Annoying warmonger

[MrIdontCare]

As playing as the leader of the vikings (cant remember his name), im invading the HRE, and after capuring a city, it tells me to raze it, or keep it. Both give me a bad warmonger stat, but it wont let me not do either of those options. Im new to civilization as a whole, so i still dont know much about the game. Any advice on this topic would help, and thank you.

[Copernicus]

Basically, all aggressive (military) moves towards other players count towards "Warmonger" status in the AI. Capturing a city counts as one of the most aggressive actions you can take, regardless of what you do with it afterwards (although razing it can make the original owner very angry, if I recall correctly).

[Bellum se Ipsum Alet]

yes, there should be a "raid" option or something where you wreck a bunch of stuff and get money but let the owner keep the city. Another thing that happens is if you capture a city too close to their other cities you can't hold it and it rebels and its a whole drama. Also, there should be a way to "liberate" city states when you conquer them that leaves you as Suzerain so whey you are at war with someone you can take out their city state allies without destroying or annexing them.

[Bellum se Ipsum Alet]

... also though your name is "Hardrada" and you have an army of berserkers. Maybe they shouldn't, but people judge.

[Copernicus]

Originally posted by Bellum se Ipsum Alet:

yes, there should be a "raid" option or something where you wreck a bunch of stuff and get money but let the owner keep the city.

Actually, you are quite able to "Pillage" any plot other than the city center. This gives you a variety of types of loot, depending on what the plot contains.

Originally posted by Bellum se Ipsum Alet:

Another thing that happens is if you capture a city too close to their other cities you can't hold it and it rebels and its a whole drama.

Certainly, if you are planning to capture a city, you also need a plan to hold it. If you can't control the population in the city, they will rebel. Razing can be more useful to you, if you feel you can't live with your opponent controlling the city, but you have no way to control it yourself.

Originally posted by Bellum se Ipsum Alet:

Also, there should be a way to "liberate" city states when you conquer them that leaves you as Suzerain so whey you are at war with someone you can take out their city state allies without destroying or annexing them.

Hey, that's the life of a conqueror; when you take over a city by killing its citizens, those citizens are not going to be happy. You are going to have to keep those people down one way or another...

[Catalytic]

Warmonger is annoying as a mechanic. Generally in Civ, your goal was to conquer the world. Over the years, it has become fashionable to add peaceful means of winning the game, so we go the addition of the science victory, the culture victory, the religious victory, and most recently the diplomatic victory. Warmongering was so powerful that many game mechanics were put in place specifically to make it more difficult. Civ 5 and 6 have 1 unit per tile (1UPT) which spreads out the army and makes it easier to attack compared to the old stacks of doom. You have zone of control rules which greatly limit your mobility on the battlefield, cavalry units which ignore it, walls that make siege more difficult, encampments that can get a second passive attack for the city, a governor which gives still another passive attack, the ability to put ranged units/archers in both the city and the encampment for even more uncontested damage on the attacking force.... etc, etc, etc. Then they add on all the diplomatic penalties. Grievances make not only your target hate you, but the rest of the world as well. Take a city and they'll hate you til they get it back. Raze one and you'll never ever reach neutral diplomatic status again no matter how nice you are. Trade's more difficult. Oh, and your own empire hates it, so there's war weariness, and if you take too much too fast, you get loyalty and happiness issues, etc.

Essentially, they wanted to promote peaceful paths to victory so much that warmongering is now extremely difficult if not outright impossible to achieve on anything but a small map with a rapid (cheesy) ultra-early game victory. That's just the way the game is now balanced, and that can be very annoying if you ever wanted to play out the fantasy of the Mongol hordes or the conquests of Alexander the Great for example.

You can get away with using wars as tools, but only under limited conditions:
* You attack, but never take land. This is basically just roving and pillaging while attempting to steal builders and settlers. The game lets you do this with little to no penalty. You go in, snatch whatever you can for 10 turns, then declare an even peace at no cost, and 10 turns later, the grievances are gone. On deity, you actually are highly encouraged to do precisely this.
* You can attack, but you must use the casus belli system, most of which comes on line in the mid-game. You must satisfy those conditions before being given permission to start a war with less penalties. Some of those conditions can be highly restrictive requiring opposing religions (holy war), an enormous tech advantage (colonial war), multiple cities bordering a single target (territorial expansion), or requiring a golden age dedication.

