N.N.Thoughts wrote:

In light of the dev's post I don't think it's appropriate to refer to this mechanic as Forced Truce. You're not forced to do anything, and that was the core annoyance before. It's simply an Early Truce which you can reject, at a price. To me this is a good way to marry the dev's vision for having multiple wars and players' need for agency. I would've liked the option for the weaker empire that has had it's truce rejected multiple times to go into a "war to the death" mode, but that's something for later on, perhaps. I think for now, it's best to wait till early truce is implemented in the next patch (I hope it is in the next patch and not further down the way) so that we can constructively review it rather then repeat old frustrations about the system that's about to change.

Yep, the mechanic is no longer forcing anything, so a name change is definitely necessary. I'd also like to see it catered around certain races and governments better (Religious, Military and Industrialists shouldn't mind a war, they're all good for them or justifiable; Pacifists, Ecologists and Scientists should dislike continuing a fight, seeing as how it interferes with their goals, or directly opposes their ideology).

adelahaye wrote:

The recipient of the proposition will be able to refuse and keep the war going for a few number of turns. However, refusing a truce will result in an approval penalty: the population being unhappy about the war being waged longer than necessary. If truces keep being proposed and the same party keeps refusing them, the disapproval from civil unrest will grow bigger each time, to the point of becoming utterly crippling.

As someone else posted on the forums that they absolutely HATE Stellaris for the forced truce and I completely agree.

I am sorry adelahaye this does not solve the problem it only makes it worse. Because war weariness and such systems will never truly be able to calculate the standing of a war, you will always penalize one player, and players will be able to abuse this system. I give you an example - let´s say a player is wide spread and you take a couple of his planets before he can defend them.

Player A is the aggressor and has a fleet of 10k total (hypothetical numbers) but he´s able to take 50% of Player B´s systems before he can even get in place to defend them.

Player B is the defender and has 30k total fleet-size. Now because B lost half of his systems Player A is able to force truce spam him, giving him severe modifiers, he can keep doing this while avoiding battles, going to capture other systems, and eventually take Player A out of the game, even though A should have easily won the war. And it´s not because Player B played smarter, it´s because he was able to abuse a certain game mechanic to a certain extent that made it very unpleasant and unfair to play the game.

This is not just a hypothetical example, as I stated before in a game of Stellaris I had enough fleet-power to beat 5 other players that were playing together against me. However there was no time to get to all systems in time, and even though I was constantly killing their fleet, they were making small insignificant advances that counted for much more war-score than me wrecking their fleet. In a non-specific example you can have someone rushing systems as mentioned, with a very inferior fleet just to get points and abuse force truce somehow. ( Now we can´t be specific yet since the final details of force truce are not known yet )

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In any case the aggressor should under NO CIRCUMSTANCES whatsoever be allowed to send a force truce. If you wish to keep the mechanic in the game, which I´m not very fond of, but can agree that it could be kept as a mechanic for the defender - however the specifics of this mechanic would have to be very thoroughly examined.

I mean honestly let´s go through it - if the factors are laid out in such a way that it would be fair towards the aggressor - the chances are that you are already out of the game anyway if you are defeated in such a war - competitively speaking. You will never be able to defeat the aggressor alone, sure you could join into an alliance. There is no game mechanic you can create to ever make this fair. Either way I think a good approach might be the systems invaded, but their contribution towards a war weariness would depend on their economic output compared to your total economic strength. So an invader taking over 3 systems which all-together only account for 10% of your total economy should NOT allow you to force truce out of the war. It would have to be a significant percentage of your economic power.

let´s say a player is wide spread and you take a couple of his planets before he can defend them.

I say, that's too bad and your hypothetical player should maybe patrol his or her borders better. To me, that's an example of a smart, asymmetrical play, and what you describe sounds like Marquis of Fantailler rules applied to war. If the opportunistic aggressor proposes an early truce after his excursions, you are free to refuse and pursue his weak fleet to turn the war around. You seem to want to have your cake (wide empire with weak peripheral defences) and eat it (not get an approval hit for a proper war). 

You also assume there aren't going to be any safeguards against spamming early truce proposals and against abusing the mechanic to drive the disapproval penalty towards player's elimination. It sure makes sense to have a flag somewhere in the algorithm to treat the Aggressor in a war slightly differently compared to the defending party. But it all depends on the exact implementation of the truce mechanic and the bigger picture of diplomacy / art of war.

N.N.Thoughts wrote:

I say, that's too bad and your hypothetical player should maybe patrol his or her borders better. To me, that's an example of a smart, asymmetrical play, and what you describe sounds like Marquis of Fantailler rules applied to war. If the opportunistic aggressor proposes an early truce after his excursions, you are free to refuse and pursue his weak fleet to turn the war around. You seem to want to have your cake (wide empire with weak peripheral defences) and eat it (not get an approval hit for a proper war). 

(I don't know why editing quotes is so broken on this site, I can't do any better than this)

All we want is a system that makes any logistical or mechanical sense. If someone declares a surprise war on you and takes some of your stuff, nobody in your empire is going to celebrate. Especially if you have the military muscle to swing around and recoup your losses, there is almost no conceivable scenario in which the citizens of your empire would be upset for trying to take it back. If you want to punish players for spreading themselves thinly, there IS ALREADY a downside to having an empire spread thin: it's called pissing everyone off. If you take a lot of territory, that makes you a big target for everyone else, and if your defenses are thinly spread, that also makes you an easy target. You also struggle with Approval already, because of expansion disapproval, and you're probably having a hard time affording the necessary infrastructure on all those planets. Your argument here pretends there's literally no consequence whatsoever to spreading yourself thin.

