Anyone broke an Alliance. . . not?

[Bangedup]

I happened to get into a scuffle with Babylonia, Russia, and America on diety level. No problem really but I decided that since Germany was going to get his panzers soon I might as well invite him to play as well. I got him to joined in cheap as he and Babylonia are old enemies. To make a long story short Babs was pushed off the continent and with only 8 turns left in my alliance with Germany I invaded the little island that Babs held and took his last city. (They deserved it) I then called up Germany to see if he had any new techs and he has gone from Gracious to Annoyed! I believe this is so because by default the alliance has been broken because the war ends before the 20 turns is up.
I have had similar problems with making trade deals with a civ a few turns before he gets creamed by a few other civs. As a result my reputation is injured and everyone wants cash up front from then on. I think this is a bug that needs to be addressed, but perhaps someone would like to relate their own experiences.
I plan on loading the game to the beginning of this last turn and I will try to wait until the alliance is up and then destroy Babs. This will be hard as my Aztecs are war weary.

[Ethelred]

Bismark is ornery. He doesn't like anyone most of the time. If you were the lead civ at that moment that could be why he was annoyed with you.

One question though, are you playing with the patches or is it the original version of the game? The original version did have bugs and there has been rebalancing as well since then. I would suppose that you are playing the patched game.

[Bangedup]

I am playing version 1.29 which I believe is the latest version. Yes Bismark can be a pain but it is uncommon for a civ to go from being gracious to annoyed in one turn without being insulted, cheated or stiffed somehow.
I probably wouldn't care so much except I have the U.N. and the balance of votes would go to me with Bismark on my side. France, Germany, Me, Vs. America, Russia. If Bismark is suddenly annoyed I may not be able to repair that relationship before the next vote.

[vondrack]

Bangedup, I have seen a discussion about this some time ago. The mechanics behind is like this: Bismarck starts at Annoyed (or whatever), but by signing an alliance with him, your mutual relationship gets a boost (going as high as Gracious). However, as soon as the alliance is cancelled (either explicitely or by wiping out the common enemy), his attitude returns to the pre-allaince level (might go even worse, if you made yourself stronger in the war...).

[Tiberius]

Something similar happened to me, too. I was busy wiping out the romans, when the greeks declared war to me and since I wasn't prepared for them I reloaded the previous turn and offered a mutual protection pact to Alexander. He accepted it and his attitude changed from "furious" to "gracious", just like that! Quite strange, IMHO.
I'm looking forward to see what will happen when the war is over. One little difference, though: I didn't make an "alliance against ...", just a mutual protection pact, and it is still active.

Btw, does anybody know what are consequencies to your reputation when you declare war to a civ that didn't fulfill your demands ("give me ... or face the consequencies!")? I did it to wipe out the zulus and for a long period everybody was furious on me. It took a lot of trading to improve my relations somehow.
The fact that you are the strongest does influence the relations (like in civ2) ?

[Der PH]

I am not sure, but I experienced that your reputation with your ally is rapidly going down, when you successfully offer a peace treaty to your common enemy, before the 20 turns are over (not a big surprise, so far), but it does not, when the enemy proposes the peace treaty and you accept.

Anybody experienced similar things?

[Hurricane]

Overall, reputation is a concept that is little understood.

In bangedup's case, I think the Germans were happy because of the alliance, so when it ended, they got back to their default annoyed status. In this case I think everything worked ok (just like in Tiberius's more extreme case). You have probably noticed that establishing embassies will make ther other civ happier, as well as will MPP:s and ROP:s.

Der PH's question is good. I haven´t any experience of it myself, since I always will wait the 20 turns before making peace. Anybody with similar experiences as him?

[Minmaster]

i hear ya..when a trade is broken for a reason that was outside your control, i dont think human player should suffer a bad reputation. i mean if i make a trade to egypt and 1 turn later their only harbor city gets destroyed, why should I get penalized by having the AIs not wanting to trade with me anymore? this is a dumb P.O.S situation and they need to fix this. its even harder trying to be a nice guy when you give iron as a gift to someone and then their trade route gets fuq'd up and you end up having a messed up rep and nobody wants to trade with you.

