Reputation -?missing

[Mexlic]

Hi Razor, how's the weather like in Sydney?

You did know that you can see your reputation with any other nation by marking your nation in the diplomacy screen and then hovering your mouse (without clicking) over the other nations' text showing their attitude to you (e.g. "friendly" or "unfriendly" or similar), did you?

Your examples 2 (backstabbing an ally) and 3 (refuse to aid ally) would both break the alliance, and worsen almost every other nation's opinion about you by 40 points, if I remember correctly (I'm in the office right now, so can't look) - because you ignore your alliances.

I personally like the handling of military access in ETW much better than in M2TW. In ETW, if another country without military access moves an army in your country, it is counted as declaration of war, and you're "allowed" to get rid of them without any diplomacy issues on your side. At least no other issues as the declaration of war brought by itself.

In M2TW, when playing a catholic nation, I was criticized by the pope, or even banished from the church, for attacking an army hanging around illegally in my own courtyard!

The fact they're not using the military access is, I guess, one of the many Campaign AI issues we still have with the game. But I personally still think there are lots of improvements to former games, and it looks like they are still working in improving the AI.

[Fisherking]

Welcome aboard Mexlic!

It is nice to see someone else from the Munich area.



I think the reputation is combined into the friendship meter but at this time friendship doesn’t mean a lot to the AI. Even if you are one friendly and sometimes very friendly terms with a faction they are still likely to declare war on you.

Hopefully the will make the campaign AI less likely to go to war but more aggressive once they do.

[Mexlic]

Thanks for the welcome Fisherking!

I also think that friendship doesn't mean, let's say enough, to the AI. But although it's not enough, it does have

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

some

effect on diplomacy.

They definitely are more likely to deal with you the friendlier they are towards you. Sending some porcelain to somebody who refused to become my trade partner quite often made them think twice about my trade proposal. Sometimes of course with some additional cash during the trade proposal (which wouldn't have been sufficient before I sent the porcelain).

And when parts of the expensive porcelain get broken after time, causing our relationship to get worse again, some of those intellectual masterminds get the brilliant ideas that the best solution for everybody is to cancel their trade agreement with me. Well, I still own the by far richest nation in the world (GB in that sample), and they get closer to bankrupt for not trading with me (Sweden in that sample).

On the other hand, the AI's decision between war and peace usually does not sufficiently consider friendship. There is some part of randomness in the process, as some other people already posted in the forum. But I think there are also some territorial decisions.

Quite often I got declarations of war from small nations, e.g. some native American tribes, after expanding my territory close to theirs - even though the relationship between us wasn't bad. The stupid part of it is, that I didn't want to expand further ever. I didn't want their territories. I just wanted (as GB once again) to get rid of the French in between our two nations, and establish a trade route to the natives. That part usually works, but not for long. A few turns after I became their neighbor they canceled the trade agreement and declared war. I think I don't need to mention that they were history a few turns later.

I hope with one of the next patches the AI will be able to vague the risks of declaring war to an extremely mighty country in their neighborhood who want to be friends and trade partners.

[Mexlic]

That "some" in my previous post should have been "bold", not "spoiler alert".

Seems I clicked the wrong icon.

[Razor1952]

Hi Mexlic, thanks for the replies.

I'm aware of the relationship -o - meter, but my point was really that you can do some pretty dishonorable/untrustworthy things ( like settle peace and redeclare quickly) without a big hit. perhaps another way would be your king/president gets a big negative diplomacy trait for these heinous acts.

[aimlesswanderer]

Now I sometimes swap a territory (that I happen to have an army stack next to), for a province in another theatre (especially a nearly uninvadeable island), which I can't get to. Then a DoW next turn, and hey presto, acquired a new territory in another theatre. Often you can then get peace and all is good. Rinse and repeat, and no one seems to be concerned about your trustworthiness even after a few times.

In some ways it went from one extreme to the other. It used to be extremely difficult to maintain a good reputation, and no one would do any deals with you, but now...

[anweRU]

Actually, you'll be getting a -10 hit to your reputation every time you capture a region like that, which is universal for the Christian and Hindu factions, but which the animist an Islamic factions ignoore for some reason...