Alliances are broken and a worse diplomatic state to be in than war.

[치 The Spearman 치]

Background: Turn 192 Playing as Bosporus and am currently in control of Obliae, Sarmatia Meridionalis, Chersonesus, Hanageria, Alania, and Albania. Since the region is almost completely undeveloped the plan going forwards is to maintain my current borders and ally with a few choice states to act as 'buffers' around my borders.

I put in about 50 turns worth of ally building and see no benefits, just an endless supply of bugs and disasters. A few things I noticed;

1) Allies will move a small stack of units into your territory and will just sit there. Not really an issue, but when they lose their last province, that one unit stack will somehow PEACEFULLY gain control of the territory they're camping in and then declare war on the player.

2)After a string of poorly performing allies, I decided to garrison their territories to make sure the worthless losers don't lose any more land. When the province is attacked and the players beat the attacking stack, the player somehow gets control of the province.

3)AI is generally terrible at keeping land and maintaining stable borders and their territories will 'migrate' away from the player, leaving ample room for their own enemies to get a foothold and bring the war to you.

4)No way to trade or gift land to allies makes it useless to help them fight wars, since it leaves they player with enclaves that they don't want and can't afford to maintain.

Overall, I caution against advancing diplomacy past cooperation.

[DeLastOne]

1 and 2 are really worrying. Hope this can be answered

[PocusFR]

I can't say the first points rings a bell for me or for the testers. If you have the saved games before such strange transfer happens, I would take a look.

AI if decently powerful, will try to maintain a cohesive territory. If not, then it does what it can with the forces it has.

[치 The Spearman 치]

Originally posted by PocusFR:

I can't say the first points rings a bell for me or for the testers. If you have the saved games before such strange transfer happens, I would take a look.

AI if decently powerful, will try to maintain a cohesive territory. If not, then it does what it can with the forces it has.

I rolled back an old save and made it happen again. I have an autosave for the turn in which my ally takes my territory and declares war, let me know where you want it sent.

[Toppins]

I've also found alliances to be more trouble than they're worth at this stage, and it's mostly due to point 4 here. I can't help an ally in a war without taking some land which I don't want, which is why I allied them in the first place, because my interests do not cover that territory. I don't want it. But I want to help my ally. But I can't. So inevitably my allies collapse and just earn me more enemies in the process.

[Tnx]

Most of this has been the same experience for me as well. If your ally is strong, they'll usually try to wage war and end up using a deathstack to drive a line through whoever they're warring, and get stuck behind enemy lines and get wiped out. This leads to the territory "migrating" outwards as stated in point 3.

[Lysimaque]

I strongly agree with OP, alliance are quit useless.

[ositodefelpa]

While on the subject of allies, it would be nice to be able to give Regions to them.

[PocusFR]

Originally posted by 치 The Spearman 치:

Originally posted by PocusFR:

I can't say the first points rings a bell for me or for the testers. If you have the saved games before such strange transfer happens, I would take a look.

AI if decently powerful, will try to maintain a cohesive territory. If not, then it does what it can with the forces it has.

I rolled back an old save and made it happen again. I have an autosave for the turn in which my ally takes my territory and declares war, let me know where you want it sent.

Send it to [e-mail] and mention it is for Pocus, ideally copy paste this thread link!

Thanks.

[cranky corvid]

On the subject of ally stupidity, I noticed that after starting the campaign as Massilia, Emporia often sends a tiny force on a suicide run through an adjacent independent province while trying to move it to your capital. This occurred during the initial turns in multiple different campaigns. In later turns, the AI has more sensibly sent the troops over the sea instead. Here's a visual exampe.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1808735472

Originally posted by 치 The Spearman 치:

2)After a string of poorly performing allies, I decided to garrison their territories to make sure the worthless losers don't lose any more land. When the province is attacked and the players beat the attacking stack, the player somehow gets control of the province.

I noticed this occurred in the beta tester multiplayer AAR[www.slitherine.com] as well. The player there figured it had to do with the allied portion of the army getting wiped out in the battle.

[PocusFR]

Ah, interesting information that might help pinpointing the issue.

[sonichev]

Yeah I think the diplomatic options and territory control need a slight revamp. Sometimes I just want to fight an army, not take land! Unintentionally taking my allies land is terrible.

I haven't had too good luck with my allies militarily either. They love to garrison all your small towns but they are less likely to get a good army stack and actually help you.

Right now the alliance system works like an ancient NATO where they instantly go to war with whoever you're fighting, but you don't really get to direct them anywhere. Would prefer more flexible, realistic alliances. Maybe I can have the opportunity to borrow/receive money, get metal, or borrow some units of troops, a general, etc.

Even better, let us set one objective region for our allies (subject to how much the AI wants the area in question, and diplomatic relations). So the AI doesn't try to do everything in the world, it can just focus on helping us by taking that one thing. Maybe we could pay them in money/legacy/metal for that. This is where we could use some decisions!

[PocusFR]

Thanks for the saved game. Indeed, there was a loophole were automated garrisons did not trigger each time an hostile force appeared. Fixing it, it should solve a lot of issues.

[wven]

Originally posted by Toppins:

I've also found alliances to be more trouble than they're worth at this stage, and it's mostly due to point 4 here. I can't help an ally in a war without taking some land which I don't want, which is why I allied them in the first place, because my interests do not cover that territory. I don't want it. But I want to help my ally. But I can't. So inevitably my allies collapse and just earn me more enemies in the process.

I want to bring this thread back as the developers seemed to have ignored the biggest problem with Allies.

[PocusFR]

There will be something about region ownership in the upcoming patch. Soon, very soon!

[LDiCesare]

Thanks for changing something, Pocus, I feel bad for taking Rome's former territories as I "combat the usurpers" and end up tearing down Rome's lands as their faithful ally, while they help me deal with revolts outside the walls of my regions.