[GS] Why am I a warmonger?

[N3XUS12]

So playing my first major runthrough of this game, and my Inca neighbour declares his second surprise war against me, plunders my trade routes, steals my settler and attacks my cities.

After a long war, where I was on the defensive for the majority, I finally managed to take his nearest city.

The world congress has just declared me a warmonger and most of the world is now at war with me.

What gives? How can one be classed as a warmonger when they are defending? The logic doesn't make sense to me.

 

[reddishrecue]

That happens to me too when I conquer cities even if I didn't declare war in the first place.

 

[OmegaDestroyer]

Don't look for logic in this game. The AI is insane.

 

[leandrombraz]

You aren't, you got targeted by a Military Emergency. Emergencies are a separate mechanic from warmongering (Grievances in Gathering Storm). Being targeted by one doesn't mean that the world thinks you're a warmonger, you aren't getting a relationship penalty for it. The Civs that voted to participate will try to take the city back for the duration of the emergency, then they will be friendly again. You might be able to make peace 10 turns after the emergency was declared, but the AI doesn't always accept to make peace before the emergency ends (30 turns). I'm not 100% sure about what triggers military emergencies, but it doesn't happen every time you conquer a city and you can try to stop it in the congress.

Friends and allies can't declare war on each other, so next time, try to make as many friendships/alliances as you can before you conquer the city. That will prevent them from participating in the emergency. The only exception is a betrayal emergency, where even friends/allies can declare war on you. Friendships/alliances are also a good way to prevent the AI from denouncing you while you conquer, since friends/allies also can't denounce each other. If you care about diplomacy, you should try to always declare friendship with Civs that you don't want to hate you while you're being aggressive.

The grievances system takes into account that you're defending yourself. It's basically a revenge system, it lets you hurt the AI back proportionally when they hurt you. If the Inca declared a surprise war on you, that gives you 150 grievances against the Inca. The world won't care about what you do to the Inca into you do enough to give the Inca more than 150 grievances against you. If all you did was to take a city, you didn't do enough for anyone to care yet, at least outside of emergencies. The Incas are the warmonger for now, not you. There's a grievances tab in each leader's diplomacy screen. Go there to see how much grievances you still have against the Inca. Be warned that when you take a city, you only get half the penalty for conquering it. The other half will be applied in the peace deal if you keep the city. If you return the city, the half you already got is removed.

 

[MrRadar]

What gives? How can one be classed as a warmonger when they are defending? The logic doesn't make sense to me.

When defenders no longer defend or liberate cities but start taking someone else’s cities, they become aggressors.
It is also customary for whoever misjudged their chances in attack, to try to save their skin and seek help of others by rebranding themselves as the true wronged ones.

Just know the next time, that whenever you take a city, be it in an aggressive or defensive war, you’ll be likely slapped with an emergency vote. Either have enough DF to defeat it in the congress voting, or become friends with more of other civs, that prevents them from joining against you.

If you only want to defend, don’ take cities in war, destroy their units instead and pillage their lands, then in peace deal you’ll get lots of gold in reparations or maybe even a city or two.

 

[Sostratus]

In civ6 war taking cities is really the only thing that matters. You can slaughter armies, pillage, and loot traders, but taking cities is the only real thing anyone cares about. (Bizarre, but it’s how it is.)
The Inca didn’t take any of your cities. You took one of theirs. Now, a fine point needs to be made- all the hate you get can be expunged if in a peace deal you give back the cities you took! But everyone overlooks that.

It’s the difference between “We were invaded by Germany, so we pushed them back and occupied their homeland to force a surrender...” and “... we then annexed half of Germany as part of France. Why are people calling us imperialist warmongers?!?!”
Most players forget this part and keep the cities. Obviously that’s not a good look for pacifists.

 

[Futumch]

In addition, razing cities is not a good look if you want to play as a peaceful civ.

 

[Banazir864]

In civ6 war taking cities is really the only thing that matters. You can slaughter armies, pillage, and loot traders, but taking cities is the only real thing anyone cares about. (Bizarre, but it’s how it is.)
The Inca didn’t take any of your cities. You took one of theirs. Now, a fine point needs to be made- all the hate you get can be expunged if in a peace deal you give back the cities you took! But everyone overlooks that.

It’s the difference between “We were invaded by Germany, so we pushed them back and occupied their homeland to force a surrender...” and “... we then annexed half of Germany as part of France. Why are people calling us imperialist warmongers?!?!”
Most players forget this part and keep the cities. Obviously that’s not a good look for pacifists.

