How can you improve other civ's attidude toward you?

[Thoth]

Depending on your relative military strength, you may want to agree to an ROP with the offender. The AI will send units through your territory regardless, I find letting the AI use my roads/railroads decreases the annoyance factor and tends to improve relations.

In my last game as the French, both the Germans and the English were using my rail system to ferry troops back and forth. Both were very happy with me (despite the heavy prunings I'd given both of them earlier in the game.) and I didn't have AI units in my territory except when the occasional unit retreated into it. Coventry changed hands at least 6 times in 15 turns.

[GusSmed]

Originally posted by Thoth
Depending on your relative military strength, you may want to agree to an ROP with the offender. The AI will send units through your territory regardless, I find letting the AI use my roads/railroads decreases the annoyance factor and tends to improve relations.

I thought that way until the first time a "friendly" civ performed a ROP rape against me. Even really weak civs will do this to you if you leave a city relatively undefended, which I am prone to do late in the game with my inner cities.

This is particularly bad if you've got a rail network. A ROP means you've got to treat every city as if it were a front line defender, with 3 good defensive units. That's more than I really want to spend, both in shields and in gold per turn upkeep.

I do still occasionally grant ROPs to civs that I want to move quickly through my territory, but I'm usually terribly paranoid about them and I cancel them as soon as I can honorably do so.

I think the fact that ROP rapes are possible, either for the human player or for the AI, is a nasty flaw. I wish they'd gone with the Civ 2 model, where if you broke an alliance (which granted an equivalent of ROP), all of your units immediately moved out of enemy territory.

- Gus