A little tip on how to gain peace without cheating or spending $$...

[mrjade06]

Something I've noticed that works exceptionally well for me is that when at war with someone, if your provinces no longer border theirs, they will accept peace around 95% of the time. So Ive taken advantage of this a bit, and after I have conquered as much as I wish, I give a province or two in a buffer to a faction far away, and the AI will normally agree to peace. At this point you can leave those provinces there as a buffer or attack them and get peace right away with the far off faction after you take them. Another interesting thing with this is the AI usually will not attack you right away either once you border them again...

One exception with this sometimes is if you are Carthage fighting Rome, Rome won't agree to peace no matter what. This is on BI.exe

[Mulceber]

Interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind. Thanks =)

[Macilrille]

I have often tried to do exactly that, but no one will take provinces from me. They come up with something about how the lands would not be theirs for long before I marched in taking them back.

[fraoula]

I have often tried to do exactly that, but no one will take provinces from me. They come up with something about how the lands would not be theirs for long before I marched in taking them back.

You should try to sweeten the deal. Offer them 15K mnai or so and you might be able to gain military access as well if they are your allies. However your diplomat's influence does matter a lot to make a deal successful.

[Ludens]

fraoula, I'd welcome you to the .Org, but it appears you have been lurking here for a while. Still, I hope you enjoy posting here.

[fraoula]

fraoula, I'd welcome you to the .Org, but it appears you have been lurking here for a while. Still, I hope you enjoy posting here.

Talk about lurking...
Thanks for the greeting. I hope I will start participating in the org as well.

[Macilrille]

Yes, welcome. I forgot that :-(

Anyway, I have tried sweetening the deal and using seasoned diplomats. Did not work. I have also once let Ludens talk me into trying to pay my allied faction a small amount each turn to avoid being attacked by them as that would be detrimental to their income. Suffice it to say I will not do that again.

From then I decided to follow the Roman doctrine of never negotiating from a point of weakness and never give enemies anything at all. And if the mad AI goes berserk on me, I crush the factions it uses for it. No negotiations, no retreat, no surrender, only ruthless persecution of them till they are all dead or slaves.

[fraoula]

Well I share your decision to "punish" the AI for it's suicidal tendencies. However if you are playing as Pontos, for example, you really can use a break from the endless AS fullstacks. Unfortunately the CA did nothing to improve that in M2TW although I have heard that you can tweak the AI's diplomatic stance. Let's hope that EB2 will be improved on that matter.

[ARCHIPPOS]

Fraoula are you a girl ??? Sorry just had to ask :)

[Macilrille]

Well I share your decision to "punish" the AI for it's suicidal tendencies. However if you are playing as Pontos, for example, you really can use a break from the endless AS fullstacks. Unfortunately the CA did nothing to improve that in M2TW although I have heard that you can tweak the AI's diplomatic stance. Let's hope that EB2 will be improved on that matter.

I shall certainly join you in that hope. In fact that is one thing that has worried me a lot these last few weeks as it dawns more and more on me how insanely berserk the AI is. And say what you want; it is worse in EB than it was in Vanilla.

[fraoula]

Fraoula are you a girl ??? Sorry just had to ask :)

No mate. It my online nickname ever since I was playing Counter Strike about 6 to 7 years ago.
I know it's kinda rediculus to have a name that means strawberry in Greek but what the hey.

[ARCHIPPOS]

χεχεχε τα λέμε :)

[fraoula]

And say what you want; it is worse in EB than it was in Vanilla.

Well I will have to disagree on that. I have had loyal allies on EB ( especially the Getai, who knoes why?) but in vanilla they were constantly trying to screw me. Especially those idiotic port blockades could drive you crazy. Still I am a bit hesitant in trying the forcy diplomacy mod. There is this thin line between realism and cheating that would be very alluring to cross...

[fraoula]

χεχεχε τα λέμε :)

Καλα σε εκοψα για πατριωτακι. Ας μην συνεχισουμε στα ελληνικα και το κανουμε οπως οι καφροι στo youtube. Καλυτερα PM για ελληνικα.

[mrjade06]

I have often tried to do exactly that, but no one will take provinces from me. They come up with something about how the lands would not be theirs for long before I marched in taking them back.

hmmm I wonder why...what difficulty are you playing on?

[Macilrille]

Right now M/M because I thought that would be better AI-Diplomacy-wise than my usually VH/M and wanted to try some various factions in fast campaigns.

Edited to add, but the AI diplomacy is still as insane.

[mrjade06]

Yeah I'm not sure if that is your problem...the AI diplomacy drives me up the wall. I play on VH/H and it seems to work for me most of the time. Im also using BI.exe which you may or may not be using. Im going to tinker around on M/M and see if I can't figure out a way to make it work for you.

[Macilrille]

I use the normal RTW exe, but I suspect that does not make much of a difference and I know there is no difference between M and VH campaign settings; at first I thought so cause as Baktria in my first test, the AS actually made peace a few times (if in an idiotic way), but my illusions quickly got dispelled... No the AI's madness is the singlemost detracting factor in EB, it makes no sense at all.

