Just finished my second round through, this time being an absolute warmonger and vassalizing the entire starting continent. Three things I experienced in this playthrough that I want to highlight.

(Playthrough was on Civilization difficulty btw)

1. Vassals are too loyal. As long as I don't interact with them, that is, I ignore their demands nothirng really happens. They build up to 100 war support and then they just stay there. The only reason I can see why they never tried to rebel was because they had a "Benefits from your sphere of influence" modifier to their relationship.
2. Vassal income was also quite insane, which I believe to come from the AI bonues being higher on this difficulty. My entire economy was riding on their money income from their markets districts, which allowed me to build distcits that actually were productive instead.
3. The fact that pushed demands are mandatort in war resolution annoys me. Not in the sense that it is unimmersive, but the fact that they make it hard to get the peace deal I want. Most of my wars started as a result of multiple minor skirmishes, each of which created a "Demand Compensation" grievance. This is well and good, except for the fact that I am forced to spend 40-50 warscore on just those, when I would much rather take a city or vassalize them instead.

Diplomacy was at once to easy, and kinda frustrating. When I made demands, they where almost always accepted. The difficulty level was easy at the time though so it may be as a result of that. However, perhaps whether they accept or refuse to give you territory should be related to your influence score over that territory compared to theirs?

Given that I have completed both games I played allied to half, or all, of the other factions it also seems like the alliances do not fully weigh whether you are already allied to their enemies or not, and do not offer much benefit. In fact, when allies went to war, it always gave me an immediate reputation penalty with my ally for not being at war with their enemy, even though they had just declared war and had not even given me a chance to join. I also found I could not actually "join" their war but only go to war myself, with no apparent impact on each others war goals and demands after the conflict. There should likely be a day or two delay, or even -asking- me to go to war with them, before a reputation penalty is applied.

Please please please bring back the extermination civic or at least make it an option to toggle when setting up the game. I thought the feature was perfect for multiplayer and made war more regular and engaging rather than something that is shied away from on account of kicking someone out of the game.

just had an irritating issue where every turn the same ai would demand i convert. everytime i said no their war support would go up by 25, and they would retract their demand. within 4 turns of them demanding and retracting, they went from 13 to 100 war support.

Was there a way to liberate an enemy's vassal? I was not able to find that in the UI.

Some feedback I had:

I was not able to see where the cost requirements for certain treaties/alliances was, or if it was calculated dynamically based on what the AI thought it wanted. 

I liked the options available, they're pretty solid in terms of what's available and what you can do with the AI.

In the diplomacy screen I encountered a bug where scrolling through the surrender terms box and selecting cities/territories worked, but I was not able to click on the scroll bar and drag it down. The longer the list, the more tedious the scrolling was.

I was not able to find an easy way to correlate the names of the provinces/territories/cities with what I saw on the map. I was able to drag the map behind the diplomacy screen and I was able to see some of the names that corresponded to checkboxes, but that was very tedious as the only part of the map that was visible was in the lower third of the background of the diplomacy screen.

The above ties into my confusion with enforcing surrenders. I just wasn't able to correlate very easily which territories I wanted. It may also be interesting to have a little more granularity in what kinds of peace/terms you can offer - i.e maybe not having to pay as much war support to demand the enemy give a city you already occupied? 

I liked the demand system, it offered a cool way to interact with war support to build up enough of it necessary to launch a war or catch up on support.

I really liked the independent peoples popping up in random areas, but I was not clear on how they spawn or when they spawn. They showed up on occasion, however I was not able to determine why they showed up where they did. Having them disappear is also interesting, having some as warmongers, peaceful ones, etc. Liked that. I think it would be cooler if they could spawn with themes, like I saw the Scythians spawned and the blurb IIRC mentioned something about horses but I don't remember seeing them with many horse units. Don't remember if they had horses by them either, I think they might have.

Hi,
I would like to ask you what I'm getting wrong with diplomacy/war. Maybe you can help me why i cant get what i want although i won war.

1. green is vasal of yellow

2. green build city in middle of my territory as on screen 1 (PARSA -piautos region)

20210616140706_1.jpg

3. claimed claimed claimed anoyyed them 

4. yellow declares war on me.

5. i win - but i have to fulfill yellow's will as on screen. 2  i cnat get territory. Whatsmore althoug i won war i have to ceed it to theme!!!

20210616140848_1.jpg

Question WHY? what am i doing wrong? 

