What do you think of the war support system?

[blackbutterfly]

But yeah I agree with you, I'd like an option to continue a war even if the rival hits 0 war support.

That would make the game easier, considerably.

That's part of the challenge.

 

[CoconutTank]

Playing Civ VI at Deity is no different. War is the easiest way to get the upper hand on the AI.

But comparatively HK's AI does produce a navy and will put up a considerable fight, which is a huge contrast to Civ VI which the AI builds a couple of ships but will rarely if ever perform a naval assault/siege of one of your cities.

In Civilization you pretty much have to be aggressive from the get go until the end. Civ VI is better than Civ V in that respect, particularly after NFP, thanks to Monopolies & Corporations mode. In HK you can make alliances, trade, tech and build wonders to win in the mid-late game, as I did in my last game. So it's not all war.

I do want to try more peaceful/vertical sessions, though my previous attempts had not worked out that well. If a rival is separated from me by several regions or a sea (or several other rivals), and has managed to grow fat (which is just a matter of chance), it's fairly difficult for me to interfere unless I send military in their direction. That was the case in Civ6, and that seems to be the case in HK as well.

That would make the game easier, considerably.

That's part of the challenge.

So admittedly I didn't explicitly recite kaspergm's proposal of being able to continue a war with penalties. To make it more apparent, yes it'd probably make the game too easy to continue war w/out penalties in the game's current state, and I would like to see an option to continue warring with penalties.

 

[Dale]

but the system itself is a step forward in the right direction for the 4X empire building games.

I'm sorry, but absolutely not! Yes, I hear everyone with their "oh but that's how Paradox does it" and "oh but that's how history works", seriously come on!

I do not play Paradox games partly because of this mechanic, plus a game is meant to be fun, not a history simulator. This system to me (and a large amount of players going by games2gether forums) is NOT FUN. This war resolution method plus the reinforcement mechanic has absolutely destroyed Humankind for me. I literally do not find these two things fun.

Which is really a shame because I am REALLY enjoying the nation building aspects (territories, outposts, attachments, influence).

 

[Siptah]

What do you dislike about the reinforcement mechanic @Dale? That it can prolong (especially later) battles sheer endlessly? Or that it is hard to know what you have to put up with when starting a battle? That reinforcement is so easy to block? I'm curious, haven't heard much complaints about that yet.

 

[Dale]

I posted this elsewhere, but it answers the question.

The reinforcement mechanic where if I have X stacks incoming to their city the AI sends one unit out and retreats on battle start, causing all my stacks to go on cooldown for a turn.
The reinforcement mechanic where if I attack a single unit with a single unit, and AI retreats, my main army in the vicinity goes on cooldown even having not been used.
The reinforcement mechanic where if I have units near a neighbouring civ's border city, and someone else attacks it (even though I'm not at war with either) it locks my units into the battle, even though I cannot participate in it.
The reinforcement mechanic where if your units are nearby when someone initiates a siege, get locked in for 7+ turns. Someone on games2gether even has a thread running where his stack of units was caught in a continuous siege after siege for 100 turns. And, it should be noted the two civs at war he was at peace with for the entire time.

 

[Jkchart]

This mechanic I really dislike. It's been made clear on games2gether forums that this mechanic is to ensure the human player cannot destroy AI after AI quickly. It eliminates strategic choice from the player and railroads you down a ridiculous path that leads to frustrations and completely dumb resolutions. Lots of people have already posted horror stories of war resolution, including (but not limited to) occupying nearly all of the enemy, destroying the armies of the enemy, and rolling over the remaining territory, but because your war support hit 0 first the AI turns around and takes chunks of your land and taking everything it just lost back. Or being forced into surrender because a third AI civ at war with the same civ surrenders.

What an insane design decision that the only valid path to conquering an enemy is to ransack all their territories except the captial, then finish the war off by taking the capital.

I truly have no idea how that could even happen if you have already conquered almost all enemy cities and repeatedly smashed their units that your War Support would be at 0 considering you win 8 for each battle, 5 for each retreat, and then give ticking warscore against an enemy for each city you occupy...that just doesn't sound possible with the system but I'm curious to learn more about that issue

 

[blackbutterfly]

Which is really a shame because I am REALLY enjoying the nation building aspects (territories, outposts, attachments, influence).

TIP: Try a mostly water map. Many Islands. Max. continents.