The problem with this analogy is that in real life, you can force a regime change or demilitarization or even partitioning, whereas Civ VI doesn’t have those options, leaving peaceful players who have berserk neighbors in a perpetual series of wars with no way out. You can either conquer the other civ and be branded a warmonger or just accept that you’ll get a new DoW every time the truce expires, giving you all of the military costs of a conquest-oriented strategy with none of the benefits.

If they wanted to penalize players for conquering aggressors, they should have added some sort of “Regime Change” peace option that gives the losing civ an opinion boost towards you and lets you change their agendas to ones you like. Or, they could let you force the aggressor to release some of their founded cities as new city states. Unfortunately, such options don’t exist, so your choices when faced with a hostile neighbor are either high warmongering penalties for conquering them or perpetual wars that you don’t even get cities from.

 

[AlanC9]

"No way out" isn't true. If you crush the enemy's military and put their priests and scholars to the sword, they'll give you several cities to get you to stop. The problem isn't that you can't inflict disabling losses in war without becoming a warmonger. The problem is that the mechanism is stupid.

 

[N3XUS12]

Thanks for the advice everyone. A few mechanics there I wasn't fully aware about.

The problem with this analogy is that in real life, you can force a regime change or demilitarization or even partitioning, whereas Civ VI doesn’t have those options, leaving peaceful players who have berserk neighbors in a perpetual series of wars with no way out. You can either conquer the other civ and be branded a warmonger or just accept that you’ll get a new DoW every time the truce expires, giving you all of the military costs of a conquest-oriented strategy with none of the benefits.

If they wanted to penalize players for conquering aggressors, they should have added some sort of “Regime Change” peace option that gives the losing civ an opinion boost towards you and lets you change their agendas to ones you like. Or, they could let you force the aggressor to release some of their founded cities as new city states. Unfortunately, such options don’t exist, so your choices when faced with a hostile neighbor are either high warmongering penalties for conquering them or perpetual wars that you don’t even get cities from.

This sums up my opinion though. It was the second surprise war declared against me by the Inca. The first one, I took nothing, just some gold. I took the city in the second one because I had no other choice. I didn't even want the burden of managing it, but I kept it because I thought razing would look bad. I had to take it as it was in a choke point giving them easy access to my heartlands.

If there was an option to change regime or vassalise or something like that I would definitely have taken that option instead. I only 'annexed' it to prevent my heartland from being so vulnerable.

 

[Myomoto]

Generally if I'm going for retaliation (and not domination), I will pillage as much as possible from the enemy Civ, including all of their city's districts before I capture the city, or at least surround it and bring it close to capturing. Then I will negotiate peace and generally take all of their gold/resources in trade for giving the city back.

The same can be done as the aggressor. You can definitely run a 'bullying' based economy in Civ VI.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I'm usually pretty peaceful, so if someone attacks me I can get away with keeping a border city or two. Like someone else said declaration of friendships help.

 

[Josephias]

Real world diplomacy. Awful but true. AFAIK, the city emergency can be triggered if you are leading in any victory condition and take a city.

It is a bully-counter reaction even if not just all the time (think of it as your little brother / sister poking at you all the time, but when you react in not-good manner, all it takes is a little crying from them for your pearents considering you guilty). You were strong enough to stand the poking, you do not have the right (even if the grievances meter says so) to take retribution.

Of course, it has to go trough a vote, and if you have enough diplomatic favour and friends, you might be able to stop the emergency. On the other hand, if some civs were just waiting the opportunity to declare war on you without penalty, they will try to use it. As many nations use UN-resolutions to extend their influency while presenting themselves as peacekeepers).

As commented by others, this is not a classification as a warmonger and the emergency (teoretically) is only focused on the city you just took, just to stop you from being too strong -altough anyone can use it for other means.

Indeed the diplomatic side of the game could be improved, and other options could be added (option to request resolutions constraining a player from doing something, that could then trigger a "punishment" emergency if he ignores the constraint are the thing that most likely mimic Real Life, IMHO)

 

[kb27787]

Short answer: because, frankly, Firaxis devs (they did an awesome job on some aspects of the game, but with regards to diplomacy/casus belli, etc...) are stupid.
IMO you shouldn't be able to be the target of an emergency UNLESS you have a certain level of grievance against you.

But I digress; the game is set up to reward being a jackass to all your neighbors, in complete opposite to BNW.

 

[AriochIV]

While the grievance system is better than the "warmonger" system that it replaced, it still doesn't place enough importance on who was the aggressor. The world did not condemn the Allies for occupying the Axis countries at the end of WWII; it was seen as a just consequence of the war which the Axis started. But even going back to the most "polite" eras of limited warfare, the ceding of territory was considered a normal part of warfare.

