Domination of Barbarians [Diplo Game] [Organization Thread]

[Calanthian]

So if I'm reading your reply right.

Germany declares on me.
I take a German city (Hamburg in this case).
After the city is taken, any other civ can declare on Germany (including a friend in a phony war).
Germany can invoke DMW, including against me, and demand I return the city (or pay penalties)?

If so, it is now officially impossible to take cities by force.

If so, then these rules should be changed.. as this would ensure unrealistic tactics:
* not bothering to defend islands
* sending a lone settler to territories where there only barbs to worry about
* blocking expansion room of someones civ, while that civ can't do anything militairy about it..

The rules are intended to ensure that everyone can play a viable game. Now the attacker is hampered too much. The 25% measured war rule from previous Diplo games does this better. And is far easier!
The moment someone has 4 cities, one should be able to take one (at least the smallest one).

[Calanthian]

So I propose that:

0-3 cities: no cities can be kept after peace
4-7 cities: the smallest city (or if parties agree: another one) can be kept after peace
8-11 cities: the two smallest cities (or if parties agree: two other ones) can be kept after peace

Easy rule, easy to remember, easy to implement, and it makes sure no one can be hurt too much by war.

[Sommerswerd]

So if I'm reading your reply right.

Germany declares on me.
I take a German city (Hamburg in this case).
After the city is taken, any other civ can declare on Germany (including a friend in a phony war).
Germany can invoke DMW, including against me, and demand I return the city (or pay penalties)?

If so, it is now officially impossible to take cities by force.

Sorry HRE, when responding to your post I confused myself as to whether you were the Defender or the Attacker, and whether you were calling DMW or not. I have corrected my previous response, but here is the relevant excerpt from the rule clarifications

Rule 6.7 & 6.7.1 - ... Defenders as to the Civ calling for DMW have no obligation to return cities.

So to clarify things. If Gemany is the Attacker and you (HRE) are the Defender you can capture/raze him as much as you want, so long as you don't ask for DMW yourself. If someone else then Declares War on him, He can call for DMW, and force you to make peace, but he can't use DMW to get cities back from you.

Does that clear things up?

[Sommerswerd]

Germany declares on me.
I take a German city (Hamburg in this case).
After the city is taken, any other civ can declare on Germany (including a friend in a phony war).
Germany can invoke DMW, including against me, and demand I return the city (or pay penalties)

So in the scenario you describe, Germany can't get Hamburg back from you by DMW... UNLESS you call for DMW yourself (presumably because allies of Germany start dogpiling you or something like that).

[Sommerswerd]

Races to settle areas is a major part of this map. So conflicts/wars over settler races will be an ongoing theme on this map. Since there is loads and loads of empty unclaimed terrain, these settlement races will be happening all the time.

The DMW rule means that when you are contesting with other Civs for territory you have an important strategic decision to make. You can block them from settling by pre-emptively declaring War and killing their settler, or by moving your military units to block the places they could settle. However, by making yourself the Attacker, you are exposed to city razes and captures without the benefit of DMW to save you. So you have to decide whether blocking them from settling is worth exposing yourself as an Attacker. However, as players are finding out, the tactic of waiting for your rival to settle and then trying to capture/raze is not a viable tactic. You have to stop him BEFORE he settles because the rules are designed to protect player's cities.

Alot of the strategy in this game (because of the DMW rule) will be trying to force opponents to Declare War on you, so that they cant protect themselves with DMW, rather than just building military and grabbing peoples cities.

An easy rule of thumb (not an official rule statement) to remember is this. If you want to just DoW somebody and you can capture 4 of a his cities in 10 turns, then you can keep 1. Otherwise you will be giving them all back, so dont capture cities unless you have some other reason for taking them like destroying his improvements, harrassing him into gifting you the city permanently, gaining capture gold or even paying the 500 gold to raze a really good city, etc. There are many many reasons to capture an opponents city besides keeping it.

[Calanthian]

capture 4 of a his cities in 10 turns, then you can keep 1

Ridicously hard. You might as well say you can't capture cities at all.

And it will also lead to more wartime destruction and less winnings. As it will be the only way to get people to accept the loss of a city (diplomatically) to completely destroy this person's lands. And then this rule leads to completely different behaviour as it's intention: making sure someone's economy / game cannot be ruined by war.

I would like to hear from other players what they think.


(I know better as to discuss with you Sommer, before you get all lawyerly on me..
And we know what you think as you designed the rules.)



