Stages of involvement and escalation for wars

[Talib123]

Hey Folks! The game is in a pretty good state as of now. BUT there is a thing which is bothering me since for ever really and actually holding the game back a bit. And that is the really strange and unintuitive diplomatic play system. For mainly these reason.

1. You always give your enemies time to react. There is no way to just create facts. Mobilize your army, march into foreign state and occupy it. The way it is now you basically say: "Hey want to conquer this land. If anyone wants to stop me, I give you time to muster your troops, bring them to the front so we can have a fair and honest war. This isnt how it worked and it opens up a lot of problems.

2. One of which is the fact that you predetermine your wargoals. Which is not terribly bad. But the fact that you cannot make real peace treaties (which do include more then was intitally intented, should one side loose the war significantly) is. This leads to nosense wars where great powers battle it out over some strange investment rights in the phillipines or whatever only to conlude to a white peace. I think most players experienced this AI wars.

3. The fact that the AI is so willing to involve itself so heavily for minor gains. This ties into the above point. I had a war once where I fought russia as japan for manchuria and france (russias ally) send ALL its units, including conscripts, to the siberian front (which is in itself a logical problem because of logistics)

4. There are no real inner political consequences to wars. This is really a bummer. Because in real life wars, especially in this time period, had a big impact on the overall situation inside a nation. Vicky actually has everything to implement this. Just think about the paris commune who famously refused to surrender to the germans 1871.

What do you guys think about this?
My thoughts are as follows:
Here are three things i thought about to battle this dynamic

I. Give conflicts a stage of involvement. Make the AI actually consider how much the gonna contribute to a conflict. Lets say Low, Medium, Heavy and total. On low they would send some weapons, ammunition, material maybe even a general or two. On medium they could be adding som some minor battalions, who are close. And so on. Total would mean mass mobilization and a country in full on war mode

II. Let the wars also have escalation stages. Where as the heavier you invest in it, the more consequences there are internally and on the international level. The higher the escalation and the involvement was, the harder the consequences for losing or winning a war.

III. Make diplomatic plays invisible. The could be a mechanic that allows to hide conquest plans for a time or under certain circumstances. But there should always be an option to uncover this, if you have an interest, good relations, a spy, diplomatic ties etc.

These are just my thoughts and I am looking forward to hear what you guys think. Do you experience these as problems? And what do you think about the solutions?

 

[L-Histidine]

You might like this thread

On issues 1-2: I observe that diplomatic plays run in an overly rigid and predictable manner.
They always have the same three phases that mostly run for the same length of time, during which the sides spend their maneuver points adding wargoals and bribing third parties to join (but not to merely stay neutral); everyone involved knows that the play ends with a war, or rarely with one side capitulating and ceding goals; and once the play reaches the final phase the participants are fixed.
There's no bargaining to try and prevent a war, no way to do a sneak attack for an infamy cost (it's particularly silly that colonial uprisings will politely wait for the metropole to send an army over to put them down), and no way for someone else to intervene later.

The idea of hidden DPs is an interesting one for this reason. I'm imagining a scenario where, say, a country notices the Unfriendly Neighbor has a large concentration of troops on the border and must decide whether this is just a provocation or a threat of imminent invasion and they should mobilize in response. If the DP is still 'hidden' at this point, the would-be aggressor can back down without losing anything.

For levels of war involvement, I've posted an idea that bases it on the wargoals, although that system assumes 'public' diplomatic plays.

 

[Don Wing]

I want an option where if you join a diplomatic play to be able to demand more than a single goal for the negotiation. It is akward that you can only demand just one goal... in real life there were plenty of cases where third parties join for more than a single goal, name states, rights, etc.

Please fix this.

 

[strattonthebard]

Imo the length of phases in a diplomatic play shoild be based on the actions of the countries involved. If nobody mobilizes troops or acts provactiviely the negotiation phase should be able to go on nearly indefinitely, but if a country opens a diplomatic play by immediately mobilizing their army the countdown to war should accelerate very quickly.

I imagine a system where there are a number of different "provocations" that a country can do in the early phases of a play to accelerate things. For example if you have mobilized troops and the opposing side hasn't you might be able to order an occupation of border provinces or some other territorial incursion. Rather than being mainly tied to war goals I think infamy would be based primarily on these sorts of actions, with the amount maybe scaling on the size of war goals involved. Perhaps that conduct should also have an impact on the willingness of other countries to join the play, so that its possible to get too aggressive and diplomatically isolate yourself.

One of the upshots is that wars with unrecognized powers would probably go a lot more quickly as you'd be able to take hostile actions like immediate mobilization and occupation at a much smaller infamy cost, provoking a war much more quickly.

 

[Headshotkill]

I'm reading good stuff in this thread and those linked by L-Histidine and agree with pretty much everything, I'd just like to ad it should be possible to have temporary ceasefire agreements during a war to restart negotiations if both parties agree. Similar to a diplomatic play this takes into account the current status of the war and who's got the upper hand, it can allow nations to opt in or out of the war and change war goals. Logically this is also how a war can end without needing one side to always capitulate.
Next it should be possible to do a sneak attack in exchange for gaining infamy, maximum penalty if you completely bypass a diplomatic play and instantly begin to fight, however also during a diplomatic play you should be able to attack at any time with the penalty becoming less severe the longer you wait and let the diplomatic play run out.
A gradient system for war involvement is also nescessary, starting with only economic assistance to one side, next step would be hostile economic actions against the enemy side like embargo's and sending military advisors, next would be a limited expeditionary force to help out, last stage would be full war involvement with the entire army.
Logically all of this should be tied in with the political system and legitimacy, if your country doesn't want to fight but you go ahead anyway it should cause unstability, researching propaganda could perhaps make it easier to convince your nation to fight but you'd still need support from your government.

 

[Pendables]

Another thing that sucks about the war system is there is no real way of getting someone to leave a war other than waiting. If the country has more than just a couple states and you don't have a wargoal on them then actually attacking them is a waste of effort, there's nothing to do but wait for their war support to drop on its own.