I suspect that the heavy grievance penalties for capturing cities (and extra for occupying the enemy capital) are the way they are for difficulty reasons. It's pretty easy for the player to beat the poor combat AI, so they probably stack on unreasonable and illogical diplomatic penalties so the player can't just conquer the world with impunity by just waiting for the enemy to attack first.

 

[AlanC9]

It doesn't make much sense to talk about the occupation of the Axis powers after WW2 in a Civ 6 context. The occupied zones weren't outright annexed to the Allied powers(well, Koenigsberg and the Sakhalin area exceoted.)

 

[Arithmion]

-snip-

Bravo @Josephias , I think you've said it beautifully. The game is really missing some more meaningful aspects of diplomacy in the sense of: "Hi everybody in the world congress, just to let you know, Pachacuti tried to kill me. Twice. With no casus belli. I am declaring right now that if he tries it again, I will wipe him off the face of the planet. Anybody want to join me in that pact?" The grievance system is definitely a step in the right direction, but lacks some long-term consequences to the civ that is the grievance creator.

Maybe some sort of world congress resolution: When a single civ has generated over 1000 grievances in their lifetime (which sounds like a lot, but that high number still allows at least some territorial war to keep things moderately interesting), the person with the most lifetime grievances against them can spend 100 diplomatic favor to propose that the civ be declared a hostile state. Now, anytime they declare war, an emergency is triggered. This emergency would be just like any other military emergency, with each civ getting to vote on whether a war is worth it.

IMHO this would make warmongering a little scarier and less snowball-y, and would make world wars a fun addition to the late game, and giving some downside to alliance-locking. (Are you sure you want to alliance lock both Montezuma and Cyrus? Well, okay I guess. They won't attack you, but you're playing a dangerous game with the other civs.)

 

[SirWill90]

It doesn't make much sense to talk about the occupation of the Axis powers after WW2 in a Civ 6 context. The occupied zones weren't outright annexed to the Allied powers(well, Koenigsberg and the Sakhalin area exceoted.)

True however if you think about Civ IV’s vassalage system, that is kind of what happened to the Axis powers. They got their core territory back but were essentially subservient to the Allied powers for decades after the war. All that to say that IV did a much better job of allowing the victor of a long and costly war to relinquish direct control of the conquered territory. The loser was still in the game and could regain independence (in theory). Wish they would bring that back. Oh well maybe in VII...

 

[AriochIV]

Yeah, I miss the vassal system. It had problems, but I still think it was better than not having it.

 

[kb27787]

If I have to suggest some sort of mechanism... make it such that every war is the same (throw out the stupid casus belli and denouncement system altogether--AI doesn't care and surprise wars are not at all punishing) like it was in BNW. You just declare (even on a friend or ally), short and simple.

Instead, tie down the war weariness/allowance for razing/taking cities based on the initial grievance levels when war is declared.
Let's say, declaring war costs 100 grievances (as do surprise wars now), so a DoW against an innocent target who has caused you no harm whatsoever puts you at -100.
At this level the defender gets a -100% reduction to ANY action he takes in the war which would normally cause grievances (which means, he can raze your entire empire without anyone saying anything). Also, your war weariness is increased by +100% from baseline. (And IF I may be allowed to be a bit extreme, the aggressor in this case should take -10 combat strength to all units, so the attacker must have vastly superior forces--just for a gameplay balance purpose of the aggressor getting the advantage of striking first)

Another scenario, let's say the target refused to give a promise you asked (-25) and declared war on one of your CS in which you had an envoy (-25), declaring war against him puts you at -50 instead. He gets -50% reduction to any retaliatory action he takes, your war weariness is increased by +50%, and you suffer -5 combat strength.

Again, let's say that the target had actually been a jerk.. he's broken a promise to you (-100 grievance), you swiftly retaliate by declaring war then and there. The grievance now adds up to a net of zero. Neither player gets any grievance reduction to any action he takes in this war, they get normal war weariness, and there is no combat penalty.

If he's a big jerk (he's holding your cities, etc. and has declared an unprovoked war on you previously) and is sitting at -200 for example, now this time YOU get a -100% reduction on grievances (meaning, you can wipe out his entire empire and the world says serves him right), he gets doubled war weariness and suffers -10 combat strength.

It would nerf active warmongering enough and make it a lot more logical for players to value alliances which boost both sides rather than aiming to just take away the other's stuff.