Consequences for inactive war participants

[Targor]

Right now many players (including me) often answer CtAs from AIs without really helping in the war, because they don't wanna lose the MP/empower the AI. I'd suggest a kind of penalty for this, for example if a Participant doesn't take part in any battles for a time, he automatically leaves the war and gets treated like if he broke the CtA. Would be interesting, of course it would probably be hard to take special cases into consideration like a player not able to reach an enemy.

 

[bbqftw]

"ok let me run 1k stack and join into battle from time to time"

 

[josh127]

What would qualify as a special case though?

A) I can't even get to the war.

B) I can get to the war but I'm going to have to run up a lot of relations for military access.

C) I'm barely holding my own in another war, did you have to decide to declare on France now?

D) You have no need for me in your war on Ulm, why did you even call me?


Valid reasons for not actually doing anything in a war would be awfully hard to account for.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What would qualify as a special case though?

A) I can't even get to the war.

B) I can get to the war but I'm going to have to run up a lot of relations for military access.

C) I'm barely holding my own in another war, did you have to decide to declare on France now?

D) You have no need for me in your war on Ulm, why did you even call me?


Valid reasons for not actually doing anything in a war would be awfully hard to account for.

Even if OP suggestion isn't implemented, this definitely needs a look in some capacity. Few things are more terrible than a 5 year war because A) is mutually true for some of the nations "in the war" for example.

Also, what do you do in events where the target's armies are stackwiped early? Isn't this an area where the AI might lose its allies on "dishonored" calls because it can't ship forces to a front in time or worse, because the target's forces were destroyed so it can't actually fight ?

 

[Freudia]

The AI does this too, I've noticed. For example, playing as Theodoro and allying Muscovy before declaring war on a Sunni/Shia nation (Qara Qoyunlu, for example). Muscovy can join the war if it's friendly enough, but it won't be able to get access there due to the hordes being hostile and PLC rivaling Muscovy (probably). This also more likely happens on defensive calls, where the AI is seemingly willing to nearly always join them even if they can't get access there.

 

[BFTeixeira]

I like this idea. Adds some realism to the game. Just like you get furious if your AI ally joins your war and does nothing, the AI should react the same way, and also affect the nation reputation for not helping it's ally.

 

[Awesomeguy32]

I like this idea. Adds some realism to the game. Just like you get furious if your AI ally joins your war and does nothing, the AI should react the same way, and also affect the nation reputation for not helping it's ally.

If we're actually going with this, it should be a two way street, or more complex than that. I can't count the number of times I've fought a war on their behalf and in critical battles when they're right NEXT DOOR, they aren't assisting. The latest occurrence really drove me nuts cause I lost my Conquistador in that battle, and they might have been saved if they sent their troops.

That being said, I don't want to enter a war on their behalf and do all the work for my ally. It's their war, not mine; the fact I'm even helping them in a war where I know I'm getting nothing immediately should lead to them doing the heavy lifting. I shouldn't be losing half my manpower or more on a war that they aren't directly fighting. So on top of this suggestion, I think there should be modifiers to allow players to express disapproval with an AI's choice in treaty terms.

Currently, wars where your allies have a claim on a province held by the enemy usually leads to them requesting something for their troubles. Obviously, not giving them something infuriates them and adds a negative opinion modifier. I think there should be something similar for players to choose to express their anger or disapproval with an ally's choices, especially if the situation is reversed.

This would also be helpful in an instance where the player is basically stabbed in the back and left to fight almost all the battles for literally zero reward. If there's a modifier choice that lets a player show their aggravation as such, it could even things out. Maybe it would be an event letting the player express their outrage (storming out of a peace conference, a harsh notice sent to the war leader, etc.) and maybe gives a few prestige points while giving relations from the player's nation a negative modifier.

 

[BFTeixeira]

If we're actually going with this, it should be a two way street, or more complex than that. I can't count the number of times I've fought a war on their behalf and in critical battles when they're right NEXT DOOR, they aren't assisting. The latest occurrence really drove me nuts cause I lost my Conquistador in that battle, and they might have been saved if they sent their troops.

That being said, I don't want to enter a war on their behalf and do all the work for my ally. It's their war, not mine; the fact I'm even helping them in a war where I know I'm getting nothing immediately should lead to them doing the heavy lifting. I shouldn't be losing half my manpower or more on a war that they aren't directly fighting. So on top of this suggestion, I think there should be modifiers to allow players to express disapproval with an AI's choice in treaty terms.

