Border Wars

[Prussian to the Iron]

................that never happened to me; in my russian campaign about 10 turns ago(so turn 11) i shared a border with georgia, the ottomans, the polish, the swedes, and the dagestanis. the only nation who attacked me was dagestan, who had only 1 city andw as steamrolled easily.

however, i admit it would made more sense for georgia to DoW on me; thy control their home province, plus the one to the south and all of anatolia. hey could probably build up an army and steamroll my southern cities while im busy dealing with persia.

maybe its cuz u play on VH? for strategy map, i prefer medium/easy. otherwise the upkeep/ building costs are so rediculous, and the trade values so low, it is a little too hard to play.

[Megas Methuselah]

maybe its cuz u play on VH? for strategy map, i prefer medium/easy. otherwise the upkeep/ building costs are so rediculous, and the trade values so low, it is a little too hard to play.

That's probably it. I play medium campaign, hard battles, and don't suffer these border wars (except for the Italian States who declared war on me everytime I take Naples and Sicily).

Of course, playing on vh/vh is no excuse. You shouldn't be having to deal with this idiocy, Yunson.

[aimlesswanderer]

I play on H/H, and nations which border me (unless they are protectorates) do have a tendency to declare war.

What is just stupid though is when a faction declares war and then just sits around examining their navels. What was the point of the DoW in the first place?

I am very happy that other armies can no longer just wander around your land at will - that is one improvement at least.

Could do without the mandatory patches and the inability to roll back "improvements".

[Fisherking]

It happens!

And the settings make little difference. If it didn’t happen in a particular campaign then just say you were lucky.

Allies don’t always back stab you but even friendly trading partners will.

The good thing is that I think the next patch will tone it down.

[Zenicetus]

IIRC, in M2TW (and possibly also RTW?) there was a "relations" modifier tied to the campaign difficulty setting. On medium difficulty, your relations with other countries remained neutral for every turn, unless you did something to upset them, or move them in a positive direction with bribes. You still had to keep reasonable garrisons on your frontier provinces, to avoid attacks of opportunity.

On Easy difficulty, it was set to gradually improve relations with each turn, even without bribes or treaties. On Hard and Very Hard, relations were set to deteriorate constantly on each turn by a small amount, unless you did something to stop it, like steady bribes.

That led to constant warfare on H and VH settings. Enemy nations would attack the player with ridiculously under-sized armies, because they hadn't had enough time to build up their economy. Constant wars kept them in that impoverished state. For that reason, I always played M2TW at the medium campaign setting, where diplomacy (such as it was) is a bit more realistic, and the enemy usually had larger armies by the time wars break out.

Does anyone know if there's a similar dynamic in Empire at the harder settings, with that constant degrading of relations? The campaign needs to be more difficult for the player at the harder settings, but it shouldn't be just ramping up the aggression and likelihood of declaring war. That's a cheap shortcut for making the enemy look like an intelligent adversary.

P.S. Sorry if this has been discussed earlier, I only decided to try the game recently and haven't read threads from the release date.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Sharing a border isn't the real issue. But the game does track how many wars your fighting. If you make peace or eliminate an opponent the *ahem* AI will throw a seemingly randomly picked nation at the player nation.

Which, as has been observed on more then one occasion by more then a few people, makes a total mockery of the diplomatic aspects this game pretends to have.

[Fisherking]

There seem to have been some changes however subtle to the DoWs but still they are too frequent.

Also a favorite tactic now is to do ridiculous DoWs on protectorates. Now as you reach your goals and near the late years it does get far worse and the great AI god orders his minions to do all they can to hamper you…

It is still easy to win, it just isn’t so much fun as it was…