You will need to build a navy. HK is not Civ.

 

[fortydayweekend]

I truly have no idea how that could even happen if you have already conquered almost all enemy cities and repeatedly smashed their units that your War Support would be at 0 considering you win 8 for each battle, 5 for each retreat, and then give ticking warscore against an enemy for each city you occupy...that just doesn't sound possible with the system but I'm curious to learn more about that issue

I think you lose war support for:
- losing battles or retreating
- cities being occupied by enemy
- ransacking

So you could hit zero war support in a 'winning' situation if you lost a lot of individual battles and were ransacking a lot, especially if your initial war support was low.

Making demands to build war support before war breaks out is very important, and this is a good mechanic - it means there's an incentive for both sides to escalate a minor disagreement into a major crisis by making demands, with the option to "defuse".

Spoiler :

I think they need to tweak a couple of things - losing minor skirmishes shouldn't matter as much as large battles - but otherwise you just have to play the game. There's no hard caps on conquest like you get in Paradox games and you can quickly rebuild war support especially with military cultures, it might take a few wars to conquer someone completely and you might have to alternate between enemies while rebuilding war support but conquering the world should be possible?

 

[Taefin]

I think the reinforcements system is build on a strong governing ethos, but then the specific rules implemented in the game are often opposed to that philosophy.

Ultimately it should become that anyone at peace with both sides can move freely through, or at least out of, a battle zone, and that anyone at war with any party involved can join, and that more than 2 empires can participate in a battle.

If two battles are happening with overlapping regions, wherein becomes ambiguous which battle a given army should be assigned to (currently they are added to whichever battle is initiated first), these battles should take place simultaneously on one. I’d put a dividing line between the two battle zone, but allow units to freely move across this like from one battle to the other. In my current game, my entire army got engaged by one AI army while a second AI army sieged my city right next door. I should have been able to walk my troops over to defend the city but obviously couldn’t. For each battle across this dividing line of follow the same rules for ending the battle. If all of one sides units are killed in one side, that should fend that battle. Then it’s still possible to screen for a battle but you’d need to actually be between the army and the siege and hold a line to deprive them a path to the siege.
And if a the attacker retreats or the defending army wins a battle within three rounds, the defender should not have their movement or action taken away, to prevent being forced into cool down by a single unit. Sometimes this seems to happen so there must be some effort to make this a reality.

I wish we had a Stellaris like ability to spend influence to lay claim on an owned region. So let influence passively affect cultural ownership, but let empires selectively apply influence to certain regions as well.

I do think that Cyrus’ conquest is not a good argument for allowing capture of entire AI empires in one to (contrary to Persian’s legacy ability’s focus on city cap) but for making it easier to make vassals out of non-trivial empires. Adding relatively military strength to the war score would help with this. I also want the ability to train vassals’ EU.

 

[Dale]

TIP: Try a mostly water map. Many Islands. Max. continents.

You will need to build a navy. HK is not Civ.

Last game I did huge, 8 continents, 8 civs, peaceful (since I really do not like how war works in HK). Whilst yeah, it increases the focus on territory building, it also highlights the snowball effect from medieval. The last 100 turns were essentially queue up industry and science districts, and click next next next. By the time I finished the tech tree around turn 250, I was 3 eras in front.

Navy you say? What point is a navy when I'm in battleships and the AI is still getting lost at sea?

 

[fortydayweekend]

Last game I did huge, 8 continents, 8 civs, peaceful (since I really do not like how war works in HK). Whilst yeah, it increases the focus on territory building, it also highlights the snowball effect from medieval. The last 100 turns were essentially queue up industry and science districts, and click next next next. By the time I finished the tech tree around turn 250, I was 3 eras in front.

Navy you say? What point is a navy when I'm in battleships and the AI is still getting lost at sea?

What level was that on? I'm finding the AI can keep up pretty well on the higher levels if you don't do any conquest.

 

[Dale]

What level was that on? I'm finding the AI can keep up pretty well on the higher levels if you don't do any conquest.

2 or 3 from the top from memory.

 

[Aristos]

Playing Civ VI at Deity is no different. War is the easiest way to get the upper hand on the AI.

That is exactly what I was saying. You misunderstood me, I was referring to "that other game".

 

[Taefin]

And for the love of god give me 10 seconds to move before the AI triggers every possible battle across the map while I am still closing era stars notifications!