fighting a bloodless war

[Bella Hella]

i know, so boring to you warmongering types.

the question is how to take over a close friend and neighbor's cities peacefully? in some situations, you'll go to war with everyone if you try to take out a neighbor. in others, you'll be a backstabbing bastard and no one will trust you ever again. but the neighbor is getting too strong for his own good, and has some prime real estate you're drooling over.

the most obvious is the culture flip. but that's so unreliable, especially if their cities have been growing at the same rate as yours. i know you can use spies to hurt them sneakily, but how? i'm not up on espianoge techniques, so can someone either explain or point me in the direction of a thread that can? specifically, i want to know why they're immune to propaganda and how to best use my spies to sneak some cities out from under them, or weaken them so they fall behind and you can declare war without fear.

please, no "who cares if everybody goes to war with you? nuke 'em!!" responses.

[Arrian]

Using propoganda is only an option once you have espionage, I believe. You need the Intelligence Agency. It's extremely expensive, and furthermore will not work on a democracy. If the AI isn't fighting, they are a democracy. Count on it. Plus, I've tried it once or twice for the hell of it and failed.

Culture flipping is best done very early on using a religious civ. Build 2 cities as close to the target as possible, rush temples and wait. No guarantees, but it often works.

Fighting a war does not automatically make you a pariah nation. An honorable declaration of war (declare war when you have no trade deals active and without any troops in the enemy's territory) will make other civs wary of you, but it doesn't ruin your reputation. You can still do gold-per-turn trade deals and such. If you're worried about multifront wars, negotiate yourself some alliances so the enemy can't.

-Arrian

[Theseus]

Originally posted by Arrian
Fighting a war does not automatically make you a pariah nation. An honorable declaration of war (declare war when you have no trade deals active and without any troops in the enemy's territory) will make other civs wary of you, but it doesn't ruin your reputation.

Also, let them strike the first blow, on your territory.

[vmxa1]

That is my choice, let them declare war and then no rep hit.
Yes you would need Int Agency and spend money on spying, which is not even allowed if they are Dems as Arrian said. In short not much of an option until it too late.

[Barchan]

Originally posted by Arrian
Using propoganda is only an option once you have espionage, I believe. You need the Intelligence Agency. It's extremely expensive, and furthermore will not work on a democracy. If the AI isn't fighting, they are a democracy. Count on it. Plus, I've tried it once or twice for the hell of it and failed.

I've succeeded on occasion. I think it's heavily dependent on the overall happiness of the city. I was playing around with one little border town (since attempts were cheap!) and it just wouldn't see things my way. I scoped out the town and noticed it was using my transportation network to ship in a few luxuries (it was totally surrounded by my empire and we had a RoP). So, I tore up all the roads in my territory, isolating the city. Without the luxuries, the people weren't quite as happy with Lincoln (they were American) and they bought off on my "propaganda" and joined my glorious Indian empire.

Thus, if you want to try to "steal" away rival cities, you need to try to increase local unhappiness to improve your propaganda chances. It'll probably be tough for you to do this directly, since you can't take offensive action against someone and use espionage (which seems silly, but anyway...). However, you could try getting other AI trading partners to initiate embargoes or go to war to cut off luxuries and perhaps bombard the city to destroy happiness-producing structures. Once the city is unhappy enough, you might be able to convince them to join your empire.

Also, I've heard that these things are somewhat more successful under communism, but I haven't actually tested it yet since communism is otherwise entirely lame. Perhaps you might give it a go and see if you have more success as the Reds?

[Bella Hella]

i liked how you could simply buy cities in SMAC. but i guess in this game it doesn't make sense (it didn't make sense in SMAC, either, but it was awfully fun). i didn't consider trade embargos, but that sounds fun, too. question, if you initiate an embargo, do you go to war or will the other civ just be mad at you?

BTW, what i did in the game in question is wait for the RoP agreement to end and wait for my teade deals with him to end, get MPPs with the other civs, and get trade embargos from a couple of them agaist the enemy. they were totally ready to declare war and had moved tons of troops into my territory, where there was aluminum (they hadn't discovered rocketry yet *shrug*). it was pretty easy to goad him into war by calling him up and telling him to get the @#$% out.

anyway, it's a shame that propaganda is so weak!!! i'd really like to use it sometime, but everybody's usually in a democracy, i guess. bummer. barchan - i agree that communism sucks, so i'll probably put off trying that for a while.

[Sheik]

"who cares if everybody goes to war with you? nuke 'em!!"




Now for my real answer:
IMO espionage missions are way to expensive in this game. Culture flipping is really the only way to do it.

BTW has anyone tried to buy a city with gold? If so how much does it take?

[Alex]

I'd be very interested in using the espionage options IF they worked properly. Problem is, they are too expensive and their success rate is outrageously low. If they could fix that in PTW, it would improve the game a lot, for a simple reason, as stated by Bella: how can we fight a bloodless war without proper use of intelligence informations and espionage actions? Culture flipping, you'd say. I'd say that it is a viable way, but one that is not enough.
We need better implementation of these espionage options.

[Jaybe]

Espionage options work well, but only under the proper conditions. The problem is that those conditions are not well known, and may vary with the mission you are attempting. Otherwise, it's the luck of the draw.

[Optimizer]

You can see wht government other nations have on the Military advisor's screen.

[vmxa1]

I have tried to buy a city with gold, but was never able to get anyone to sell for what I had to offer. Oh how I miss the the masked lady letting me incite with no repercusions for double the price (yeah it was too easy, but fun).

[Arrian]

You can no longer purchase AI cities or sell yours to the AI. That option was removed in one of the first patches, because it was highly exploitable.

-Arrian