War-Weariness in Civ 3: Realistic or a Handicap?

[Leonidas]

War-weariness in Civ 3 is a major issue with me. I can understand your people rioting and growing weary of a war if you are a Democracy and start attacking your neighbours, and the war lasts for several years.

But what about the situation when your civilization is attacked; or you are involved in a major war helping an ally, like in WWII? Your people should rally behind you, not start looting and burning in the streets.

For me, this issue goes back to Civ 2 - trying to contain an aggressor, while having to baby-sit your own cities. Even a Democracy will be united when it has to fight for its life.

The programming related this war-weariness and unhappiness needs to be tweaked and/or changed to better reflect real-world situations. As it stands now - it is just an artifical handicap on the human to aid the AI.

Has anyone ever witnessed an AI city in revolt, or rebel due to war-weariness?

[TheDarkside]

Yes, I just posted my rant about war-weariness in another thread. I got attacked, unprovoked I mgiht add, by another civilization. Half of my cities go into revolt- "33% All we are say'n is give peace a chance". None of my military units were outside my borders

[Leonidas]

Same thing happened to me in my last game:

I was surrounded on all sides and the AI civs started to penetrate my territory fast and furious.

Did my people drop their remotes, rise up from their recliners in righteous anger, and rain down retribution upon the heads of the infidels?

Hell, no - they took one peak over their city walls, mumbled "Aye carumba", and then staged a "love-in" and started chanting "The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind...."

. . . and so another potential great civilization was ground into the dust. . .

Those bloody cowards. . .

[dainbramaged13]

i dont have any problems with war weariness because i play with monarchy...

i agree though that you should not have war weariness affecting you too much when all your units are inside your borders... thats ridiculus. but you have to consider, the only reason for unhappiness in a war is not ala vietnam. that is one reason... there are also reasons for unhappiness (not neccesarily rioting, but that is how unhappiness functions in civ games) such as warrriors coming into your homes and raping your wife and children. So you see, there are different reasons for unhappiness, not just having soldiers away from home...

[ElitePersian]

Originally posted by Leonidas
Same thing happened to me in my last game:

I was surrounded on all sides and the AI civs started to penetrate my territory fast and furious.

Did my people drop their remotes, rise up from their recliners in righteous anger, and rain down retribution upon the heads of the infidels?

Hell, no - they took one peak over their city walls, mumbled "Aye carumba", and then staged a "love-in" and started chanting "The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind...."

. . . and so another potential great civilization was ground into the dust. . .

Those bloody cowards. . .

LOL!

[Kristjan]

there are also reasons for unhappiness (not neccesarily rioting, but that is how unhappiness functions in civ games) such as warrriors coming into your homes and raping your wife and children. So you see, there are different reasons for unhappiness, not just having soldiers away from home...

Then they should be angry towards the enemy and take up arms to take rid of it... In the history, many self-defence wars were lost because of cowardice of the rulers, but very few because of cowardice of the "man from the street". If there were enemy units in your borders and no your units out of your borders, there should be no war weariness.

[Setsuna]

I think the player gets a lot of handicaps in order to counteract any shortcomings in the AI.

I find that combat leans toward the AI even when the odds clearly favor my units.

Just my two cents.

[Sikander]

I agree that the war weariness thing is unrealistic to a large degree as outlined above. Part of the problem relates to a stupid design decision in Civ 1 that has continued until this day, which is the insanely low movement factors of the units. This forces a modern war to go one for years and years. I swear it would take at least 50 years to play out WW2, when in reality that war only lasted about 6 years. (And I hear people complain that rail movement is unrealistic....it's the least unrealistic movement possible.)

Military units need to build more quickly as well. It could take a good sized city 80 years to build a spearman in the BCs (or more). The way to allieviate the cheap cost of building units would be to increase the expense of operating them. Thus you could afford a decent standing force to help you survive the initial attack, and after that your cities can crank out a unit every turn (at least, there should be no limitation on the number of units you can build in a turn besides shields).

Historically some of the most effective military powers were Republics. Whether they used a highly skilled professional army (Rome, Great Britain) or later a massive citizen force (France, USA etc.), Republics have been powerful, so powerful in fact that they have dominated history in the recent past. At least you are not penalized as heavily for having a large standing force in Civ 3 like you were in previous editions.