War Weariness

[Diadem]

I'm currently playing a normal speed game on prince (a low but fun difficulty). I have jails in every city, and Mt Rushmore as well. No police state, so -50% war weariness for me.

I'm in the modern era right now. I declared war 6 turns ago. My first war in centuries, against someone I have not warred before. I have not used nukes either. Still I already have -10 or -12 unhapiness in most of my cities due to war weariness. That's with a 50% reduction!

24 war weariness after 6 turns of war! That's completely insane! How on earth are you supposed to wage war if penalties are so ridiculous.

Am I the only one who suffers from this? I usually play very peacefully, so I don't have much experience with wars yet. Also I played a lot of OCC where you don't suffer from war weariness because of the Globe Theatre.

Luckily I am so far ahead I can savely set my slider to 100% culture if need be. But if I had not been far ahead, this war would have been my death. My economy would have completely collapsed from it. As it is, I fear that in a few turns i might have starving citizens even with 100% culture.

Am I missing something here? Some magic key to remove war weariness? Because at this rate war is a complete impossibility at higher difficulties - war weariness will kill you faster than you can kill your enemy.

[Krill]

can you post a save please, Diadem? I'd like to have a look at the WW as well, but I can only come up with so many different samples myself...

[Cort Haus]

That certainly doesn't sound right, Diadem. If you post a save someone might be able to check that out.

[Jaybe]

Huge cities (>20 size) are prime candidates for war protests in my experience. Are your cities 30+?

Otherwise, anything "known" so far about war weariness in Civ4 is an extrapolation from previous versions.

[Diadem]

My cities aren't too big. My capital for example is only size 23 and it's suffering from -13 hapiness due to war. Despite having a jail and Mt Rushmore being in another city. I'll post a save.

[korn469]

That's very strange, I usually stay at war for thousands of years with little or no penalties from war weariness.

[Vimpster]

In my latest game I noticed that many of my cities had over 70 happiness. I don't think I could have experienced WW no matter how long I were to be at war.

[joncnunn]

Diadem, are you fighting someone with the same state religion you have?

Or by any chance are you fighting a war while running the Pacifism civic?

[sovietwaffle]

Have you suffered heavy losses? That's another thing that brings in war weariness (More than just the amount of time you've been at war. I've been at war with civilizations for 100+ Turns, but we never fought. My cities were all perfectly happy.

[Diadem]

No I'm running Free Religion.

When are losses considered 'heavy'? I lost quite a few units, but I killed many, many, many more. I did not have a extremely huge army in game terms, I was second according to the statistics.

I guess the problem lies in the losses I had. But in that case, the penalty for losses is way too steep for late age warfare. My war went amazingly smooth, I basicly rolled over him. Yet war weariness went through the roof in just 6 turns.

By the way, switching to police state eliminated war weariness completely. I guess a jail (-25%), Mt Rushmore (-25%) and Police State (-50%) together means -100%. But that's pretty flawed game design imho.

They make war weariness a completely crippling penalty, and then implement a method of eliminating it completely. That war weariness just means a restriction on which civics to run during war. It should be a gradually increasing problem that penalizes long, dragged out wars.

[chequita guevara]

Look at it from an historical point of view. The U.S. lost 60K people in the Vietnam War. As far as wars go, not really that big a body count, especially considering our population at the time. We killed two million Vietnamese. Did that stop our "war weariness?"