Currently, wars where your allies have a claim on a province held by the enemy usually leads to them requesting something for their troubles. Obviously, not giving them something infuriates them and adds a negative opinion modifier. I think there should be something similar for players to choose to express their anger or disapproval with an ally's choices, especially if the situation is reversed.

This would also be helpful in an instance where the player is basically stabbed in the back and left to fight almost all the battles for literally zero reward. If there's a modifier choice that lets a player show their aggravation as such, it could even things out. Maybe it would be an event letting the player express their outrage (storming out of a peace conference, a harsh notice sent to the war leader, etc.) and maybe gives a few prestige points while giving relations from the player's nation a negative modifier.

I agree with you. Maybe prestige should be given to nations, according to how envolved each nation was. If you were in the war and you didn't do a thing, get a prestige penalty because you did nothing to help your ally. But if you did the heavy lifting, then get a prestige bonus for going out of your way to help your ally. Obviously, this should be applied also to the AI.

 

[Wizzington]

On my todo.

 

[BFTeixeira]

On my todo.

Nice!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

On my todo.

I wish you luck, I think you'll need it for this one, unless you intend to make the AI ignore this potential penalty with other AI .

People are going to get really mad if they "dishonor" because their target no longer has troops so they can't fight them, or they get called into wars where they can't do anything...but on the flip side it won't take much to send 2 guys over and siege something to "participate" if you make the requirements too lax.

 

[Awesomeguy32]

On my todo.

Best of luck with this! I suspect details for this may be in discussion, but is there any idea on whether naval support, specifically blockades, will count as participating in the war?

 

[josh127]

Making it so that it can evaluate properly whether you participated, call you into wars that you can participate in, and understand when you were in a position that you couldn't send help sounds like a lot of work for very little gain. Does this really make the game better and more enjoyable?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Making it so that it can evaluate properly whether you participated, call you into wars that you can participate in, and understand when you were in a position that you couldn't send help sounds like a lot of work for very little gain. Does this really make the game better and more enjoyable?

I can't think of a single cutoff point for evaluating "participation" that won't result in the occasional garbage interpretation of "you didn't help us!".

1. England declares on Tyrone and calls you in, it stack wipes Tyrone and sieges. You didn't help?
2. You declare war on a new world nation and carpet it, but it takes a long time. You call in Spain, but they never sent troops. Penalize the AI here?
3. Austria as HRE calls you into war against France (you're Serbia). You send 2 guys into France and they siege for a moment before getting stack wiped. Legit help?
4. Muscovy calls you in on Uzbek (you're Byzantium). The war lasts a few years but it completely one-sided in their favor, so you can't actually fight units even if you try to get stuff over there. 2 man siege good enough?
5. You're losing a war badly and get a CTA. You have almost no units. Dishonored alliance for non-participation in a 2nd war you honored?

6. You are Aztec. Spain declares on you (or you on Spain), bringing in derpscrub Portugal for the ride (I love how people blather about westernization being ahistorical, but then don't have anything to say about a combined alliance against the Aztec shipping 40k-60k + calling crusade for bonuses by 1530. The game is what it is ffs). Portugal, having just lost its navy to a spat with France v. England + getting its fleet caught, has no active navy but of course still joins the war because it's otherwise in good condition. As a result, Portugal "doesn't participate" as the player Aztec blasts Spain's fleet out of the water and starts taking colonies. Iberian alliance shattered when this is "engineered" to happen a few times?

Pick one or even several criteria that covers all of the above and will consistently penalize non-participants appropriately. It's not going to happen. Short of deliberately making the AI cheat and forgive other AI here (and not penalize it for not helping humans), creating an arbitrary, hard to understand rules framework, this kind of mechanic is going to wind up being a non-starter. You are virtually guaranteed to have situations where the penalty will be applied inappropriately and ruthlessly abused, unless the criteria for participation is so lax that the mechanic is functionally pointless and a CTA just results in a player occasionally attempting to loot a few provinces.

It's a non-functional concept under the current war leader and negotiation rules IMO. I challenge anybody capable of demonstrating a model whereby I'm wrong about this. Maybe I'm missing something. If I am, show me. If not, it's not justifiable to introduce a mechanic whereby players are encouraged to "pretend" they're helping "just enough"...it's not going to resemble anything historical and it's instantly going to sit in the "game around this but not actually participate" category, because if that's impossible you're going to get complete garbage for "non participation".