So once more I propose the following:

0-3 cities: no cities can be kept after peace
4-7 cities: the smallest city (or if parties agree: another one) can be kept after peace
8-11 cities: the two smallest cities (or if parties agree: two other ones) can be kept after peace

Easy rule, easy to remember, easy to implement, and it makes sure no one can be hurt too much by war; while it is still possible to win something in a war.



PS. If we should decide to change some things it is best we start applying any new rules later in the future (let's say in 50 turns).. So everyone can speak freely without letting the current game situation dictate his opinion..

[Sommerswerd]

Ridicously hard. You might as well say you can't capture cities at all.

Well you are right that in the early part of the game this is very difficult. But later on in the game when we have oceanfaring Navies, coastal and island colonies and larger armies, it will be much easier... But I digress...

And it will also lead to more wartime destruction and less winnings.

That's the idea. Players lose heart more from losing cities than from losing improvements. The whole point of DMW (and the other Measured War rules) is to make it much harder to get the traditional "winnings" from war.

As it will be the only way to get people to accept the loss of a city (diplomatically) to completely destroy this person's lands. And then this rule leads to completely different behaviour as it's intention: making sure someone's economy / game cannot be ruined by war.

A player who is willing to let his lands be ravaged without surrendering does not care about his economy. All he cares about is keeping his cities. Such a player would be the same kind of player to lose heart because he did not have a certain number of cities anymore (enough to build Oxford, Cathedrals etc). Keeping cities is much more important to a defeated player than keeping improvements. Its the loss of cities that breaks the spirit as improvements are more quickly rebuilt, while cities can not be replaced.

I would like to hear from other players what they think.


(I know better as to discuss with you Sommer, before you get all lawyerly on me..
And we know what you think as you designed the rules.)

Sorry Cal, but you can't expect me not to comment on your suggestion to scrap the rules I wrote for the game I am hosting. If you say something that I think is incorrect about the ruleset than I am probably going to respond. Just an FYI

Also remember that the rulset is painstakingly interconnected. Changing one part of the rulset has an impact on other rules which would then need to be changed too. These small battles in the begining are great for fleshing out the existing ruleset so everyone sees how it works. Changing the ruleset just to make "capturing cities easier" defeats the whole purpose of it. Permanently keeping captured cities is supposed to be more difficult than usual. Capturing is as easy as normal, its just that keeping them requires alot more strategy than usual.

OK so that being said... onto the Monthly diploscoring

[Sommerswerd]

Now is the time to vote for the August Diploscore winner.

This Month, let's all use this program to vote http://www.warner-home.com/DoB/

If you really really don't trust the program then you can use PM, but please dont use both as it is a little confusing to sort out. Hopefully we will be able to completely transition to the program over the next couple of months.

Each Civ has 5 points to allocate anyway you choose, except you can not vote for yourself. So you can give 1 point to five different Civs or 5 points to one Civ or anything in between. If you don't vote there is no penalty, but you can't use the votes later.

Remember don't be a scummy double voter and please don't vote for yourself if you are subbing for anyone (for example, if China is casting votes for China and Japan, then Japan should not be voting for China, and China should not be voting for Japan).

As usual, we will leave the voting open all month, and announce the results at the end of the Month at the same time that we open the voting for next month. That way everyone gets plenty of time to read, catch up, notice that voting is going on etc. I will send everybody a PM.

Happy Voting

Most Importantly, Here is the current Leaderboard:

Japan = 47
France = 32
Netherlands = 32
China = 15
England = 14
Arabia = 13
Celtia = 12
Rome = 11
Byzantium = 10
Ottomans = 9
Vikings = 8
Spain = 6
Persia = 3
Portugal = 2
Russia = 1

Here are the Final Results of the July voting:

Japan = 14
Netherlands = 12
China = 6
Byzantines = 5
France = 4
England = 3
Ottomans = 2
Celts = 2
Rome = 1
Russia = 1

As a recap Here are the Final Results of the prior voting:
June: Japan = 24, Netherlands = 6, Rome = 2, France = 2, Portugal = 2, Arabia = 1, England = 1, Vikings = 1, China = 1
May 2012: France = 15, Arabia = 9, Rome = 8, Celtia = 6, Netherlands = 6, England = 4, Byzantium = 4, Japan = 5, China = 3, Persia = 3, Vikings = 2
April 2012 - France: 11, Netherlands: 8, Ottomans: 7, England: 6, Spain: 6, China: 5, Vikings: 5, Celtia: 4, Japan: 4, Arabia: 3, Byzantium: 1

Congrats to Japan, the score leader . Well done everyone and keep it up!

