imrik confederation/stalemate question

[Askyndr]

when i play imrik, i surprisingly survived his super-aggressive enemies in the beginning. i confederated with calidor and made it to turn 300 something. now my problem is a huge stalemate. after the "good" guys (including me) all allied with each other during the chaos invasion it is impossible to fight one of them (reiksland has 126 settlements and countless full stack armies).

they also will never break their alliances (what an annoyance, since the dawn of this game...). my only slight chance would be to ally with two big elven factions. but even though i'm stronger than one, no matter how much i artificially influence them, and even with 300+ influence, they will never confederate with me (ah yes, conquering them is no option, because they are also allied to empire and dwarves...). now there is a complete halt in the game. any suggestions?

[yuzhonglu]

Entrepeneurs. Stack them, and then you can fight the whole world.

[Mrhappyface]

You could use your influence to break up their relationships rather than make yours better

[Konstantin]

Why do you want to fight them? For the Victory Condition only a Military Alliance is needed. That you can make when there is still one enemy left for them so you offer to join war if the make a military alliance.

[Askyndr]

@Mrhappyface: unfortunately you can't spend so many influence, if empire and dwarves have like 600+ positive attitude towards each other. each single attempt costs you a high two digit amount (and so far i've maybe made about 1200 influence in total, mind you i've gathered it at every fight, special actions etc.). also, even if you decrease it by 200 it basically instantly goes up again...

@Konstantin: i have already won the short campaign, but i normally play for total dominance (annihilate all others).

[Slim Sic]

You need to manipulate those factions early before archaon shows up or go to war with them early before they ally each other. You're goal is to build a strong economy early, ideally before 75... then you want to start conquering off the homeland. If you do so too early, your resources will be spread thin. Kill the dark elves ASAP, confederate all the HE LL elsewhere, then by like turn 120 or so you can go kill bretonnia if you want or empire, or both. I wouldn't ♥♥♥♥ with lustria, the old world is a bigger problem late game

[Mrhappyface]

Wait till a rogue army declares war on someone, then join war against? Also if you wanna confederate, don't have a military alliance with them and pay them 100k+ gold. If it's Tyrion you're having problems with, I too am trying to save up enough cash to confederate him.

[Xeonzs]

Originally posted by Mrhappyface:

You could use your influence to break up their relationships rather than make yours better

Sadly that doesn't really work in vanilla that way.
Factions can be at -300 with each other and still not declare war on each other if they don't want to declare war on an enemy that's a lot stronger / has many alliances.

There's a mod that fixes this by adding a script that adds a 10% chance to declare war for every -100 standing, it checks every turn.

Makes the game a lot more active, also allows you to just raid enemies till they declare war on you instead of you having to declare war on them and their defensive allies.

edit:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1983237410&searchtext=ai+war

[Askyndr]

@Echel0n: building a strong economy is a good idea, but for 150 turns i was so often attacked by three diffrent factions, razing my cities (of course...), rebuilding etc. i was really happy not only to survive, but also to even expand. problem with imrik (or elves in general) is that he doesn't really make a lot of cash with the buildings/abilites (like dwarves or lizardmen). so whatever cash i had, i had to use on cash generating buildings and also armies, just to defend myself.

but i will try to load an early game (where my upkeep was low, but income high), to save this ridiculous amount of cash, just to buy them pointy-ears out...

@❦Xeonzsღ💕: as you said, in vanilla it is completely impossible to influence them to war or even breaking military alliance etc. after chaos invasion. and even before that, it's almost impossible, as they have so strong affinities to each other. heck, i was only able to influence enshin early on to be my ally, only to be backstabbed by those rats like 200 turns later (after they conquered the whole south), because they confederated with an enemy rat...