Per Targor's suggestion, I can force the AI (who can't fight battles) to break an alliance between historical friends so many times that it alters the diplomatic landscape in Europe, and I can do it as a 4 province minor in Asia in the late 1400's. The OP is no suggestion at all.

 

[josh127]

1. England declares on Tyrone and calls you in, it stack wipes Tyrone and sieges. You didn't help?

To bad you were playing Bohemia and didn't have a port yet.

2. You declare war on a new world nation and carpet it, but it takes a long time. You call in Spain, but they never sent troops. Penalize the AI here?

But Spain's navy was wiped out in their war with Portugal, Aragon, and GB so they had no chance to help.

3. Austria as HRE calls you into war against France (you're Serbia). You send 2 guys into France and they siege for a moment before getting stack wiped. Legit help?

Perhaps you're supposed to give subsidies to Austria instead (even though that shouldn't require joining the war).

4. Muscovy calls you in on Uzbek (you're Byzantium). The war lasts a few years but it completely one-sided in their favor, so you can't actually fight units even if you try to get stuff over there. 2 man siege good enough?

Muscovy calls you in against Uzbek even though they wouldn't join your war against Ottomans. Being that your survival is on the line you don't have any troops to send to their one sided affair. Sorry, no more alliance because now they're mad (and probably want your provinces as an extra kick in the face).

This entire change sounds to be something to stop the country who is seeing constant success. Instead it's going to screw the countries that are struggling. Never mind, now I know why it's on the todo list.

 

[net.split]

I can't think of a single cutoff point for evaluating "participation" that won't result in the occasional garbage interpretation of "you didn't help us!".

1. England declares on Tyrone and calls you in, it stack wipes Tyrone and sieges. You didn't help?
2. You declare war on a new world nation and carpet it, but it takes a long time. You call in Spain, but they never sent troops. Penalize the AI here?
3. Austria as HRE calls you into war against France (you're Serbia). You send 2 guys into France and they siege for a moment before getting stack wiped. Legit help?
4. Muscovy calls you in on Uzbek (you're Byzantium). The war lasts a few years but it completely one-sided in their favor, so you can't actually fight units even if you try to get stuff over there. 2 man siege good enough?
5. You're losing a war badly and get a CTA. You have almost no units. Dishonored alliance for non-participation in a 2nd war you honored?

6. You are Aztec. Spain declares on you (or you on Spain), bringing in derpscrub Portugal for the ride (I love how people blather about westernization being ahistorical, but then don't have anything to say about a combined alliance against the Aztec shipping 40k-60k + calling crusade for bonuses by 1530. The game is what it is ffs). Portugal, having just lost its navy to a spat with France v. England + getting its fleet caught, has no active navy but of course still joins the war because it's otherwise in good condition. As a result, Portugal "doesn't participate" as the player Aztec blasts Spain's fleet out of the water and starts taking colonies. Iberian alliance shattered when this is "engineered" to happen a few times?

Pick one or even several criteria that covers all of the above and will consistently penalize non-participants appropriately. It's not going to happen. Short of deliberately making the AI cheat and forgive other AI here (and not penalize it for not helping humans), creating an arbitrary, hard to understand rules framework, this kind of mechanic is going to wind up being a non-starter. You are virtually guaranteed to have situations where the penalty will be applied inappropriately and ruthlessly abused, unless the criteria for participation is so lax that the mechanic is functionally pointless and a CTA just results in a player occasionally attempting to loot a few provinces.

It's a non-functional concept under the current war leader and negotiation rules IMO. I challenge anybody capable of demonstrating a model whereby I'm wrong about this. Maybe I'm missing something. If I am, show me. If not, it's not justifiable to introduce a mechanic whereby players are encouraged to "pretend" they're helping "just enough"...it's not going to resemble anything historical and it's instantly going to sit in the "game around this but not actually participate" category, because if that's impossible you're going to get complete garbage for "non participation".

Per Targor's suggestion, I can force the AI (who can't fight battles) to break an alliance between historical friends so many times that it alters the diplomatic landscape in Europe, and I can do it as a 4 province minor in Asia in the late 1400's. The OP is no suggestion at all.

Sounds like fun! I don't exactly disagree with you, but I want to try to do this anyway.

Your stipulations here are that I can't change the war leader and negotiation rules. That's fine. I'll make some tweaks to CTA instead:

When an ally is the subject of a Call to Arms, a percentage of its units temporarily flip control to the calling nation. Any surviving units flip back when the called nation is no longer involved in the war. The original owner must still pay upkeep for flipped troops.