Personally, I think there are some flaws in this game design. The game doesn't penalize you for chasing the peaceful modes of victory. It rewards them. Easier diplomacy. Better trade routes. Safer trade routes. No diplomatic hate. No chain denouncing. You can lead in tech or culture all game and the game's mechanics do nothing to compete with you or slow you down. You can convert whole empires and then vote down the emergency where you have to defend the holy city you just converted. Easy peasy, no penalties... unless you go for a domination victory. That's not how a competition should work. The AI should actively compete across all victory strategies.

[Copernicus]

Originally posted by Catalytic:

Warmonger is annoying as a mechanic. Generally in Civ, your goal was to conquer the world.

Oh really? It was my understanding that in Civ, your goal was to simulate the advancement of civilization over time in an Earth-like world. The enjoyment of the game was to examine alternative methods to accomplish that goal, both historical and a-historical.

As such, the victory conditions are sort of beside the point. If you skew the game towards conquering the world with military force, you're probably not going to have a game that has anything at all to do with the actual advance of civilization.

[grognardgary]

Originally posted by Bellum se Ipsum Alet:

yes, there should be a "raid" option or something where you wreck a bunch of stuff and get money but let the owner keep the city. Another thing that happens is if you capture a city too close to their other cities you can't hold it and it rebels and its a whole drama. Also, there should be a way to "liberate" city states when you conquer them that leaves you as Suzerain so whey you are at war with someone you can take out their city state allies without destroying or annexing them.

That depends on whether you're playing GS or vanilla. Vanilla doesn't have loyalty and sense he's talking warmonger he has to be playing vanilla since GS does away with warmonger replacing it with loyalty in some ways and Greivances in others. My general view in Vanilla is you ignore war monger crap and just play as you wish. This is especially true on levels below prince.

[plaguepenguin]

You generally only have those two options when you capture a city, raze it or keep it. If you don't want to do either, don't capture the city.

If the city you capture, from the HRE in this case, was a city that the HRE had captured in the past form another civ or from a city state, you will be given a third option on capture, to liberate the city to the original owner.

Keeping or razing the city pile on extra grievances. Liberating the city subtracts grievances and makes the recipient of the liberation like you in addition. A city state you liberate makes you their suzerain.

Grievances tend to go away in time, and they go away at a faster rate the earlier the era. Get your conquering in early, and you can retire from your life of crime to full respectability in an era or two at most. Well, grievances go away except for those you acquire by taking an enemy capital. To compensate for those grievances you have to do enough nice things to get and keep the other civs friendly. That's manageable until you take many enemy capitals.

Grievances shouldn't categorically stop you from doing anything. They impose certain downsides, so you factor incurring them into your decisions, just like you factor every other upside and downside. High grievances will make other civs more likely to attack you, but if you are incurring grievances by taking cities, you generally are not terribly afraid of AIs attacking you, since the AI is way better at static defense than attack. You won't get deals as favorable the less they like you, but you can still get reasonable deals up until the point that they denounce you. You have to get them all the way to "declared friends" before they will make alliances with you, and alliances have some neat benefits.

Conquering cities, at least the ones you can keep, has such huge benefits that the grievances incurred in conquest almost never outweigh those benefits.

[Demon of Razgriz]

Originally posted by Catalytic:

Warmonger is annoying as a mechanic. Generally in Civ, your goal was to conquer the world. Over the years, it has become fashionable to add peaceful means of winning the game, so we go the addition of the science victory, the culture victory, the religious victory, and most recently the diplomatic victory. Warmongering was so powerful that many game mechanics were put in place specifically to make it more difficult. Civ 5 and 6 have 1 unit per tile (1UPT) which spreads out the army and makes it easier to attack compared to the old stacks of doom. You have zone of control rules which greatly limit your mobility on the battlefield, cavalry units which ignore it, walls that make siege more difficult, encampments that can get a second passive attack for the city, a governor which gives still another passive attack, the ability to put ranged units/archers in both the city and the encampment for even more uncontested damage on the attacking force.... etc, etc, etc. Then they add on all the diplomatic penalties. Grievances make not only your target hate you, but the rest of the world as well. Take a city and they'll hate you til they get it back. Raze one and you'll never ever reach neutral diplomatic status again no matter how nice you are. Trade's more difficult. Oh, and your own empire hates it, so there's war weariness, and if you take too much too fast, you get loyalty and happiness issues, etc.