[Adagio]

I made a post about this a month ago, since I also thought it was weird...

I understand that the enemies wont be as happy with you as when you were allied, though I'd say, in a case like that, the AI shouldn't go lower than being polite... I wouldn't be angry at my (ex)ally if he/she destroyed my worst enemy... at least not in one turn... That would be the same way as the worst part of Survivor: "We are friends now, but tomorow I'll stab you in your back and throw you to the sharks"

[SpencerH]

In my current game the AI's were mad because they said I broke a ROP and sneak attacked the French. I attacked the French after we had been dancing troops across each other borders but they wouldnt declare war (they started it but I finished it ).

[Arrian]

Minmaster,

I agree with you re: a broken trade deal b/c the trade connection was broken in a war. I've had it happen, and it sucks, particularly if you're trying to play as more of a "builder" than a "warmonger."

As for Bangedup's alliance situation, I agree with the others that it isn't a reputation issue. It's a Bismarck is a nasty, demanding SOB issue. The stronger you get, the more annoyed Bis gets.

-Arrian

[Wormwood]

Bismark and Catherine seriously need to be curtailed in any game they are present. I've noticed that when the two become superpowers, they often start ganging up on other nations, including your own. Anytime there is a period where attack units have significant advantages over defenders, I use that time to launch a raid on them, raze their best cities, capture workers, and try to force a battle with their mobile army. Rome sort of follows their pattern, but seems to quite down late game.

[Destroyer]

Originally posted by Bangedup
I am playing version 1.29 which I believe is the latest version. Yes Bismark can be a pain but it is uncommon for a civ to go from being gracious to annoyed in one turn without being insulted, cheated or stiffed somehow.
I probably wouldn't care so much except I have the U.N. and the balance of votes would go to me with Bismark on my side. France, Germany, Me, Vs. America, Russia. If Bismark is suddenly annoyed I may not be able to repair that relationship before the next vote.

This is what I relly hate about the game. The whole diplomacy thing needs reworking. If you are too strong they hate you, If you are too weak, they attack you.

Id like to see some sort of Ideology introduced where other civs will help you out if you have the same religion (or whatever) unless you have recently been bad.

The whole hate thing seems a bit strange. Do we all still hate the Germans for the war? I think when you start a new government, you should get a clean slate. Especially in a democracy.

[vondrack]

Originally posted by Destroyer
This is what I relly hate about the game. The whole diplomacy thing needs reworking. If you are too strong they hate you, If you are too weak, they attack you.

Well, you do have a point... however, I distinctly remember one game of mine, where I was the Germans, stuck on a pretty small island, with almost no resources... Speaking militarily, I was weak, at least for a very long time (I had my standard two defender one attacker combo per city only from mid-industrial era). I did my best to maintain good relations with everybody else - and I succeeded to avoid every single war (i.e. the only fight my units have ever seen was that with barbarians in the ancient times) and managed to win through the UN vote in 1900.

I was weak and still, was never attacked (even though I was blackmailed a couple of times... oh, my, can you imagine the humiliation? But the sweeter was the feeling after the final vote... )

Originally posted by Destroyer
The whole hate thing seems a bit strange. Do we all still hate the Germans for the war? I think when you start a new government, you should get a clean slate. Especially in a democracy.

This would be too easy to exploit. You screw someone up, change governments back and forth and voila - you have a spotless reputation again.

Regarding the problem of having trade routes destroyed at wartimes... I admit that often, a rep hit is not justified. But once I had a war with my AI neighbour. I think I provoked it, even if not started it... my objective was a cluster of luxuries in the enemy territory close to my border. The operation was going smoothly in the beginning, I took the whole area and happily traded the extra luxuries all over the world. Due to incompetency on my side, I lost the luxuries back to my enemy few turns later (to recover them again few more turns later). My trades were gone and reputation suffered. To be honest, I deserved that - it was pretty dumb from me to trade the luxuries prior to fully securing the area. So in this particular case, I did not feel it would have been unjustified...