No need for a punishment mechanic in this case because the calling nation gets your troops and does whatever with them it wants. You can choose to support further by moving the remainder of your army to help (say they get 10%, you're still allies in war as normal and can move another 40% of your forces in yourself if you want).

Alternatives? Let's see... how about, you can no longer CtA any ally that doesn't have land access to your target. If the ally has sea access, they can be CtA, but they won't be punished for non-participation (i.e. no opinion penalties).

Something else... how about bonuses instead of penalties? No opinion malus if you sit on your ass, but actually helping gives a notable opinion boost. To balance, alliance opinion bonuses are reduced, so you'd need to help each other out in wars at least a little to get back to how it used to look. "Helping" requires actually winning battles / sieges (or at least blockading), because nobody cares if you come to war and accomplish nothing.

Trying to come up with a "mission" system where you get a specific task to accomplish when you're called to war, but it runs into a lot of pitfalls that you describe. You'd need a very complex system to be able to handle all the eventualities, probably with a failsafe of "just agree to come to war" for situations like England vs Tyrone where there aren't really any reasonable options.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Hahahaha. Well, this time I'm owned on a technicality, which serves me right. I should have asked for a *punative* model as that is the basis for this thread, not a completely altered war system in general...though if it worked with the "unit transfer" thing I would abuse the hell out of getting as many freebie troops to massacre the world as possible but still lol.

Alternatives? Let's see... how about, you can no longer CtA any ally that doesn't have land access to your target. If the ally has sea access, they can be CtA, but they won't be punished for non-participation (i.e. no opinion penalties).

Doesn't cover all the scenarios above, such as BYZ one where Muscovy has already won by the time you can get there, even though you can walk through Muscovy directly or the Austria vs France one where Serbia puts forth a token joke effort, effectively bypassing any relevance the mechanic is supposed to have.

Something else... how about bonuses instead of penalties? No opinion malus if you sit on your ass, but actually helping gives a notable opinion boost. To balance, alliance opinion bonuses are reduced, so you'd need to help each other out in wars at least a little to get back to how it used to look. "Helping" requires actually winning battles / sieges (or at least blockading), because nobody cares if you come to war and accomplish nothing.

Again, not a PUNITIVE model for "not helping", though a heck of a lot easier to implement. What you are instead doing is a counter-suggestion, and a markedly superior one...one that Wiz saying "on to do" would be a lot less worrying to see tbh.

 

[josh127]

Sounds like fun! I don't exactly disagree with you, but I want to try to do this anyway.

Your stipulations here are that I can't change the war leader and negotiation rules. That's fine. I'll make some tweaks to CTA instead:

When an ally is the subject of a Call to Arms, a percentage of its units temporarily flip control to the calling nation. Any surviving units flip back when the called nation is no longer involved in the war. The original owner must still pay upkeep for flipped troops.

No need for a punishment mechanic in this case because the calling nation gets your troops and does whatever with them it wants. You can choose to support further by moving the remainder of your army to help (say they get 10%, you're still allies in war as normal and can move another 40% of your forces in yourself if you want).

Alternatives? Let's see... how about, you can no longer CtA any ally that doesn't have land access to your target. If the ally has sea access, they can be CtA, but they won't be punished for non-participation (i.e. no opinion penalties).

Something else... how about bonuses instead of penalties? No opinion malus if you sit on your ass, but actually helping gives a notable opinion boost. To balance, alliance opinion bonuses are reduced, so you'd need to help each other out in wars at least a little to get back to how it used to look. "Helping" requires actually winning battles / sieges (or at least blockading), because nobody cares if you come to war and accomplish nothing.

Trying to come up with a "mission" system where you get a specific task to accomplish when you're called to war, but it runs into a lot of pitfalls that you describe. You'd need a very complex system to be able to handle all the eventualities, probably with a failsafe of "just agree to come to war" for situations like England vs Tyrone where there aren't really any reasonable options.

Nice to see not everyone thinks everything in the game needs to be met by harsh consequences.

 

[bbqftw]

clearly when I'm looting France 20 times over whenever I get called in by Austria in an HRE defense war, I'm helping. Look at those 400 sieges I started!

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Personally I'd say the main problem here is AIs joining defensive wars that they can't reach, but still preventing you from negotiating for peace for several years due to being unoccupied. A good example of this is one of the OPMs in the HRE being 100% occupied 2-3 months into a war, but the attacker being unable to negotiate with them due to them being allied to some other minor on the other side of the HRE.