Why if i have claime on territory, and AI declares war on me to protect that terriotry, and even if i win in summary it allways win AI. becaouse i have to resign from claims.

Aggressive IP seem a bit over-powered in the early game. It is really hard to deal with the first wave of them. Maybe let them start with weaker units. If I see aggressive IP I can't run away since they will chase me, and I can't engage in battle since they are waaaay stronger than scouts and I won't have anything else researched to replace scouts with. Also, make letting them stick closer to their home would be good. Sometimes its weird to see them travel to the other side of the continent.

Also, it was not clear to me how the cost to assimilate changed over time. Sometimes it was very high, then it was really low. Maybe add some explanation of when this is going to change so that I can plan for this.

I think in Victor we were able to assimilate IPs that were patronized by someone else earlier. It seems like that is not the case anymore. I miss that feature. It makes more sense I think. Then it's a race of who can get the city cap and influence earlier.

Pleas include a "no and stop asking" option. It's really annoying to have to refuse the same proposal over and over again. 

I was once in a war with someone who was also at war with someone else. I captured their last city causing their war support to drop to 0 and then the other player who was at war with them made them their vassal before I could do anything (since their war support would've dropped to 0 with the other person they were fighting). I then went to war with their new liege, won and made them my vassal. This had the impact of saying the they were my vassal on the diplomacy screen but not in practice. They were still liege over their vassal and did not pay me tribute. Once I granted them their freedom, they lost their vassal. I then subjugated them normally. Another time when I made a liege my vassal, he and his vassal both became my vassal. I'm guessing this is a big caused by the weirdness of having someone's war score drop to 0 against two opponents simultaneously. 

I just completed my first run through of the scenario and think that diplomacy needs the most work. My thoughts:

1) Echoing when several other people have said, please either make the influence cost of diplomacy clear or remove it. It took me a while to realize that I was wasting influence on diplomacy.

2) Rather than the current counter system for a fixed price, it would be helpful if the game showed the likelihood of the AI accepting a treaty, and then you can add additional offers (e.g., gold, other treaties) to reach acceptance. This would be a significant improvement over just hoping they'll accept and having no idea why they won't.

3) I like the tooltip that explains the AI's current opinion of you, but it seemed a bit random at times. For example, I had a great relationship, alliance, and multiple treaties with one other country. Everything was wonderful until one turn they decided that they hated me and cancelled all our treaties. I looked at the tooltip, but they was no real reason for the sudden change. Not long after they declared war and I easily crushed them and vassalized them. I could understand them breaking their treaties if they thought they had a chance at backstabbing me, but it ultimately just seemed self-defeating.

4) Again echoing others, I think that vassals are too loyal. Despite one of them hating me and having multiple grievances, I could safely ignore them without consequences. After they have been vassalized for an appropriate period of time if they still hate you, they should have an increased risk of a rebellion (with an indicator of the likelihood). It would also be great if other countries could support their independence.

5) For independent peoples, I think the assimilation system could use some work. It should be clear how much many relationship points you get from your investment of influence or money, and how many turns it will last. There should also be a way to sabotage other countries' relations with independent people in order to unseat a patron.

I think the independent people city assimilation should take course over turns rather than being an immediate flip upon purchase. Also when the AI does it on an independent city you have relations with, it should come with a warning as well. Otherwise maybe provide warnings when another AI is nearing a relationship level that could allow them to assimilate the city. There was one instance where I checked an independent city and I had a relationship score of 100 with the second highest AI being 50 or so, and a few turns later they assimilated the city and that felt like it came out of nowhere without warning. 

Diplomacy finally feels like it's at the right place.
The only issue I have is vassalization, maybe this shouldn't be possible until the target has only a few territories or one city left. It's just too strong and you can always achieve it.

It would also be nice if we could interact with our vassals more, like demanding an outposts or city. (with obvious downsides like costs or grievances)

Independent cities felt great once I figured out how to handle them.

The only other general issue I have is when you conquer a city, there should be an option to raze it. I'd even take a big diplomatic hit for that.
Since early on you can only have two cities, so any city of an enemy next to you becomes a wall you can't overcome.

dragon891089 wrote:
I cant end the turn without going on the surrender negotiations it wont let me cancel or force the demands on the opponent, what do i do? 

I think you may have too many of the opponent's cities selected. Try unchecking one or two and see if the accept button starts working. The cancel button apparently never works, at least I've never been able to refuse a surrender.. It's quite annoying.

