Diplomancy and Going to War.

[SkepticJerry]

The diplomacy in ETW is a bit, er...lacking.

Two things really irk me and I don't understand how they work are,

1. What determines when a country will declare war on you? I've had them being Very Happy with me and trading and in one turn, they declare war in the next. What gives? You get zero feedback from the game on how other nations are viewing you. I feel that it's just a simple random number generator that pops out declarations of war for no rhyme or reason. There seems to be zero modifiers according to the power, size and wealth of your nation. I've had the tiniest poorest countries declare war on me, when anyone would know it would be suicide to do such a thing.

2. Once you are at war, they never give up! I can be crushing them, yet my success or failure in the war has zero impact on the relations. Sometimes I don't want to have to conquer an entire small nation as I have more pressing matter to turn to. I can smack them around all day, destroy army after army, cause untold detestation in their regions, yet when I approach with a peace treaty, they tell me to go to hell. In reality, any nation would gladly accept a peace treaty offered by an overwhelming foe and given the opportunity.

Is there any way at all to address these two issues? Is there anyway to make adjustments on the diplomacy side to take these things into account? As it is, it feels entirely random. I quite spending money in the diplomacy section, as it doesn't seem to make a difference..

[Johan217]

2. Once you are at war, they never give up! I can be crushing them, yet my success or failure in the war has zero impact on the relations. Sometimes I don't want to have to conquer an entire small nation as I have more pressing matter to turn to. I can smack them around all day, destroy army after army, cause untold detestation in their regions, yet when I approach with a peace treaty, they tell me to go to hell. In reality, any nation would gladly accept a peace treaty offered by an overwhelming foe and given the opportunity.

Giving them territory or money usually does it for me, at least with the major nations. The minors seem more stubborn. Try being more generous I actually find the AI willing to make peace with me (sometimes they even come and ask), but they seem unable to sign peace among themselves. Once two AI factions go to war, they seem to remain at war for the rest of the campaign. This is an issue with ETW itself, not really connected with TROM mod.

As for what makes the AI declare war on you... again this has been an issue with previous TW games as well, and in ETW it is complicated by the fact that some of the files cannot be edited easily.

[Beastro]

1. What determines when a country will declare war on you? I've had them being Very Happy with me and trading and in one turn, they declare war in the next. What gives? You get zero feedback from the game on how other nations are viewing you. I feel that it's just a simple random number generator that pops out declarations of war for no rhyme or reason. There seems to be zero modifiers according to the power, size and wealth of your nation. I've had the tiniest poorest countries declare war on me, when anyone would know it would be suicide to do such a thing.

2. Once you are at war, they never give up! I can be crushing them, yet my success or failure in the war has zero impact on the relations. Sometimes I don't want to have to conquer an entire small nation as I have more pressing matter to turn to. I can smack them around all day, destroy army after army, cause untold detestation in their regions, yet when I approach with a peace treaty, they tell me to go to hell. In reality, any nation would gladly accept a peace treaty offered by an overwhelming foe and given the opportunity.

1: Some factions will hate you no matter what you do, they'll offer trade deals and break them a turn later, make war and then make war again the turn after a peace treaty.

The worst offenders I've seen so far are Sweden and Spain though Sweden doesn't seem to do it if your a Protestant power .... well at least not in the early game when both of you are weak.

Others will be peaceful but will take the near ruin of their country before making peace and sometimes, not even then.

Factions like this are mainly Eastern: The Ottomans and Persia being the worst.

Also, in my last game I attacked the Netherlands to extort them for Ceylon with their European territory I'd seized. I offered Alsace-Lorraine, Wurttemburg and a ton of tech and money and they simply refused even for just the peace treaty alone.

The only way you can really stop a faction dead set on fighting you is to conquer them, then hand their homeland over to another faction that in no way can hold it. It rebelles and the the original faction repops at peace with everyone (minus any holdings elsewhere).

2: Factions making peace are messed up.

The only time I've ever had a faction offer peace terms on their own in any TW game was on my last IS game before I switched to TROM where I was Prussia and the Dutch tried to sweet talk me with just the peace treaty and nothing else.

They wern't an issue for me and I gained more from fighting them being at peace so I rejected it.

For forcing peace on a faction, you've got to really beat them up, crush half a stack or larger army or two and maybe take a region and extorted peace from them with it in exchange for the territory back.

If you beat them up enough to they'll fork out alot of tech to stop the war. Playing Russia in my past two games I've found it's easier to work up the tech trees this way as oppose to researching ymself (this only ended when I captured Brandenburg, Austria proper and Sweden proper and began to churn out tech by simply having so many universites.

[sage2]

Regarding both items, CA has stated that they are aware of these issue and they will be fixed for the 1.3 patch.

[Beastro]

Regarding both items, CA has stated that they are aware of these issue and they will be fixed for the 1.3 patch.

I wish they'd get around to this bloody thing, it's not like this isn't their flagship product atm.

[Bumbar]

Financially it makes more sense for them to focus on expansion or new game, than patching this one. It will be patched eventually, but most of their programmers are already working on some other project.

[sage2]

Financially it makes more sense for them to focus on expansion or new game, than patching this one. It will be patched eventually, but most of their programmers are already working on some other project.

I don't think many people would buy an expansion right now. They took a pretty significant PR hit from the piss-poor release they made. In one more patch, the game should be about equivalent to MTW2 on release -- and that was pretty darn broken!!!

[Bumbar]

Maybe not now, but in 9 or 12 months, they will buy it. That's why game developers don't invest heavily into testing and debugging a game before release. Customers are willing to buy any game, as long as it's advertised properly and belongs to well known franchise. ETW is buggy as hell and you can be sure, devs had known about most of those bugs before release. Yet it was a major success. Good graphics are easy to advertise, so ETW looks great. Lack of bugs or AI can't be advertised, so ETW sucks in that department. Medieval 2 was similar in that aspect and I'm pretty sure next game in series will follow the same pattern.