Way to tell if the Other Leader(AI) is going to attack you?

[Artanis]

Y'know, this makes me wonder...do the AIs buy off other AIs into attacking their enemies?

 

[notque]

He just attacked me, I took a citiy with iron, he was fine.. i gained his ivory by culture, and the war is on.

 

[madmaven]

I was astonished last night when Greece declared war on me.

Alexander is a punk. If I'm near him I hamstring him as soon as possible because you'll never keep him happy.

 

[madmaven]

Not true. In fact, Ive played a couple of games where they have been on cautious and declared war out of the blue. Caught me completely unprepared. Not sure if this is working as intended or a bug.

Good to know. I'm sure each AI makes a calculation about war and if it's over their patience threshold they will declare. I think the "cautious" or "furious" calculation is a related but not equal calculation.

 

[Lucas87]

as someone else mentioned, your neighbour switching to vassalage/theocracy is a VERY good clue. They won't necessarily do this everytime before war, but if they do do it then you KNOW you are about to be attacked and you may as well start shoring up your defences Asap

 

[ghen]

an extremely easy way to tell if a furious civ is going to attack is if they send a single military unit and a siege weapon to your border. In the next couple turns you're getting attacked.

The single unit+siege might be hidden in another stack, but the AI treats that as its expeditionary force and completely seperate from the main attacking stacks.. It seems to always be sent out.

 

[Meffy]

This has been touched on before but I'll put it in a formula. My rule with regard to Isabella, Alexander, Montezuma, Tokugawa, et. al.:

The way to tell if Certain Leaders (AI) are going to attack you is if they are not yet attacking you.

:-S =8-O

 

[Geostrophic]

Not true. In fact, Ive played a couple of games where they have been on cautious and declared war out of the blue. Caught me completely unprepared. Not sure if this is working as intended or a bug.

A long time ago I had someone declare war on me while they were "Pleased" towards me... wish I'd taken a screenshot so I had proof. I THINK it was Montezuma, though I could be wrong. The upshot was I was blocking his expansion and had zilch for a military. The AI will take opportunities like that if you present them, regardless of what their attitude towards you is.

 

[magerain]

If I have thin military and era changes Ancient->Knights, Knights-Cavalry, Cavalry-Armour, Armour->Modern Armour then I know they will go after me.

And changing civics to war-time is a very good clue too.

If you don't let AI expand I think he will attack too, but usually when my cities don't let AI expand, his cities don't let me expand too, so in that situation it's usually I am who is on offensive

 

[calyth]

I had Isabella declare war shortly after I converted to her religion. She was silly enough to place a city on my island (archipelago map) so I razed it (it was size 1 anyways). She was also at least cautious, and relations were getting better when she declared war.
There seems to be two types of AI, those that are more rational and those who aren't. The more rational ones usually declares war if they're cautious or below, irrational ones may declare war simply because he/she's ran out of room to expand.

 

[magerain]

In fact Isabella is rational. Once I was waging war with her against Napoleon. I thought it was very smart of me to have that +4 Our military struggle brings us closer together, for safe bombing Napoleon. So I thought I was fooling her. In fact she was fooling me , when Napoleon was over she attacked me, we had a long war, she captured one of my cities after 50 turns and I lost time victory.
So I decided to reload, and get a time victory by capturing Spain. This time I started building up military, after Napoleon was done with, I still was not ready to strike Isabella, but this time she didn't declare war. She asked for a tribute, and when I refused, she still didn't declare.

So there really are at least three factors towards whether they declare or not:
1) They like you or don't
2) Comparative strength of your military
3) Which AI is that (that is Montezuma striking before Isabella, Isabella striking before Gandhi)

And there might be some other factors too.

 

[calyth]

magerain: You just haven't play enough games with Isabella. She's rarely rational at all. There are enough times, like when I have 3 defenders in each city on a warlord game, and they're the best city defenders you can get, that she declares war and there was no good reason for it. She's declared war while pleased and militarily weak compared to me.

 

[PekkaM]

If I have thin military and era changes Ancient->Knights, Knights-Cavalry, Cavalry-Armour, Armour->Modern Armour then I know they will go after me.

I think AI would be much more efficient if they too beelined for cavalry. I think I've gotten knights long time after cavalry in all my games so far. Maybe if I was in stretched war I'd research guilds earlier to help me in my immediate needs but usually it's just appeasing until miltitary tradition and then... bam!

 

[magerain]

calyth: she declared war on you while you had overwhelming number of defenders, and she got off my back when I built eight armor units. Maybe she doesn't perceive defenders as threat, but rather counts number of attackers you have?
And maybe you prevented her expansion?

 

[Instant_Cereal]

Montezum usually attack without warning and without reason. In my current game he declared war on me FOUR TIMES in the ancient age

This ******* did the same thing to me one time on a large snakey continents map. I'm Rome, half way around the world (literally, I was like in North America and he was in Russia), and this guy starts marchin' armies around the world for me to decimate. I had no ability to harm him in any way. It took his armies so long to reach me there were times when I forgot I was even still at war with him. Seriously, the war lasted a good 3000 some years.