Based on these two points:

GRasputin wrote:

1) Echoing when several other people have said, please either make the influence cost of diplomacy clear or remove it. It took me a while to realize that I was wasting influence on diplomacy.

2) Rather than the current counter system for a fixed price, it would be helpful if the game showed the likelihood of the AI accepting a treaty, and then you can add additional offers (e.g., gold, other treaties) to reach acceptance. This would be a significant improvement over just hoping they'll accept and having no idea why they won't.

How about, instead of influence being spent on simply proposing treaties. Why not show the likelihood of the AI accepting a treaty with the option to pump influence points into the proposal to push the likelihood in your favour? So for example: "Propose Open Borders: [Unlikely to Accept]", we can spend 30 influence to change the odds to "Propose Open Borders: [May Accept]" or 100 influence to Propose Open Borders: [Likely to Accept] etc. The amount of influence required could depend on your relationship with the AI and current Era, or maybe even your total banked influence vs theirs? There is some RNG to this though which some players might save scum.

Maybe the AI can also try to bully you to accept treaties too and you'd have to spend some influence of your own to prevent it. Or to prevent getting steamrolled by an AI with high influence you can still not accept it but it would generate a grievance with them. Going to war over denying trade was something that happened in history. I realise at this point it kind of turns into a demand system. Since you're throwing your influence around to bully other civs to do what you want. I think it could work though.

FinalFreak16 wrote:

Based on these two points:

GRasputin wrote:

1) Echoing when several other people have said, please either make the influence cost of diplomacy clear or remove it. It took me a while to realize that I was wasting influence on diplomacy.

2) Rather than the current counter system for a fixed price, it would be helpful if the game showed the likelihood of the AI accepting a treaty, and then you can add additional offers (e.g., gold, other treaties) to reach acceptance. This would be a significant improvement over just hoping they'll accept and having no idea why they won't.

How about, instead of influence being spent on simply proposing treaties. Why not show the likelihood of the AI accepting a treaty with the option to pump influence points into the proposal to push the likelihood in your favour? So for example: "Propose Open Borders: [Unlikely to Accept]", we can spend 30 influence to change the odds to "Propose Open Borders: [May Accept]" or 100 influence to Propose Open Borders: [Likely to Accept] etc. The amount of influence required could depend on your relationship with the AI and current Era, or maybe even your total banked influence vs theirs? There is some RNG to this though which some players might save scum.

I love this :D It doesn't lock you out of early game diplomacy by making you the influence you desperately need for your early outposts, it would provide something new to do with influence throughout the game, and it would help with making diplomacy more understandable!

I ran into a problem fighting a war against an AI and their vassal. Black had vassalized my neighbor Green. My other neighbor, Yellow, was allied with black and declared war on me, which eventually drew in Black and Green in demanding I surrender to Yellow. I won the war with Yellow so I couldn't even surrender to them anymore yet Black somehow still demanded it and wouldn't end our war. Black was on the other side of the continent and wouldn't send any units to my territory to fight so their war score never dropped low enough for them to surrender and I've never seen the AI accept a white peace. Meanwhile, their vassal Green spammed unit stacks to endlessly attack me for the rest of the game and each time I won a battle their war score never dropped. I assume the war score is permanently at 100 for a vassal at war and this seems broken. The war doesn't progress at all from fighting a vassal so the battles become more of an annoyance than hard fought victories. Vassal losses should diminish their war score or it can lead to endless fighting. The threshold for a white peace should also be much lower after many turns have passed, or war support should drop much more per turn after a while to prevent endless war.

On the topic of vassals, they seem too easy to obtain. It seems like you can vassalize any player when they surrender which is overpowered. The war score to vassalize a player should be raised or the requirement to do it should be changed. For example, you could only vassalize by capturing a certain percent of their territory or taking their capital.   

The game needs more improvement with combined wars. Vassal and ally wars are currently a bit of a mess. It's hard to cooperate with any vassals or allies you have to fight a war while it's likewise hard to end wars against enemy vassals and allies. A lot of this can probably be fixed with diplomacy and AI tweaks. Looking forward to multiplayer games though I feel it's important to be able to have allied or vassalized players fighting with you in battles instead of just a 1v1 for each battle, especially when they can scale to be so large.        

Maybe you shouldn't be able to vassalize people unless you conquer all their cities.
This would make it way harder to abuse defensive wars etc.