is it possible to maintain a good and healthy alliace with a faction, and if so- how!

[Brandy Blue]

Is it true that an ally is less likely to bretray you if you try to match foreign policies - be allies with their allies and enemies of their enemies?

[ReluctantSamurai]

Not that I've ever noticed......

The only surefire way to stay allied with someone (excepting the Greek Cities or the Romans) is to not have a common border. Personally, I don't waste my time anymore making formal alliances. If I want to see a faction get a heads up on another, or create problems for a common enemy, I just feed them money at intervals...but no formal agreement.

[Brandy Blue]

Well, surefire is nice, but I think a lot of players would settle for reasonably reliable. Can you share a common boundary and get reasonably reliable?

[ReluctantSamurai]

Can you share a common boundary and get reasonably reliable?

Back when I still made formal alliances, I had exactly one alliance that worked like one would expect an alliance to work, and it lasted to the end. IIRC, I was playing as Macedon, and my ally was Pontus. It was rather shocking really, as we shared a very long border in Anatolia. Most of the time the AI is just really stupid in breaking an alliance....even to the point of self destruction. Case-in-point:

As Armenia, I had an alliance with Scythia during one game. I held all the ports along the southern edge of the Black Sea and held all of Anatolia, being well into my campaign to eliminate the Big E. They had all the northern ports including Chersonesos. In looking at the trade screen, a very large portion of Scythian income came from sea trade with me. We had only one common border between Tribus Alanni and Colchis provinces, and it's a verrrrry long way between Campus Alanni and Kotais, the capitals of each respective province.

In my campaign against Egypt, I had moved all of my Black Sea fleets to the Eastern Med to gain naval superiority, leaving the Black Sea area with one small transportation fleet. Somehow the AI took this as a sign that I was ripe for the picking, or some such nonsense....it sent a single bireme to blockade Sinope, breaking the alliance and starting a war. Now considering that the in-game graph for faction strengths had me rated #1, and Scythia was involved in a distant war with Germania, this made no sense whatsoever.

The reason I remember this game is because of the rapid collapse of my former ally after their backstab. I could do without their trade, but they could not do without mine, and the loss of income led to riots in their high population cities, and they were unable to replace their losses against Germania.

The pre-Empire TW version of the "Black Knight"??

[Brandy Blue]

I wondered because I too had a very long alliance (not to the end, but it was quite useful for a long time) and I made some real efforts to keep it going - matching my foreign policy to my ally's, forgoing easy rebel conquests to leave my ally somewhere to expand that wasn't me, maybe occaisional small gifts. So it looked like I was doing something that worked, but maybe I was just plain lucky. It hasn't happened again, but then I haven't bothered trying.

Maybe alliances work better for short campaigns than for the full campaign, if only because your ally has less time to decide to do something silly?

[Myth]

But why would you even want allies? Their cities are put to better use when governed by you!

[ReluctantSamurai]