The game usually plays out this way.You build up and then mid game you have one decisive war of annihilation of one faction and the game is effectively over in single player.You snowball too big for anybody to complete.New games like EU4 and even Civ:be use a the war score system to stop this easy blobbing.

Depending on difficulty, victory settings and selected faction and opponents, the scenario you mentioned is but one possibility that will not necessarily happen. Sorry, but the war score system in EU4 is one of the reasons why I stopped playing that game for a long time. EU4 does not challenge the player for expanding, it intentionally and methodically punishes one for doing so. To arrive at a peace deal and keep conquests, you must cause as much damage and win as many battles as possible to chalk up a huge war score, which forces you to extend an aggressive campaign longer than necessary. I understand Paradox style games have their appeal to a specific niche player group, but to the average 4x player, this wastes more time in an already complex game.

I actually think a warscore and casus belli mechanic would have fit well into Endless Legend (especially with Necrophages who would only use an always available "consumption" CB and Roving Clans being restricted to "Trade Conflict"), as long as it wasn't copied wholecloth from CK2 or EU4. While I like the systems in those games, and think they fit into what each game is trying to achieve, a slightly more forgiving take on the system might be in order for a 4X game, so that you can actually end a war for a single city a couple of turns after taking that city, instead of having to fully occupy the whole enemy empire.



That said, I don't think a warscore system would be a good idea for a DLC feature. It is a much too extensive change of core systems of the game.

Unfortunately, the nature of war score and causus belli is anything but forgiving because such mechanics provide no middle ground especially in a game like EL. Such mechanics may work well in a game where every faction is very similar (very boring btw) but not in a game like EL. There are situations when you do not have a causus belli but still need to declare war to progress further. Imagine the Allayi with their huge expansion penalty having to declare war just to talk to a minor faction village because the enemy closed off its borders where it's located and negotiating an open borders agreement would be too expensive. Worse, if the enemy screws you and closes off the border soon after you negotiate opening it. So the "safer" option would be to declare war. Why should the Allayi be double penalized by lack of causus belli?



Or you need to take several cities quickly in a race against time because the enemy is very close to an economic or wonder victory. Why should you be double penalized on top of the existing expansion penalty? Or you destroy every enemy army and they only have a few towns left. There's no way the enemy could muster enough forces to counterattack effectively. But no, you cannot capture those towns immediately because you haven't got enough war score. So your armies sit around waiting to pick off enough enemy "reinforcements" until you meet the war score quota. All these while the enemy is happily crossing its fingers waiting for its economic/wonder victory, while you can't do anything about it in time. It's ridiculous. A war score and causus belli would cause huge problems in a non-Paradox 4x game.

I disagree with you on this. Most 4X games already track the state of the war anyway, they just do not make it explicit. And I believe that it's the specific implementation of war score in CK2 and EU4 that makes them frustrating to you.



In CK2, the AI basically never surrenders unless you have 100% war score. It doesn't matter if it has any levies or mercenaries left to defend itself with. But this is probably intentional, as CK2 is meant to be a game about managing your vassals, not world conquest.

In EU4, the problem stems from the large number of large negative modifiers without positive modifiers to make up for it. You can be the Ottoman Empire, back by Austria, Bohemia (currently Emperor), and a Tunis that controls northern Africa from Gibraltar to the Nile, but does Georgia surrender after you killed their entire military? No, because while there are "-150 for length of war" and "-1000 Does not occupy a fort" modifiers to their acceptance, there is no "+150 stackwiped our entire military in the first battle" modifier. Furthermore, the target country's war exhaustion doesn't have nearly enough impact in my opinion. After wiping out the army of the enemy's ally, and their war exhaustion drops to "low", they stillr efuse to back out unless you occupy them.

In short, the numbers are skewed. I feel it's appropriate for the period the game is set in, but it's not necessarily fun.



Now, as mentioned before, basically all 4x games track warscore in some way.

There's a reason why Civ4/5 AI leaders will eventually start approaching you with peace deals: hidden war score.

In Civ:BE:RT they tried to make it explicit, and royally messed it up in the release version.

Endless Space, too, had the AI offer you peace deals if the war was going heavily in your favor.

Endless Legend, if you read the thread about the strange truce behavior, actually has AI personalities react in different ways depending on how the war goes. It might not be tracked as a single "war score" number, but it is tracked.

In Endless Space 2, according to the Diplomacy GDD, there will be a "war exhaustion" system that serves to set the base value of peace deals on the balancing bar.



As long as war score is not a hard limit, but a powerful modifier to the balance of peace negotiations, and events that should contribute to the war score actually contribute an appropriate amount (for example, leaving the enemy without any military force should be a powerful modifier, dampened by their ability to recreate a force from scratch in a short time.) I believe combining the factors into a single "war score" number displayed to the player is not necessarily a bad idea.

The "Casus Belli" mechanic would play into such a system by modifying the impact different demands and offers have on the balance of the peace deal. If you declare a trade dispute, then taking territory will tip the balance more than if you declared conquest, because declaring war with a conquest DB makes it clear to the enemy that you are not going to back down without it unless thoroughly beaten.

Fair enough. But I still don't see how that relates to the OP's point about war score addressing the alleged snowball effect. The way he put it seems to imply that an EU4 type of war score should be implemented. I strongly disagree with this as EU4 is more a simulation than 4x. There is no winning condition afaik, just surviving until a certain date. The situation he mentioned cannot be compared to EL where there are specific victory conditions and very diverse faction traits.



I think we can agree the diplomatic modifiers should vary from faction to faction depending on their traits. Say necrophages less likely to accept ceasefire for the same items offered to a "peaceful" faction in a similar situation. If this isn't already implemented. Any implementation of war score that interferes with gameplay beyond simply serving an indicator role and the usual diplomatic modifiers is wrong. I also fail to see how casus belli that works in a simulation with no specific victory conditions should interfere in a 4x game like EL.



I don't care how you define war score or display it as long as the diplomatic modifiers for each faction make sense given their traits. And not interfere with the flexible achievement of victory conditions, which would otherwise lead to ridiculous situations as I explained earlier.