Essentially, they wanted to promote peaceful paths to victory so much that warmongering is now extremely difficult if not outright impossible to achieve on anything but a small map with a rapid (cheesy) ultra-early game victory. That's just the way the game is now balanced, and that can be very annoying if you ever wanted to play out the fantasy of the Mongol hordes or the conquests of Alexander the Great for example.

You can get away with using wars as tools, but only under limited conditions:
* You attack, but never take land. This is basically just roving and pillaging while attempting to steal builders and settlers. The game lets you do this with little to no penalty. You go in, snatch whatever you can for 10 turns, then declare an even peace at no cost, and 10 turns later, the grievances are gone. On deity, you actually are highly encouraged to do precisely this.
* You can attack, but you must use the casus belli system, most of which comes on line in the mid-game. You must satisfy those conditions before being given permission to start a war with less penalties. Some of those conditions can be highly restrictive requiring opposing religions (holy war), an enormous tech advantage (colonial war), multiple cities bordering a single target (territorial expansion), or requiring a golden age dedication.

Personally, I think there are some flaws in this game design. The game doesn't penalize you for chasing the peaceful modes of victory. It rewards them. Easier diplomacy. Better trade routes. Safer trade routes. No diplomatic hate. No chain denouncing. You can lead in tech or culture all game and the game's mechanics do nothing to compete with you or slow you down. You can convert whole empires and then vote down the emergency where you have to defend the holy city you just converted. Easy peasy, no penalties... unless you go for a domination victory. That's not how a competition should work. The AI should actively compete across all victory strategies.

I mean, look at Russia and Ukraine. That is a perfect example of Warmongering/Grievances.

The goal of Civilization is not to conquer the world. That may have been YOUR goal, but its not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is to advance your civilization, how you do that is up to you.

[wcbarney]

Originally posted by Demon of Razgriz:

... The goal of Civilization is not to conquer the world. That may have been YOUR goal, but its not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is to advance your civilization, how you do that is up to you.

I always advance my civilization to the max -- i.e., get another "Future Tech" and "Future Civic" every 2-3 turns. Now the trick is to prevent one of the AIs from achieving victory: They all go for Science victories, and at least one goes for a Cultural victory. So I spend the last 50 turns disabling their space ports while launching my own satellite, moon landing and Mars landing. If one of the AIs manages to launch the Exo-planetary Expedition, then I have to quickly launch my own, and then launch as many LaGrange rockets as possible so that I get ahead by light-years of travel time.

[King Wrynn]

You could:
Conquer civs in the early ages. Grievances are much less of a problem in the ancient and classical era.

Fight during a golden age (with golden age war dedication) or use casus belli.

Try to avoid razing cities if you can.

Have some friendships/alliances with some AI before you start war against another AI. Friendships/alliances last 30 turns, so that's 30 turns that you don't have to worry about grievances.

Removing a civ from the game causes massive grievances. So if you want to avoid that don't destroy the AI's last city. Instead just cap the ones with largest population and let the small ones flip independent. Then either cap the rebelling cities or guard your borders and wait until they flip towards your civ.

Take all capitals in the same turn. I did this for my first win on deity difficulty with thermonukes & helicopters.

You can also just choose to ignore grievances. You could out tech everyone with a civ like babylon or korea and use biplanes vs their medieval units. Alternatively you could roll a very offensive civ like Byzantium or Macedon and just destroy everyone.

[wilsonstone]

Originally posted by King Wrynn:

You could:
Conquer civs in the early ages. Grievances are much less of a problem in the ancient and classical era.

Are they, though? I converted Basil II's holy city in the classical age and he stayed pissed at me for the rest of the game. He wouldn't even accept things from me FOR FREE.

[Demon of Razgriz]

Originally posted by wilsonstone:

Originally posted by King Wrynn:

You could:
Conquer civs in the early ages. Grievances are much less of a problem in the ancient and classical era.

Are they, though? I converted Basil II's holy city in the classical age and he stayed pissed at me for the rest of the game. He wouldn't even accept things from me FOR FREE.

Well, the person who you took it from probably won't like you, but the other civs won't consider you as bad in the early ages.