Zenicetus wrote:

Romeo wrote:

If I mass produce ships, I've been neglecting planetary upgrades, economy and tech. If I don't kill you, or if you ally with a partner, I'm completely and utterly boned. I will be outperformed the longer the game goes on. It's certainly not a guaranteed win. You'll notice Galactic Civilization doesn't have a "force you to stop" mechanic, yet somehow, military isn't the most common means of winning.

Exactly. This has been dealt with in other strategy games without shackling the player with a Hand of God reaching out of the stars and saying "No, you can't do that!" as with Stellaris' white peace time limits, or this forced truce idea.

If the intent is to put a brake on a player steamrolling neighbors with an early military rush, then make the limitation organic like war weariness, or an extended logistics penalty. Or that old hoary standby.... unhappiness for conquered planets, so you have to dedicate resources to garrison duty. 

Man, I have just delved into the magic world of Vodyani early Ark rush, and I must tell you, it is sexy.

The things they do to all other empires, the travesty... Ah

Zenicetus wrote:

Romeo wrote:

If I mass produce ships, I've been neglecting planetary upgrades, economy and tech. If I don't kill you, or if you ally with a partner, I'm completely and utterly boned. I will be outperformed the longer the game goes on. It's certainly not a guaranteed win. You'll notice Galactic Civilization doesn't have a "force you to stop" mechanic, yet somehow, military isn't the most common means of winning.

Exactly. This has been dealt with in other strategy games without shackling the player with a Hand of God reaching out of the stars and saying "No, you can't do that!" as with Stellaris' white peace time limits, or this forced truce idea.

If the intent is to put a brake on a player steamrolling neighbors with an early military rush, then make the limitation organic like war weariness, or an extended logistics penalty. Or that old hoary standby.... unhappiness for conquered planets, so you have to dedicate resources to garrison duty. 

Heck, if the current issue is early rush, remove the invasion ship types until they've been researched, and make the home planet far more difficult to invade. If someone has enough to research them, build a fleet, find your home system, destroy your fleet and successfully invade your planet before you could do anything to stop them, you deserve to lose.

Asuzu wrote:

Man, I have just delved into the magic world of Vodyani early Ark rush, and I must tell you, it is sexy.

The things they do to all other empires, the travesty... Ah

Yes, the Vodyani are currently balanced in absolutely no ways what-so-ever. They need to be leashed down HARD.

Just chiming in here to agree that the truce mechanic feels completely arbitrary and takes away player agency. As someone else mentioned in the thread, it reminds me of the war score system in Stellaris, which imposes an arbitrary mechanic on warfare and conquest, with ridiculous 10 year limits between fights and so on. 

I understand some of the arguments presented for these systems, like giving the loser in a conflict one last chance to recover,. But it still feels like the hand of the game developer interfering with what should be a player's decisions. 

I would hate to see any of this tied too strongly to the political system either. Otherwise we'll spend more time playing politics than furthering the natural goals of eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate, which a game like this is supposed to be concerned with. There is no "X" in politics! ;)

I'm not sure the full diplomatic mechanic is available to player yet.

So it could be that it's not supposed to work as it currently does and the force truce was just so the players war could end at all.

The whole truce mechanic (or idea, or whatever is it) is horrible atm. Especially with cravers :)
I hope it will be changed soon.

Hey guys :)

The current implementation of the mechanic is not final and is currently being worked on! Your patience shall be rewarded

I really hope it will be fine. To be honest ES1 was (still it is) my favourite 4x game. So my expectation maybe a little bit high.

So ill remain calm :) ... I hope it will be a great game, take your time, do not rush :)

I agree - I found the truce mechanic terribly irritating.  

This is the same problem that Stellaris has with it's warscore.  There is an arbitrary limit to how far you can take a war in a given period of time - which is jarring to the player. 

A MUCH better approach to handling this would be to have some political ramifications to a prolonged total war.  Perhaps as you fight more battles over the course of a war with a foreign empire, some percentage of your population switches to the peacekeepers party - creating are more natual internal tension between militarists and peacekeepers.  Obviously, this should depend on the faction you are playing - e.g. Craver's wouldn't be affected by this.  

mezmorki wrote:

This is the same problem that Stellaris has with it's warscore.  There is an arbitrary limit to how far you can take a war in a given period of time - which is jarring to the player. 

The less Stellaris the better really. Over on Steam they keep asking "is this like Stellaris?" and the only answer I want to give is "nothing like it!"

I'm happy for some sort of properly implemented war fatigue if we really need a limit, but the current magic Jedi truce is a big no.

A good work around for the Forced Truce is through the diplomacy screen. If you go to an empire that you want to continue your war with, simply make a huge political demand, i.e. a system or high level tech. The AI often refuses and declares war to get rid of the influence/political demand. BOOM. Your war is back on!

Under no circumstances does the losing side of a war get to tell the winning side that they have to take a time-out. They can ask for one, they can try to bribe for one (although that had better be one hell of a bribe...), they can fall on their knees and beg for one (and they had better not be Cravers...), but they sure as heck can't force the issue. To be frank, if they could force the issue, they wouldn't be losing the war to begin with.

The only feature even vaguely similar that I could see making sense would be some sort of tie-in with the political parties system; to whit, a regime change in the winning side's government to one that doesn't want the war for whatever reason (hi, pacifists, maybe scientists or ecologists). At that point, it's not the loser forcing peace, it's the winner's government making peace with the loser's government, also knows as the first case from my initial list. Now, for this to work as a system, elections would need speeding up, but that's not an issue as long as dust and influence costs are reduced accordingly. Diplomatically-speaking, I would also love to see 'stop fighting or else' be a viable diplomatic channel, wherein one party to a war convinces a third party to not join in and perpetuate it, but threaten to do so if the war does not stop. That provides the player with a stark choice: peace, or a much wider, perhaps unwinnable war.

