how they work at all. For example in my last game I initiated attack on the Celts but my penalty for taking 2 of their cities was only minor instead of the usual major.

It would be nice to know how the penalties are determined so that we can make more intelligent choices about who and under what circumstances to attack if we hope to preserve diplomacy with other civs.

 

[teejing]

Without knowing any code behind it i know that the more civ are at war/have denounced the civ the smaller the penalty becomes.

 

[jwerano]

Thanks for that. Im usually too impatient to denounce a civ and then wait for other civs to dogpile on top of them before attacking but I will try to think ahead a bit more and test this out.

 

[Kivin]

There's been lengthy discussions in the General Discussion and suggestions forums regrading warmongering. In general, there's a lot of confusion regarding the specific mechanics of warmongering (due mostly to its placement in DLL code) and very little consensus on how to improve the system.

 

[Delekhan]

Here's my suggestion for improving it:

Warmonger penalties are much weaker in the early game, somewhat weaker in the mid game (up to industrial), standard in the Modern Era, and somewhat stronger from Atomic onwards.

It more closely reflects the realities of history.

As for the penalty decay rate, an all-around increase of 20% - 40% in the rate seems appropriate if the above scaling is adopted.

 

[Ahriman]

My understanding is that in part the warmonger penalties depend on how much of another civ you're taking. If you take one of another civ's only 2 cities, you get a bigger penalty than if you take one of their 10 cities. So you won't get harshly penalized for a small war with minor territory control, but big conquest or wiping out civs will hurt you.

 

[ExpiredReign]

A couple of times now I have been able to muster a sizeable enough army to completely remove a civ while it is only with its Capital. Often we are the only ones on the island and neither of us has met another civ, just a handful of CSs.

Always I am treated to a popup message saying I will receive EXTREME warmongering penalties.

Question: Just who is around to call me a Warmonger and shouldn't I be able to engage in war like this in the early game?

Then to further confuse me, when I do meet new civs they know nothing of it and are rather eager to befriend me. Just how many different mechanics are involved in this diplomatic nightmare?

Either I am a warmonger and should be treated as one or I'm not.

 

[Ahriman]

IIRC warmonger penalties are only applied to civs you have contact with. So if you only know one civ, and you wipe out its capital, that will give you extreme warmonger penalty.... but only with the now dead civ.

So: you *can* engage in wars like this in the early game.

Also I believe that warmonger penalty declines over time. So early conquest wars will no longer affect diplomatic relations later in the game.

I really don't see any fundamental problems with the system. Transparency could be improved though - in particular its too late to warn a player about warmonger penalties after they've already captured the city.

 

[ExpiredReign]

IIRC warmonger penalties are only applied to civs you have contact with. So if you only know one civ, and you wipe out its capital, that will give you extreme warmonger penalty.... but only with the now dead civ.

So: you *can* engage in wars like this in the early game.

Also I believe that warmonger penalty declines over time. So early conquest wars will no longer affect diplomatic relations later in the game.

I really don't see any fundamental problems with the system. Transparency could be improved though - in particular its too late to warn a player about warmonger penalties after they've already captured the city.

Interesting. Thanks for that. I will watch out for all those dead civilians turning up causing my empire distress.

I think that point about transparency is a very good one. After taking a city is hardly the time to worry about warmongering.

 

[vampireboot]

I've been seeing a lot of minor warmonger penalties lately, but I've also been playing against AI opponents that like to spam cities all over the place. Perhaps the penalty is lower the more cities they have? In my last game, I took all seven cities from the Mayans, including their capital, and each of them was only a minor warmonger penalty. After the war, the warmongering didn't even penalize my relations with anyone else.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'd really like to change the warmonger penalty based on how we deal with captured cities, but I don't know how to do that. A lot of this stuff is in the game core where it's difficult to modify. I did manage to find ways to adjust warmonger penalties in v3.11.1, so you should see more reasonable penalties in games started at that point or later. One of the main things I did is alter the expected number of cities each player has. Firaxis mis-estimated this number, resulting in higher penalties than we should get with the actual size of empires.