Declare war button PLEASE

I agree that we should be able to declare war even if the AI is too busy to talk to us about the matter. This is something that people will deem to be silly

Rawr

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Why is the AI too busy to talk?

AI is busy. It is always working. It uses your dual core to dominate you.

It seems that every time you conclude a treaty or make a trade, the other sovereign is so overcome by your glorious presence that they need a few years to recover.

...

A developer must have put it in there as a temporary measure to prevent some abuse, and no one bothered cleaning it up.

I don't mind that there is a prevention to stop abuse, but it would be neater if the particular option for abuse is eliminated from the table. The AI simply saying to that particular item, "We have discussed this and I shall not consider your words at this time." Or "Your request is falling upon deaf ears."

Fixed in the next patch.  The exploit was that you could decalre war against weak players then force them to give you money for peace, repeat forever.

The fix is a fairly simple one.  From now on the "to busy" check only happens if you are at war.  If you aren't at war then you can contact them as many times as you want.

Thanks. That at least makes sense

But you can't sue for surrender unless you are at war. Often, I wipe out a faction's cities, and then want to sue for surrender to obtain the sovereign....but he's always 'too busy'. Too busy getting his butt kicked....he should be willing to have an audience with his better.

In addition, when a sovereign surrenders to you, you get him added to your fold, though with a negative trait applied. This is a really cool feature, though left very incomplete.

If he's 'too busy', you are forced to kill him instead....and you don't get him added to the fold. But sovereign's can't die?!? I recommend him surrendering to you at the last minute...just like he 'escapes at the last minute', but he receives a different negative trait; something that better reflects getting stomped on.

Lastly, there are times when a faction gives up. All their cities are razed. He/she stands there doing nothing. This makes no sense. Imo, first off, the cities should not be razed, but should at the very least become neutral cities, comfortable with simply sustaining themselves. Second of all, the faction sovereign should be as obtainable as if he were a hired hero. There could be a tech for 'Sovereign hiring'. There could be a cost associated with hiring a sovereign. Most importantly, there should be a negative trait added that is reflective of the sovereign's new underwhelming status as mercenary.

Good points, Firefly.

How about making "Too busy" only trigger for X number of turns after a declaration of war? After say, 50 turns, you can then recontact that civ for negotiation. Reduces the gaming of the system. Also seems like something the AI could handle, too.

Yea, I can't stand the cities razing themselves in a histrionic fit.  I once saw AI Relias rage quit when he still had 7 cities.  7!  A whole area of the game was left open where he quit.  What are we going to do, move in late game and build cities?  Cities that take hundred years to be worth a damn?  Boo to that.  

You are welcome to try to get the AI faction to surrender, but not within X turns of your last diplomatic contact (ie: declaring war).  That X value is xml defined and currently set to 10 turns.

I may have been confusing in my prior post, I didnt say you couldnt get contact if you were at war, I just said that the "to busy" check didn't happen unless you were at war.

You HAVE to be kidding. 50 turns? My average war does last a quarter of that. I doubt I have ever been at war for 50.

A timer somewhere would be nice, or some aggression something to otherwise support that they are refusing to accept contact. To date I have found it terribly vague, but am happy to see it altered so I can at least declare war now

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Agreed. I thought the 10 turns was too long.

Heh, in my current game I've been at war for over 100 turns, mercilessly crushing any army foolish enough to show itself at my doorstep.  Granted, I've been ignoring the AI factions in favor of clearing a wildlands (Mage with sunder vs. Delin, a very satisfying matchup) and could probably have won the game if I weren't so distracted.

Very good news indeed! Another of the nasty issues like autocombat fixed. This already fantastic game is getting better an better and I come more and more to the conclusion that the first real successor for Master of Magic has finally arrived after 21 years!

Am I too ecstatic to predict FE's impact on the turnbased market to be the same as Baldurs Gate's on the RPG market? Probably, but BG had everything what all RPG fans were waiting for at this time and the same goes for FE. Hopefully the (deserved) bad reputation of Elemental doesn't impair it's success too much. For me, the main problem with the original Elemental were not the bugs and crashes. It simply wasn't fun to play and getting boring after a short time. FE is exactly the opposite.

Even if there is still much work to do on FE (the AI is getting better but still has many issues and is IMHO the most important factor for long time motivation), the old feeling of "just one more turn" is already very strong.

Thanks for this gem!

I was just throwing that out as a number. 10 turns seems like a reasonable compromise. Long enough that you could say a war actually happened, but not too quickly that it's gamed. Thanks for the explanation here, Derek!

I would think that a better fix to stop people declaring war again would be to either enforce the peace treaty for (say) 10 turns, or to have a reputation that goes very negative so that the AI's wont trust you again (with money for peace) if you declare war again immediately.

This is present in GalCiv 2 also, that's why it was probably there. But in GalCiv 2 you can declare war by directly attacking.

But there is a bug where you can contact a civ that is busy if at least one faction you can talk to, and then you use the arrows to go to that busy AI.  Can you fix that (possibly by removing them from the arrow list when they are busy)?

I noticed this today. The "Too busy" message was partially a bug that will be fixed in this next update, but not sure if I really should be able to contact the AI or not.

How about just making the AI deny requests for peace at the same turn, meaby boosting the declare war/agree to peace logic? If someone declares war to them more often than once, they should pay less and less because they might see a pattern here.
If you make it "smart enough" in that section, you would not have to have the "Too busy to talk" thing in, since that's just annoys players (well annoys me anyways)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I'd think each subsequent request for peace should be less and less valued by the AI, as it's proving that you're a traitor.