I can't really find any way to determine how strong a faction's army is. You can look at their units only if you happen to spot one of their armies wandering around. As far as I can tell, there's no way to look at the units in a city garrison (unless you start a siege). Right now I have no clue if I can take on a faction in war or not before I declare.



Is there some way to see a faction's military strengths, city units, or tech before you declare war?



Is there a way to preview which army/units will be sucked into a battle as reinforcements? What's the range on that?





(Speaking of declaring war, I don't understand the point of warnings or compliments. Their influence cost is greater than the discount. I guess compliment doubles diplomacy points if you're going for that victory, but otherwise why would you use them?)

You can look at empire (f1) then hit the score button to see a military strength graph, but it is very vague. Agree re: warning/compliment.

Oh I see. Issuing a compliment/warning decreases the cost off peace/war every turn, up until 10 turns I think.



The thing is, the influence cost of declaring war/peace is trivial so it's unnecessary. I would like to see the costs increased dramatically, so that it's super expensive to quickly force peace or declare a surprise attack out of the blue. You could still do it, but you'd have to pour all your resources into influence (diplomats drafting treaties intot he night, surprise attack plans being formed). If you want to affordably get peace, you have to wait. Want affordable war, you have to give them warning time to prepare.

I'm not sure how the AI works, but when I got a war declared on me by the AI, I reloaded the game to the previous turn, complimented them, and they didn't attack me the next turn. I don't know if that's just RNG or compliments at work. I know things do change from reloading, since one time I reloaded, then a new quest had its reward changed the next turn.

fahbs wrote:
The thing is, the influence cost of declaring war/peace is trivial so it's unnecessary.

Increasing Diplomatic costs has been suggested many times. Agree that many are trivial, especially later in the game when you can produce a lot of each turn.



One of the designers (I apologize that I cannot find the reference) mentioned that they wanted to keep the prices low so that they would be used.

Propbuddha wrote:
Increasing Diplomatic costs has been suggested many times. Agree that many are trivial, especially later in the game when you can produce a lot of each turn.



One of the designers (I apologize that I cannot find the reference) mentioned that they wanted to keep the prices low so that they would be used.

I think a great formula would be:



-Make war/peace/alliance cost x10 what they do now.



-Issuing a compliment/warning would decrease the cost by 10% a turn. After 10 turns, the cost will be reduced to the trivial amount it is now. Creates a tradeoff between war/peace NOW at high influence cost or waiting around for a discount.