"You have traded with our worst enemies"

[Trynthlas]

or "we strongly encourage you to stop trading with xxx"

...when I have no OB, no trade agreements, have not gifted/received anything from the civ in question - why is this negative present, and how do I get rid of it? Rather annoying to receive a diplomatic demerit for something I'm not doing.

 

[Drago Askani]

Did you trade tech with the civ in question? once you traded with them if they were enemies of whoever it will haunt you for most the game.

 

[DrJambo]

At what point does a civ become a worst enemy of another? Obviously they have to be the most disliked, but is there an actual minimum level they also have to be at, e.g. "annoyed" or below?

 

[JujuLautre]

A worst ennmy is always a civ for which the leader is annoyed or worse. I'm not sure if it's the one which have the worse ranking though.

 

[Trynthlas]

Nope, no tech trades, nothing. Yet it's still there.

 

[KMadCandy]

giving in to demands from the worst enemy counts as a trade. like, they come and ask for 135g and you say okay, that's a trade.

it could be that they're resentful over trades with their previous worst enemy. the penalty doesn't go away when they become best friends with their ex-worst enemy and move on to a new one . so if you weren't watching the diplo screen back then you might not know who you actually earned the penalty for trading with? maybe traded maps when you first met somebody, before you met this bitter guy.

you can't do anything to get rid of it except wait for it to decay.

 

[Trynthlas]

it could be that they're resentful over trades with their previous worst enemy.

Now see, that's the annoying part I'm talking about...

 

[House Atreides]

i just had this happen on the last game i played. i wonder if having trade routes with the enemy civ will cause this as well?

 

[Airefuego]

Say I am happily trading corn-for-fish with Joao.

And say Joao's relationship with Lizzie goes from "cautious" to "annoyed" at some time during the life of the deal, thus making them "worst enemies" suddenly.

Does Lizzie hit me with -1 "you traded with our worst enemies" straight away? or does it only count for new deals with Joao? or only if I keep trading with him after she asks me to stop?

 

[Trynthlas]

That would likely get you a demerit, since it's an active trade.

What we're talking about is the -1 for trade.......when there is zero, zip, zilcho trade going on. No OB, no resources, no gifts/demands, nada.

Atreides may be on to something - if cities have trade routes with another civ (which a player has no control over, barring Mercantilism), does that count for this penalty? If so, I think that's bunk.

 

[KMadCandy]

well you get actual, useable, trade routes that show up in your cities (or theirs) only from having OB, and OB is an ongoing deal that counts as trading with them.

so you do have control over trade routes. the random, uncontrollable map factor of "if we had open borders then yes we'd be connected or no we'd not" has nothing to do with worst enemy status.

one other thing came to mind, that's 100% not intuitive. worst enemy changes require an extra turn to kick in after the display changes. say two civs are at war and sign peace, on the turn that they sign peace they might go from annoyed to cautious. so on that turn, they don't look like potential worst enemies. but they still are. the game doesn't recalculate "who's my worst enemy" until the in-between turn. so if you for example bribe someone to make peace, so that you can trade with the other, you need to wait a turn, or you will get hit with worst enemy trading even tho you cannot tell why you got hit from watching the screen.

that only happens on the exact turn someone changes from annoyed to cautious. the "cautious cannot be a worst enemy" rule doesn't count until after that turn is over. i think that's a bug and reported it as one. some folks didn't consider it a bug. everybody in that discussion agreed that the game would be better if the diplomatic interface showed worst enemies!

 

[Trynthlas]

Right KMad...that makes sense, but what I'm saying is that I seem to get the status even without open borders (and hence should be no trade routes) ...?

I've noticed the little next to a leader's name even without open borders, why would that be?

 

[KMadCandy]

that just means you have a possible trade connection for trading resources (your cities can communicate / trade with each other). declaring war takes it away, so can closed borders with somebody else along the way (barb cities popping up, etc). because those things mean "it's now impossible for our cities to communicate with each other".

i edited my previous post when another thought came to mind. i doubt it's what happened, it's pretty rare but it's just about impossible to figure out WTH is going on there. i only happened to puzzle it out by watching an ALC, so it wasn't a game i was playing, only watching and pondering, and i had plenty of time.

