Border Wars

[Yun Dog]

In MTW2 we were subjected to the most predictable and boring strategy game ever. If you shared a border with an AI nation they immediately declared war on you. It was a game killer.. the Total War strategy actually made the game easier because there was no reward or requirement for any diplomacy it was route 1 steam roll one nation after the next. Boooooring, for me personally it made M2TW so boring and predicatable and repeditive I stopped playing it and have not since.

Now we are made to suffer this same lame strategy model in ETW - we get no choice about applying this patch - suddenly a good game turns into a boring and predictable one. In my current game as prussia vh/vh I am deliberately keeping minor nations and poland bordering me as a buffer to other nations as soon as I take another province whichever nations share a border with that province will delcare war - Im bored already just writing about it - I have no wish to play this out as there is only 1 way to play it out - steam roll one nation after the next.

For a game that is attempting to position itself as a strategy game - this is the most infantile strategy model I have had the misfortune of experiencing.

please give me a glimmer of hope that they are planning to fix this as a priority and actually add some game to the game.

I feel like the guy in Jurassic park

"are there going to be any dinosaurs on the dinosaur tour"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTtlETsHL6Q

"is there going to be any strategy in the strategy game"?

[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…

[Cheetah]

Border wars are border wars and need not imply full out war with the other country.
In my recent campaign I am playing Poland and at war with Prussia, Austria and the Crimean chanate (don't ask me why). Yet none of these countries sent a single unit to fight on Polish soil (on H/H). You can easily interpret it as a low intensity border war without any serious intent. In fact I can build everything I want and still have a sizeable reserve in the treasury (and I have only 4 landlocked provinces).
The point is that being in war need not imply an all out rampage and that you might be better off with your "dear enemy" than eliminating it and drawing in another nation into war with you.

This of course does not deny the short comings of the diplomacy or the gang on the human player effect. It just that you can use wars to your own advantage.

[Yun Dog]

Cheetah,

That was sort of my point in a round about way, I hear what your saying that just because your at war doesnt mean you need to wipe out one guy after the next - but it certainly makes it easy to, and hence rather than making the game harder for the human it actually makes the game easier.

So in the game I mentioned in the OP, Ive taken out poland completely - Russia was at war with Austria. Then Ive gone from friendly trade relations with Russia to war on one turn, and then Austria who I was hostile with also declared war. Of coarse Im at war with all neighbouring protectorates. None of whom will accept peace.

so far none of the nations appears to be looking much chop

so I can take out targets of opportunity in two directions

I dunno was I expecting too much in hoping for more than this?

Honestly I can live with some of the foibles of the battle AI, but the battles need to have some sort of context - There is 0 immersion when the AI behaves in a prescipted and predictable fasion.

[Papewaio]

Russia VH/VH

I took at Dagestan and waited a few turns to replenish then moved on to fight their allies leaving a few garrison units.

Only when I had left the province did Persia declare war.

In addition to this I haven't in the first 30 years moved in to fight Sweden. They did attack one of my lesser cities but were beaten back by the mob. Sweden hasn't moved into Muscovy and P-L has gone into Russia as I have a strong garrison force in the West. While the Ottomans havn't declared war after I took out Crimea... we trade. Crimea has at least 7 decent units in it and is constantly pumping out more for generals in the field.

So it might be that your playing style is leaving a depleted border that an oppourtunistic AI is taking advantage of.

[Yun Dog]

Just an update on how the VH/VH campaign is playing out.

So in my last post Russia and Austria had declared war for no reason (probably because I now shared a border).

I had an army in the south from defeating the polish

Two turns later the undefended Kiev fell (it was a really well thought out move for them to declare war with no armies)

two turns after that the undefended Moscow fell

the russians made peace

The Austrian put up a small fight for vienna, then they moved there army out of neigbouring Hungary (god knows why) so I took that too.

Austria makes peace

The Crimean Khanate took me by surprise when they declared war (oh what a surprise! a nation I border has declared war on me) and walked across the steps of russia in one move (some thousands of miles) to attack me - luckily for me the unrepairable fort bug meant they all tried to cram through the wall breach and were defeated by a severly undermaned force.

They have unbelievably fast cav and men on motorbikes so they can pull a good rush when they need to (my men take 40minutes just to turn face and fire)- but really with one province churning out megastaks and raiding my lands thay are an annoyance that are worth me sending an army to destroy.

Hopefully the patch will address the several strategic and diplomatic flaws that result in every game being a boring and predictable grind.