In summary, to force peace, you need to be strong enough that you wouldn't be losing the war catastrophically to begin with.  Out of story, DO NOT SCREW WITH PLAYER AGENCY.

I'm glad people seem to agree with me. It makes the game unnecessarily slow and frustrating. Military victories take long enough especially when you have to fight the same fleets twice because of a draw or hunt down a bunch of Vodyani arks. 

My biggest issue with the Forced Truce option isn't that it exists so much, but how it can sneak up on you. We also have to remember that it is not at all a finished aspect of the game, and will probably be reworked in the future. 

From a realistic standpoint, fighting a complete and total genocidal war is generally not terribly easy to do or practical. Sometimes a war exists as a show of force or to take a certain military, industrial or socio-economical objective. Thus most wars are not end all be all fights tot he death. However, having said that, I would argue that the Cravers should have a method to negate a forced truce, and that will tie in with the suggestion I'm going to give.

So, we have a couple major problems with the feature as it currently stands:

1. Sneaks up on the player unless you are checking the diplomacy screen every turn.

2. The player has absolutely no way to negate a forced truce.

3. The only gain I've received from forced truces is in dust tribute, thus there should be more things to gain.

So, let's address each issue. For the first one, it can be fixed fairly easily I think, just have some popup messages happen when the enemy's or your "War Fatigue" reaches significant points, such as 50%, 75%, 90%. This allows you to gauge when the enemy (if you're winning) will try to surrender, or when you'll be able to surrender (if you're losing). For the second issue the winning faction should have the option to deny the surrender attempt, albeit at a cost. Perhaps it causes all population units not under a militarist opinion to decrease their approval rating (Double? for Pacifist pops). To give the Cravers a benefit, make their Craver population units immune to the approval change regardless of ideology, because no matter what they're Cravers and killing and consuming is their raison d'etre. Now, for the final issue the losing faction should be able to, or maybe even forced, to give alternate tributes than dust, resources or systems. Maybe if the winning faction is ahead by a significant portion, and they can choose the demand from a short list of options, and the losers must either accept the deal or sigh and keep fighting.

It's a system that is being worked on, and they've got good heads over at Amplitude so I'm sure it'll be fine. Hell, they probably already thought of my ideas xD

I do think there should be something to stop a full out genocide war from just being too easy.  Granted if you can do that, it should be possible, but I personally like the idea of the population getting war fatigued and eventually seeing approval hits due to this.  You can continue if you want, but you start to risk rebellion.

Cravers could, and probably should, be immune to this, but I do like the idea of some mechanic to at least make mindless war as any other race not so easy.

Not only is the truce system horrible, but it seems to be broken.  I had the Sophons pick a fight with me.  I defeated a few ships, and started blockading a system.  They forced a truce.  I invaded and captured  the system the next turn.

The basic idea behind the forced truce/war exhaustion mechanic seems to be giving losing or overextended factions a chance to limp away and lick their wounds for a bit. That's a good feature in theory, but it's clearly not working right now.

Here are my suggestions:

-Every player has a baseline 'war exhaustion' bar that represents the political will to keep fighting. This is fundamentally the same for all factions, but can be modified by faction traits, political ideology, and maybe government type. Every turn, this fills up by a certain amount.

-Suffering material losses should also increase this. Losing ships, population units, planet improvements, and trade routes, as well as having systems blockaded, should all be events that contribute towards filling it.

-Gaining control of a planet should initially generate a major exhaustion penalty every turn, which eventually grows lower as the planet is brought under control. This may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but from a lore perspective it represents the political will needed to consolidate and suppress new planets and from a gameplay perspective it makes pursuing wars costly.

-Conversely, losing a planet should significantly reduce the bar. This represents the renewed political will to keep fighting to take back one's planets on the one hand, and again, shifts the exhaustion costs of war onto the winning party. My next points will hopefully explain why.

-Once your bar fills up, you begin to suffer approval global approval penalties that worsen every turn. Remaining at war while overextended for a turn or two should be viable, but 10 or more turns should have all your planets rising up in rebellion (though a law to mitigate this might be a good idea)

-Once either side's exhaustion bar has filled up completely, either side can then force a truce. The costs for this should be heavily asymmetrical. The higher your exhaustion score, the more it costs to force a truce. Regular bilateral truce costs are unaffected.

-Forced truce tributes should be scrapped entirely. The winning side already has the upper hand when it comes to negotiation payments.

The basic idea behind my proposal is to make wars of attrition viable for outgunned factions. If I am attacked by a numerically or technologically superior enemy, but I manage to recoup my losses after losing a handful of systems and then shift to heavily defending my frontiers while harassing and blockading enemy planets, then I can effectively overextend them despite being militarily inferior. On the other hand, the winning faction can still negotiate regular truces for little cost and probably get significant tributes from the loser, while the losing faction will have to balance forcing the enemy to overextend vs. cutting their own losses.

Condorf wrote:

A good work around for the Forced Truce is through the diplomacy screen. If you go to an empire that you want to continue your war with, simply make a huge political demand, i.e. a system or high level tech. The AI often refuses and declares war to get rid of the influence/political demand. BOOM. Your war is back on!

Yes, though by the they respond, your ships are already on the way back home. It's just a frustrating mechanic to have absolutely no choice in the matter. It should be a choice: Hey, I'll give you this money every turn and this huge influence demand you can cash in for whatever you want, but please spare me. If the aggressor accepts, they get the Dust per turn, that "demand a favor" mechanic that's already in and possibly higher relations from other factions. If they say no, they sacrifice all those bonuses and will likely be viewed as a bully by the rest of the galaxy.