Diplomacy and Culture Penalty Qs

[GraaEminense]

Hi all, I have two reasonably easy questions.

1) When burninating a newly-captured settlement, I tend to kill off everything that says Auxilia and Barracks and keep the rest as only unit production buildings are actually useless (yeah, not optimal, I know).
However, I've noticed that quite a few Barracks (or similar, like Hall of Heroes) tend to be non-faction specific and instead say things like "Barbarian" or "Eastern", and half the damn things in the game says "Greek".

Question is, if my factions unit-production buildings are similar ("Eastern", in the case of my current Armenian campaign when conquering Pontus), will I get to use them when I'm done with Auxilia III, or can I safely destroy them?

Follow-up Question: Am I right in believing that anything that has the same faction description as my own buildings do not give a culture penalty?


2) The AI hates me. Even when more powerful enemies are invading them and I'm playing nice, or when I have them down to their last city, there's no peace to be had and alliances are worthless. Fair enough, it's Total War after all. But occationally they do play nice, I've had forever-lasting alliances with neighbouring states.

Does anyone have any clue to the actual triggers that cause the AI to hate you forever or actually behave? It would be nice on occation, when playing a minor state, to have allies that actually behaved as allies.

[Jamey]

1) When burninating a newly-captured settlement, I tend to kill off everything that says Auxilia and Barracks and keep the rest as only unit production buildings are actually useless (yeah, not optimal, I know).

However, I've noticed that quite a few Barracks (or similar, like Hall of Heroes) tend to be non-faction specific and instead say things like "Barbarian" or "Eastern", and half the damn things in the game says "Greek".

Question is, if my factions unit-production buildings are similar ("Eastern", in the case of my current Armenian campaign when conquering Pontus), will I get to use them when I'm done with Auxilia III, or can I safely destroy them?

Follow-up Question: Am I right in believing that anything that has the same faction description as my own buildings do not give a culture penalty?

Only faction specific buildings produce units for any faction. Some rebel settlements start with faction specific buildings (especially Greek colonies tend to have some level of Greek barracks). On rare occasion, the rebels will build a barracks for the appropriate nation tied to them. The vast majority of the time, you'll have to build your own barracks from zero.

Any building with the same culture as yours (listed in parentheses after the name of the building) will have no culture penalty. Thus, if playing as Macedon (Greeks), you won't get culture penalties from any buildings built by other Greek factions (Greece, Seleucia, Bactria).

2) The AI hates me. Even when more powerful enemies are invading them and I'm playing nice, or when I have them down to their last city, there's no peace to be had and alliances are worthless. Fair enough, it's Total War after all. But occationally they do play nice, I've had forever-lasting alliances with neighbouring states.

Does anyone have any clue to the actual triggers that cause the AI to hate you forever or actually behave? It would be nice on occation, when playing a minor state, to have allies that actually behaved as allies.

Basically, the AI hates you because you are flesh and blood. Prepare to be terminated, SkyNet is on the job.

I posted this elsewhere, but it's relevant:

As for alliances, they can be made to last. Just never, ever depend on the AI not attacking you. My understanding is that after looking at defensive needs (which, I'm sure you've noticed, it tends to do poorly with), the AI looks at each stack and searches for a nearby target for it to attack. If your settlements are closer to the AI's unit production centers than the other possible enemies', you're likely to be attacked. There are ways to reduce this risk:

• Keep strong garrisons in all border settlements. In RTR-PE, I like to keep a full stack composed of at least half front line units (rather than inexpensive garrison units I use for my internal settlements).
• Keep fleets (even one ship) in port near the edges of your territory and anywhere else the AI seems to like to blockade.
• Give your ally 100 denarii per turn in tribute. The AI overvalues that long term gift.
• Avoid having land borders with allies when you can.
• Never, ever violate any ally's territory with troops or spies if you don't have military access. That just devastates your internal reputation with other allies. I don't tend to put spies into non-enemy settlements anymore because I think it annoys nations other than the one which you've been spying on.
• Finally, fight a shared war. The allies who've never betrayed me are the ones whom I've fought with repeatedly in shared battles. One that stands out in my mind is Armenia in my Sarmatian campaign. I had military access with them (you have it at the start of an ExRM campaign), so whenever someone besieged an Armenian settlement I broke the siege. I shared a border with them for 100 turns and they never once sent an army towards my settlements.
• If the AI randomly and stupidly blockades your port, you can try reloading and running the AI turn again. More often than not, it will avoid doing it the second time around.

Lastly, be aware that you can only mitigate the chance of the AI doing something stupid. Sometimes (especially on difficulties harder than medium), the AI seems to decide that it has to go after the human no matter the cost.

I should add, when allied with someone, I prefer to have a border defended with forts. When the AI stack starts sniffing around the forts looking for weakness, I pull a strong stack and park it next to the fort. The AI will often (not always) decide that it would rather attack elsewhere because I've got too many troops in the area.

[Dengero]

Keep strong garrisons in all border settlements. In RTR-PE, I like to keep a full stack composed of at least half front line units (rather than inexpensive garrison units I use for my internal settlements).

You ally them so you have time to get your troops to your frontline. They backstab you the turn after.....><"

[Jamey]

You ally them so you have time to get your troops to your frontline. They backstab you the turn after.....><"

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. At times I've shared a land border with AI factions for over 100 turns without being backstabbed (I think my record was 150 turns of land border as Germany with Thrace in an old game I had in Hic Sunt Dracones, which was based on an earlier version of RTRPE). The best allies I've had in RTW based games always started out as allies without a land border. Many (not all!) of them have stayed allied with me for the whole game.

I never rely on the AI to not betray me, but it's always nice to have an ally to distract other factions.

[Sardaukar One]

I did start to notice that some factions will stay allied to you depending on who attacks who first.

If A, B and C are all allies and B attacks A, C usually will stay allied with B.
If A attacks B, then C will stay allied with A.

I want to say I ran into a faction that did the reverse. But I am not that sure about this.

I can't say for sure that this is the norm, but it seems that way to me.

The only way to stop the AI from attacking you is to have more troops on your borders than they do.
Even then, they are liable to blockade one of your ports to kick off a war.

[Jamey]

I did start to notice that some factions will stay allied to you depending on who attacks who first.

If A, B and C are all allies and B attacks A, C usually will stay allied with B.
If A attacks B, then C will stay allied with A.

I want to say I ran into a faction that did the reverse. But I am not that sure about this.

I can't say for sure that this is the norm, but it seems that way to me.

I'd say that it is the norm, but it definitely is not guaranteed that the AI will behave that way. There's also the 'screw the human' and the 'I want someone with a land border to fight' factors.