[johnhughthom]

I have often tried to do exactly that, but no one will take provinces from me. They come up with something about how the lands would not be theirs for long before I marched in taking them back.

I generally have the same experience, sometimes I take border regions, destroy everything and let them rebel to stop sharing a border. Usually works.

[cezarip]

I generally have the same experience, sometimes I take border regions, destroy everything and let them rebel to stop sharing a border. Usually works.

However it may happen that they revolt back to the faction you are in war with bringing them some top notch units with high experience. This may happen even if you destroyed the barracks. To stop this, just give them to a far away faction together with some 5000 mnai for the mercs they will use to garrison the city.

[Karo]

Sometimes even if you give away the region to allies the enemy will not accept peace. After a while they just start hating your guts and you need something else to make peace. Like one time I was playing a Hayastan campaign and I was fighting a bloody war with AS and peace was not an option. The war lasted for a decade and meanwhile the both of us were fighting the Ptolies were conquering AS lands in the west. So when Ptolies attacked my cities the AI came to make peace with me. I know weird isn't it? And we started a counter attack against the Yellow death. But I got to say they had 2 or 1 province left if I remember correctly.

[WinsingtonIII]

Sometimes even if you give away the region to allies the enemy will not accept peace. After a while they just start hating your guts and you need something else to make peace. Like one time I was playing a Hayastan campaign and I was fighting a bloody war with AS and peace was not an option. The war lasted for a decade and meanwhile the both of us were fighting the Ptolies were conquering AS lands in the west. So when Ptolies attacked my cities the AI came to make peace with me. I know weird isn't it? And we started a counter attack against the Yellow death. But I got to say they had 2 or 1 province left if I remember correctly.

You got lucky, in my Hayasdan campaign, the AS and Ptolies put aside their differences and allied to gang up on me. That was a lot of fun, let me tell you. The worst part is, they decided to do this when I hadn't even started to pose much of a threat. All I had done was take Karkathiokerta from the AS, just that one province (which conveniently made me border both the AS and the Ptolies) was enough to make them drop their rivalry and actually ally against me. It's just annoying that that's the way RTW diplomacy works, the AI automatically focuses all of its attentions on the human player, even if that goes directly against its own best interests. Of course, for the AS, this was a godsend, but in the case of the Ptolies, they could have been in a much better position if they had ignored me and instead took the opportunity of a weakened AS to take the Levant. Now, in the long run, they are in a much weaker position to fall to my forces because they are wasting most of their resources throwing stacks against the stone walls of Karkathiokerta. The one good thing about this is that it has made the AS considerably less of a pushover, since their Levant provinces are still intact, but they're still not putting up as much of a fight as I would like, after the first couple major battles they've sort of just rolled over and sent half stacks and the very occasional full stack at me as I wandered into the Mesopotamian homelands.

But such is RTW AI.

[vartan]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

You got lucky, in my Hayasdan campaign, the AS and Ptolies put aside their differences and allied to gang up on me. That was a lot of fun, let me tell you. The worst part is, they decided to do this when I hadn't even started to pose much of a threat. All I had done was take Karkathiokerta from the AS, just that one province (which conveniently made me border both the AS and the Ptolies) was enough to make them drop their rivalry and actually ally against me. It's just annoying that that's the way RTW diplomacy works, the AI automatically focuses all of its attentions on the human player, even if that goes directly against its own best interests. Of course, for the AS, this was a godsend, but in the case of the Ptolies, they could have been in a much better position if they had ignored me and instead took the opportunity of a weakened AS to take the Levant. Now, in the long run, they are in a much weaker position to fall to my forces because they are wasting most of their resources throwing stacks against the stone walls of Karkathiokerta. The one good thing about this is that it has made the AS considerably less of a pushover, since their Levant provinces are still intact, but they're still not putting up as much of a fight as I would like, after the first couple major battles they've sort of just rolled over and sent half stacks and the very occasional full stack at me as I wandered into the Mesopotamian homelands.

But such is RTW AI.

I've had this problem before. That's why in my current campaign I've made sure that all of the Caucusus is mine, and that I've got a few armies consisting of Cataphracts, Cataphract archers, Medium Swordsmen, Horse Archers, Archers, Slingers, and Skirmishers before attacking the Ptolies and AS.

[WinsingtonIII]

I've had this problem before. That's why in my current campaign I've made sure that all of the Caucusus is mine, and that I've got a few armies consisting of Cataphracts, Cataphract archers, Medium Swordsmen, Horse Archers, Archers, Slingers, and Skirmishers before attacking the Ptolies and AS.

Well, I did control the rest of the Caucasus before attacking Karkathiokerta, but I really hadn't teched up enough to get my high end troops. I was pretty much still relying on the classic early Hai build of Caucasian Spearmen, Caucasian Archers, Eastern Slingers, and Heavy Kinsmen (the bodyguard version not the recruitable ones). The problem is, I felt like I had to move to take Karkathiokerta because it is a great bottleneck area to hold back the AS from (especially once you get stone walls), and they had been constantly attacking me for years. But once the Ptolies joined in life got pretty difficult. Still was a lot of fun though.