 

[DrJambo]

Can a civ have more than one "worst enemy"? For instance, say a civ is "annoyed" with several civs and assuming that being "annoyed" is the trigger, does that mean that that civ will have several "worst enemies"?

 

[KMadCandy]

no, the worst is the single one they're annoyed or furious with that they hate the most numerically. but ... that means the lowest mathematical total including the numbers you don't see, like the invisible warmonger respect modifiers, and there are some for "i lost a war to you" i think maybe, etc. so sometimes you're guessing and aren't totally sure which of the two contestants is getting the trophy for worst. unless you get the demand to stop trading or, my personal favorite, clicking on the hater until he finally does the "we suggest you stop trading with the XYZ" dialogue. sometimes takes 87 clicks but you gotta do what you gotta do .

 

[Airefuego]

the invisible warmonger respect modifiers

is this why though Togo has closed borders and "cautious" with me for 1000 years, but then gets "pleased" with Monty the turn after they meet?

 

[KMadCandy]

that's part of the reason!

i learned about that stuff here. be sure to read all 3 pages. it's an old thread and many of the assumptions folks made on the first page are completely wrong but are corrected later by folks who know. note that the invisible -2 toward the human from all AIs but not toward each other, on the Aggressive AI setting that's mentioned in that thread, applies only to Vanilla and Warlords. that was taken away in BtS.

there's also a set of charts made recently by oedali available here. i'm a permanoob and i just flat can't wrap my brain around figuring out that chart. probably because i worked out my own bizarre way of understanding it months ago. but a lot of folks find it really helpful and hopefully you, or someone reading this, will too

 

[Speedy36]

I have a question that applies to this topic:

Say Montezuma hates Ghandi.

I, Isabella, and Julius trade with Ghandi.

Montezuma is mad at me because I traded with Ghandi, but he isn't mad with Isabella or Julius, can anyone explain why?

 

[Morgawr]

no, the worst is the single one they're annoyed or furious with that they hate the most numerically. but ... that means the lowest mathematical total including the numbers you don't see, like the invisible warmonger respect modifiers, and there are some for "i lost a war to you" i think maybe, etc. so sometimes you're guessing and aren't totally sure which of the two contestants is getting the trophy for worst. unless you get the demand to stop trading or, my personal favorite, clicking on the hater until he finally does the "we suggest you stop trading with the XYZ" dialogue. sometimes takes 87 clicks but you gotta do what you gotta do .

I do the same thing too! Click again and again until they reveal their worst enemy with that quote. It does get tiresome... I wish someone would mod the relations or the glance screen to automatically show worst enemies. How hard could it be?

I think the most straightforward way would be to modify the glance screen so that worst enemies have a different color than the pink/red used for annoyed/furious. Or maybe the color stays the same but the number is circled or underlined, something simple like that. I would do it myself it I knew Python well enough.

 

[KMadCandy]

Montezuma is mad at me because I traded with Ghandi, but he isn't mad with Isabella or Julius, can anyone explain why?

did they trade with gandhi while he was monty's worst enemy?

get your saltshaker out because i have no idea if this was coincidence or not:
i played a game in warlords once where i did a ton of reloading to watch weird diplo interactions. the whole purpose of the game was an experiment, to see what sort of things would change. i noticed that i'd have OB with, to use your example, gandhi. monty wouldn't hold it against me until he either demanded that i cancel and i refused, or in some other type of conversation he had the opening line "we suggest you stop trading with gandhi blah blah". if i didn't cancel the deals on my own that turn, he gave me the negative afterward (i can't remember if it was immediately on the following turn). it was like he didn't resent it right away, i got a pass until he notified me. he could notify me during a tech trade, it wasn't necessarily related to gandhi at all.

i never tried that type of "play purely to watch the diplo, and reload to change things" experiment game again, and haven't paid attention to that part of worst enemy really. i'd forgotten all about it until reading your post. usually i ignore those greetings, "fear my horse archers" yeah okay dude, whatever. even if that was part of the code, it may have changed in BtS. so i honestly don't know if that's real.