[Exploit]

I agree with Calanthian's assessment that it is going to be ridiculously hard to capture cities given all the defensive war options however I would prefer to keep the rules as they are since I am curious to see how things will turn out under this rule set.

I would also note that Calanthian's proposed rule is easily abused as well and comes with a lot of issues of it's own.

I would like to hear from other players what they think.

[Japan (DoB)]

Good post China!

[Halvgud]

I am for keeping the current rules, this makes it rather more interesting with diplomacy and alliance building. This IS a diplogame after all, and yes, there will be blood, there will be wars, there will most certainly be good posts from all of this. I want to see what comes next with what we have.

To me, this quote makes a very good point:

An easy rule of thumb (not an official rule statement) to remember is this. If you want to just DoW somebody and you can capture 4 of a his cities in 10 turns, then you can keep 1. Otherwise you will be giving them all back, so dont capture cities unless you have some other reason for taking them like destroying his improvements, harrassing him into gifting you the city permanently, gaining capture gold or even paying the 500 gold to raze a really good city, etc. There are many many reasons to capture an opponents city besides keeping it.

[Calanthian]

These rules simply say that the preferable way of conflict is to strangle your opponents in an economical fashion or fight a war in which you destroy the other parties economical base.

This will ensure that parties which are able to keep away from conflict will prevail, as their economy will not be hurt by war. War is no longer a means to acquire the economical potential of the other party.

My normal playing style is Builder oriented, so that fits good.. BUT I'd like to see ALL possible roads to victory.
If someone somehow can make a brilliant offensive move, I'd like to see him win some (not more than 25%) territory.

and I have been on the receiving, attacking, defending, winning and losing side..
but stacking the deck so much against the attacker makes the game LESS INTERESTING..

[France (DoB)]

An interesting scenario came up at the end of the DMW for the English/French war.

Sequence of events for the last turn when mandatory peace is required by DMW rules.

1. France plays his turn first and submits mandatory 10-turn peace treaty by DMW rules.
2. England plays his turn second but declines the peace treaty so that he can move some troops through French territory. England then submits a cease fire with France.

In this particular case, England sent France an email stating what he had done and the turns were right after one another so I was able to log back in and accept the peace agreement so no major harm done in this case however if I had not read my email or been able to log back into the game then France would have had to endure at least one more turn of war then the rules allow.

My questions are:

1) Please confirm that what England did in this case was against the rules. (No compensation requested in this case however I do want to make certain there is precedent for future transgressions which may have larger consequences.)
2) How will compensation for this type of infraction be determined in the future? Does the victim merely state the damage done and request appropriate compensation?

For example: in this case England's infraction allowed it to:

a) recover an axeman which would have been stranded for several turns on the mainland until a galley could have picked it up
b) move its galley through French territory to reach the west coast which it could not have reached otherwise thus providing positional advantage for a future attack from France's west coast that France may have difficulty defending against.
c) the extra war turn would also have denied France access to 3 key tiles allowing a total of 4 food, 1 commerce and 7 hammers. (This could have been much more significant if the blockade was still in effect as well). The loss in food may have caused starvation while the loss in hammers may have caused a significant delay in the production of something important (say losing a wonder race or not getting a unit built in time for another attack).

Based upon that scenario, could I request as compensation something like the following:

a) axeman must remain on galley for 5 turns (the number of turns it would have taken to recover the axeman otherwise)
b) the offending galley could not be moved from its current location until such time as it could have reached that location without breaking the rules (9 turns in this case)
c) a workboat in 10 turns to compensate for the cumulative lost growth/production from the tile loss until the debt is paid?

As an aside: England chose to submit a ceasefire instead of 10 Turn Peace Treaty (as I have mentioned previously this is very annoying since it means manually tracking peace durations). War cannot be declared between England and France until turn 240.

[England (DoB)]

Requiring peace treaties to be offered and accepted at first possible opportunity would be the most straightforward.

Only issue here is that the party that logs in 1st still has the option to move around its units before the other side can accept peace. Guess the stipulation to address this would be that no units may undertake any action in or move through enemy territory. That would prevent the sort of thing I did, moving a ship and unit out of French territory, but would allow the other party to delay logging in until the last min and thus deny the person who logged in 1st the opportunity to move any of their units once the peacedeal removed the units units from enemy territory. Not necessarily a huge issue but I am sure it could be abused especially in instances where multiple wars are being fought at the same time.

[China (DoB)]

I don't see that England did anything wrong.