Fenrakk101 wrote:

N.N.Thoughts wrote:

I say, that's too bad and your hypothetical player should maybe patrol his or her borders better. To me, that's an example of a smart, asymmetrical play, and what you describe sounds like Marquis of Fantailler rules applied to war. If the opportunistic aggressor proposes an early truce after his excursions, you are free to refuse and pursue his weak fleet to turn the war around. You seem to want to have your cake (wide empire with weak peripheral defences) and eat it (not get an approval hit for a proper war). 

(I don't know why editing quotes is so broken on this site, I can't do any better than this)

All we want is a system that makes any logistical or mechanical sense. If someone declares a surprise war on you and takes some of your stuff, nobody in your empire is going to celebrate. Especially if you have the military muscle to swing around and recoup your losses, there is almost no conceivable scenario in which the citizens of your empire would be upset for trying to take it back. If you want to punish players for spreading themselves thinly, there IS ALREADY a downside to having an empire spread thin: it's called pissing everyone off. If you take a lot of territory, that makes you a big target for everyone else, and if your defenses are thinly spread, that also makes you an easy target. You also struggle with Approval already, because of expansion disapproval, and you're probably having a hard time affording the necessary infrastructure on all those planets. Your argument here pretends there's literally no consequence whatsoever to spreading yourself thin.

However, the penalty here is not simply for spreading yourself thin, it's for not defending your territory adequately. Sir-Roger's scenario involved Player A losing a few systems before being able to bring the might of his fleet to bear on the opportunistic attacker. I like this opportunistic element to border skirmishes; I think it adds an interesting dynamic to the game. Besides, you can always declare war and go Total Rome on the savages harassing your borders. 

You make a good point, but consider this: the population on some of the planets in your empire (perhaps of a more pacifist persuasion) see other planets taken by an aggressor and fear the same fate might befall them as well. The empire's mighty fleet is all well and good, but it failed once already to defend the borders, and what's to stop it from happening again. Better make a bad peace now then risk a war. It's a very archetypical, selfish and cowardly behaviour that sits right next to a vengeful, chest-beating nationalist. I think the game would be better off by allowing these more complex population mechanics.

As I said, it's only fair to treat the aggressor is a different way to the defending party; perhaps by enforcing a longer period (I think it's 10 turns for everyone in ES1, regardless of who initiated the conflict) before truce can be proposed. And anyway, whoever proposes truce surely has to offer something to sweeten the deal and that'll swing some of the population to the pacifist view (especially if they didn't particularly like their conquered neighbours much anyway and don't hold a grudge). 

N.N.Thoughts wrote:

However, the penalty here is not simply for spreading yourself thin, it's for not defending your territory adequately.

"Not defending your territory adequately" is literally the definition of "spreading yourself thin"; otherwise you're just spreading yourself. If you spread quickly, you are vulnerable; it will take you time to build up the infrastructure to defend those territories. If you focus instead on building up military defenses, that territory will already be snagged by more opportunistic nations, and you'll have to war for it. If you spread yourself out, and then no one attacks you and suddenly you become well-entrenched and super-powerful, that is entirely their own fault. These careful tactical decisions have been the basis of 4X games from the very beginning - no, I take that back, the very basis of strategy games since the very beginning. Even "simple" games like Command and Conquer force you to make choices about expanding to another base and risking taking damage from an attack, against the risk of playing defensively and thus falling behind economically, while also judging when to attack your enemy's own bases or when to prepare for attacks of theirs. Force truce is not "adding" this risk to the game, this risk is fundamental to the very mechanics of strategy games. Arguing that Force Truce is in any way needed to discourage expansion is just saying that the actual core mechanics are horribly unbalanced to the point of being incapable of providing that tradeoff; if that's the case, you really ought to be looking at the rest of the mechanics first, because I don't think that's even fundamentally possible to take away from a game in the genre.

As for tying it in to political factions, I'm not against that. I've said over and over, I'm not against war weariness, I'm not against population priorities influencing their decisions, I'm not against the Senate being involved. But I loathe the idea that these machinations are spontaneously and arbitrarily set into motion whenever my opponent decides to spring them on me, because it makes absolutely no sense, both from a lore perspective and a mechanics perspective. To repeat myself on that subject: either the Approval penalty doesn't matter all that much, making the entire mechanic pointless, or the cost is so heavy that you would never do it, and thus unfairly punishes players who simply had their army in the wrong place at the wrong time ("But they SHOULD be punished for that!!!" guess what, capturing systems is already a pain in the neck, and even if you retake that system it's probably lost a ton of structures and the like. You already have a pretty severe penalty for losing that territory in the first place, whether or not you reclaim it; compounding their woes doesn't suddenly make the game more fun or fair or balanced). More to the point, the proposed alterations to the system do not account for the political system at all; while they suggested it could be related in future, that does not justify having this system in the game at this point. Take it out, rework it so that it involves the Senate, then try to introduce it again and see how well people like the mechanic versus when it wasn't in the game in the first place.

N.N.Thoughts wrote: As I said, it's only fair to treat the aggressor is a different way to the defending party; perhaps by enforcing a longer period (I think it's 10 turns for everyone in ES1, regardless of who initiated the conflict) before truce can be proposed. And anyway, whoever proposes truce surely has to offer something to sweeten the deal and that'll swing some of the population to the pacifist view (especially if they didn't particularly like their conquered neighbours much anyway and don't hold a grudge). 

You've literally just suggested making truces and wars function the same way they did in ES1 (having to actually barter for your life if you're losing a war), which brings us back to the question of why they're trying to reinvent the wheel in the first place.