 

[romelus]

pleased civs will declare war. it's happened to me twice now with mao. the biggest factor in war declaration is how strong you are militarily. if you don't have a big military, you will have multiple AIs declaring war on you, even those that share your religion.

tokugawa is another annoying guy. even with +4 relationship and same religion he wouldn't agree to open borders. he would still be "annoyed" even if total relationship is +1. he's annoying to other civs too. in my games other leaders tend to gang up on japan, probably because he's such a hard nose

some leaders however are completely peaceful. hatty of egypt has never attacked me, even when she's annoyed. has she attacked any of you?

 

[kamigawan]

The reasons for the AI to declare war or not are basically the same as the ones you can see in the diplomacy window for declaring war on a third civ:

"We cannot betray our close friends." - The better relations you have with a civ, the less likely they will declare war on you. Friendly will basically never declare war; pleased very rarely but possible; cautious unlikely; annoyed be prepared; furious pretty likely.

"We are afraid of their military might" - the AI takes your relative military power into consideration. If you have a more powerful military force overall, it is less likely to declare war (AI seems to consider total power, so for example it considers and modern armor = 4x knight).

"We would have nothing to gain." - It seems this one is based on the need for expansion where gain = territorial and/or city number gain weighed against maintainance costs and the cost of going to war itself. Not sure if resources or wonders are factored into this calculation or not.

In a possibly separate category, your culture threat against enemy cities from close borders, in addition to "our close borders spark tension" relations penalty, seems to increase the probability of war, although this may also contribute to the ease of waging war on a close neighbor.

The delcare war calculation likely is a combination of these factors.

 

[baptiste]

Question #2 - Is there any way to tell if a leader is making an empty threat, or actually going to attack ya? Are some leaders more prone to attacking then others?

If you do nott have a nasa computer, there is a very easy way to estimate if one of the ia is seriously thinking about attacking you. Lag between turns, when they calculate their chance of winning.

Threats without lag means empty threat if the ia is not totally dominant over you (in wich case calculation will be easy).

Some lunatic ia do not follow these rules (moctezuma, alexander...) since they attack without really calculating anything. Just because they love war.

 

[kung-fu-stu]

I was quite interested in this so had a quick look in the leader heads xml file and found the following data. This is just a summary of the "NoWarAttitudeProbs" data. I take it to mean that no one will go to war with you if they are friendly (everyone is 100), no one will hesitate to go to war with you if they're Furious (there's not even a statistic for this) and if they're both cautious, Asoka is more LIKELY to go to war than Saladin. But it all depends on how much you provoke them. The column titles are (A)nnoyed, (C)autious, (P)leased, (F)riendly.

Leader A C P F
Asoka 0 20 70 100
Queen Victoria 0 20 80 100
Catherine 0 20 80 100
Louis XIV 0 20 80 100
Alexander 0 20 80 100
Qin Shi Huang 0 30 80 100
Montezuma 0 30 80 100
Mao Zedong 0 30 80 100
Kublai Khan 10 50 90 100
Bismarck 10 50 90 100
Queen Elizabeth 10 50 90 100
Genghis Khan 10 50 90 100
Huayna Capac 10 50 90 100
Julius Caesar 10 50 90 100
Mansa Musa 10 50 90 100
Napoleon 10 50 90 100
Peter 10 50 90 100
Roosevelt 10 50 90 100
Edo Tokugawa 10 50 90 100
Queen Isabella 10 50 90 100
Washington 20 70 100 100
Hatshepsut 20 70 100 100
Gandhi 20 70 100 100
Frederick 20 70 100 100
Cyrus 20 70 100 100
Saladin 20 70 100 100

 

[alco75]

The code tag is your friend.

Leader           A  C   P   F
Asoka            0 20  70 100
Queen Victoria   0 20  80 100
Catherine        0 20  80 100
Louis XIV        0 20  80 100
Alexander        0 20  80 100
Qin Shi Huang    0 30  80 100
Montezuma        0 30  80 100
Mao Zedong       0 30  80 100
Kublai Khan     10 50  90 100
Bismarck        10 50  90 100
Queen Elizabeth 10 50  90 100
Genghis Khan    10 50  90 100
Huayna Capac    10 50  90 100
Julius Caesar   10 50  90 100
Mansa Musa      10 50  90 100
Napoleon        10 50  90 100
Peter           10 50  90 100
Roosevelt       10 50  90 100
Edo Tokugawa    10 50  90 100
Queen Isabella  10 50  90 100
Washington      20 70 100 100
Hatshepsut      20 70 100 100
Gandhi          20 70 100 100
Frederick       20 70 100 100
Cyrus           20 70 100 100
Saladin         20 70 100 100