I believe it is not that easy to create an algorithm capable of correctly determining what cancelled the trade - whether it was your fault (and your rep should have been hit) or something beyond your control...

[Bangedup]

I have continued this game (from the original thread) and am now in the future tech phase of the game. The only civs left were Russia, Germany, France, America and myelf the Aztecs. Germany got into a war with America and pretty soon they started throwing nukes and by default I was brought into the war against America. I was the only one that had sdi and America was wiped out pretty fast. When the final American city was captured (by me) everyone went from gracious or polite to FURIOUS! Unlike my previous thread I had no alliances or mpp with the other civs and no trade was interupted during the war. Furthermore, I had a right of passage with all of them so why did their mood change so dramatically? I had thought that since in the previous thread that I had given incense to Germany for the alliance that maybe destroying the Babs by default ended the alliance and the trade of incense and therefore made all of them not trust me.
Anyway France never got over her little mood spell and she just sent 30 modern armors and 40 mechs across my border so it's back to the grindstone.

[Ethelred]

Anyway France never got over her little mood spell and she just sent 30 modern armors and 40 mechs across my border so it's back to the grindstone.

Thats Joan allright. She can be your best friend for thousands of years. As soon as she goes bald she becomes very likely to go on the offensive. One moment a gracious ally and the next she has made a alliance with her former enemy to get at the leader. Usually me in my games but I have seen her go after others when they were in the lead. The good thing is that she often does this before she gets those modern armour she is sending at you.

[Bangedup]

Ya Joan is almost always my friend for the longest time. This is actually the first time I have seen her attack me in such a manner. I tried to get her to attack me a while ago before America starting nuking but she wouldn't do it. Its no biggy though. After the first turn she lost about 80% of her offensive force. I took 2 cities of hers that I have been wanting for a looong time and Germany and Russia have entered into to mpp with me. Hopefully I can get a U.N vote while I have them as allies and finish this game off. Either way with France about to get her arse beat I will then be #1 in culture after I take a few more of her cities and raise a few more. Aztecs rule!

[JohnM2433]

If for some reason you can't fulfill your end of a bargain, it might be nice to be able to offer the other player something in compensation for the botched deal. The more acceptable it is to them, the less the damage to your reputation. (Maybe extremely generous compensation for your incompetence could actually help your reputation -- players would know it is safe to make deals with you.)

If a trade partner is cut off from you on their end -- by losing a harbor, for example -- it's not really fair for it to negatively impact your reputation. In some cases, it would be possible to keep up your end of the deal, even if they couldn't keep up theirs. If nothing else at least that should be an option.

[realpolitic]

Originally posted by Ethelred
Bismark is ornery. He doesn't like anyone most of the time. If you were the lead civ at that moment that could be why he was annoyed with you.

Usually I make my first map trades in alliances to beat up Bismark, and normally he's the first to die.

[nationalist]

Ialways play as the Germans. I've never had to face Bismarck, but I do face Catherine. I end up destroying the Russians and the French every single game. I've played dozens of games and have never even seen a Cossack.

[Bangedup]

Cossaks aren't that great anyway. Their specs are 6.4.3. as opposed to their counterpart Cavalry which has 6.3.3. This one point difference in defense really doesn't make a lot of difference for an offensive unit. I think the best unit in the game is the Panzer. 3 tile movements and high offense really kicks ass. Plus Panzer's can be upgraded to Modern Armor and a lot of civ specific units can't be upgraded at all. ie. immortals, legionaire etc.

[vmxa1]

Yes but the outcome was determined before the Panzer came into play. The Legionaire can make a difference when the game is still in doubt.