Question about liberation war

[Imhotep]

A friendly city-state was captured by an AI civ. There was a vote on a resolution in the World Congress to liberate the city-state. So my civ and another couple of civs voted to liberate the city-state. I've now done this, and a notification came up that me and another civ were rewarded for liberating the city.

So that would appear to be that, except that my civ and the other two civs are still showing as at war with the invading civ.

What is the situation here? Could my civ or one of the other civs keep fighting this war, and hypothetically capture all the invaders' cities. The World Congress resolution mandate was to liberate the city-state, so the war continuing on would appear to exceed that.

Is a World Congress city-state liberation war just about liberating the city-state, or does it mean that the parties are now involved in a general war where anything can happen?

[Lemurian1972]

An emergency and the state of war tied to it are independent of each other (apart from the fact that an AI will only rarely end a war before an emergency ends). The Emergency just sets the starting conditions and who is involved, nothing else.

When and how the war ends is up to the civs involved. You can keep fighting and taking cities apart from the target CS, but you'll incur whatever grievances would normally apply.

[plaguepenguin]

A military emergency gets you into a war without any grievance penalties, which is one of its side benefits, apart from the rewards from winning the emergency, and the benefit of depriving the aggressor of whatever benefit he got from crossing whatever line triggered the emergency. In this case of a CS liberation emergency, you also get envoys with the CS that was liberated. It's a nice collection of benefits, so it's beneficial to always be ready to fight and win emergencies.

But, as Lemurian says, the war the emergency gets you into is, apart from these features, a standard war. It will last the same standard number of turns before you are allowed to make peace. If the emergency is resolved before that limit is reached, you have to stay in a state of war with the aggressor until the time limit is reached. There will be the same grievance penalties applied if you raze or keep cities in this war, as there is no concept that the aggressor "deserves" to lose some of his original cities, anything beyond the target of the emergency.

If it isn't to your benefit to continue in this war as a war of conquest -- because you don't need, don't want, or can't hold any cities of his you could take, or you don't want grievance penalties -- you can still take advantage of this war by fighting it on a no-grievance basis. You get to plunder and pillage and take what benefits you derive from that. You get to destroy his army and navy, which is nice if it is in your interest to weaken this aggressor, and helps get your units more XP. And then, when the time limit is reached and you can make peace, if his military strength is really low because you've used the war to kill off his armed forces, you get to extort nice terms in the peace treaty -- gold, luxuries, etc. -- as your final benefit from this exercise.

[Imhotep]

Thanks for clearing things up.

The aggressor depleted his military in capturing the city-state and now has units from other AI civs who joined the liberation war roaming his territory. So I might even have to give him some aid, as I don't favour his demise.

[plaguepenguin]

Until you make peace with him, you can't do things like give him money or sell him strategic resources to give him aid.

One thing you can do while still at war is to send your units in to run interference for him by positioning them to hamper the capture of his cities.

As a more drastic measure, if you really want to keep this civ alive and this is the only way to do that, you could go to war with your former fellow-emergency responders who are now attacking the emergency aggressor. Once the time for the emergency war runs out and you make peace with the aggressor, gifting him with any cities of his you capture from your former co-belligerents during this war would ingratiate you hugely with the original owner, and avoid the grievance penalty of keeping a city at the end of the war with your former co-belligerents. Doing this even removes some of the grievances from the civs you took these cities from. I'm not sure if the benefit is enough to outweigh the grievances you get form going to war with these civs, but I think that if you hand over enough cities you would end up as some sort of white knight, in grievance terms.