Originally posted by zombiewoof:

However, because of the grievance system, declaring war on them is completely unjustified and would come with some fairly severe penalties. Meanwhile, I could declare war on any other ruler in the game, none of which I have grievances with, and this would somehow be more justified then going to war with the ruler I have multiple grievances with.

Probably your neighbor has more grievances against you than you against them, thus making going to war not justified, while the far away ruler have no grievances against you nor you against them, thus making it balanced.

it is a numbers game the rules of which are kinda wonky, but i can live with them. the penalties are an issue, though. if only alignment and relations were affected (see https://aow4.paradoxwikis.com/index.php?title=Diplomacy) all would be OK, but why a penalty to imperium?

Originally posted by DesertRose92:

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

However, because of the grievance system, declaring war on them is completely unjustified and would come with some fairly severe penalties. Meanwhile, I could declare war on any other ruler in the game, none of which I have grievances with, and this would somehow be more justified then going to war with the ruler I have multiple grievances with.

Probably your neighbor has more grievances against you than you against them, thus making going to war not justified, while the far away ruler have no grievances against you nor you against them, thus making it balanced.

I understand how it works mechanically (you're right, they have 4 grievances against me while I have 3 against them.) My point is that conceptually, it makes no sense that I would be more justified (in terms of game mechanics) in going to war with a ruler I have no grievances with than one I have multiple grievances with (and they with me), unless I buy grievances from them i.e. give them money.

In the game I mentioned, the ruler I want to go to war with doesn't have the gold to buy any grievances from me, so in order to get out of an unjustified war I'd have to buy all grievances from them, which means I'm giving them over 1000 gold.

I mean I get the developers wanted to keep players from just declaring war on anyone they want, but this system (again, conceptually speaking) seems silly and makes my brain hurt.

worth noting is that the value of grievances is modified by declarations. If you have a rivalry, they are worth more, with friendship, less. Though the value won't change from when the grievance was caused iirc, so you have to plan ahead.

Originally posted by Narandia:

worth noting is that the value of grievances is modified by declarations. If you have a rivalry, they are worth more, with friendship, less. Though the value won't change from when the grievance was caused iirc, so you have to plan ahead.

Exactly, so the nuances just make things worse. I started this current game with the intention of messing with the diplomatic systems more than I had previously, so I made a defensive pact with a ruler on my border (Raina) and got a few grievances against and declared rivalry with another (Artica). Raina then declared war with 3 rulers (including Artica) on the same turn and gave me a call to war for all three (I know, defensive pacts are dumb but like I said, I wanted to play with the systems.) I have a -800 relationship, a declaration of rivalry and several grievances against Artica, but since she has no gold to purchase grievances, there's no way I can go to war with her without very substantial penalties. Meanwhile, I have a +325 relationship and no grievances against another ruler I have a call to war with, and almost no penalties if I go to war with them. In other words, I'm better off going to war with a friend than a sworn enemy. This makes no sense unless the point is to encourage backstabbing, which is clearly not what's intended.

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

Originally posted by Narandia:

worth noting is that the value of grievances is modified by declarations. If you have a rivalry, they are worth more, with friendship, less. Though the value won't change from when the grievance was caused iirc, so you have to plan ahead.

Exactly, so the nuances just make things worse. I started this current game with the intention of messing with the diplomatic systems more than I had previously, so I made a defensive pact with a ruler on my border (Raina) and got a few grievances against and declared rivalry with another (Artica). Raina then declared war with 3 rulers (including Artica) on the same turn and gave me a call to war for all three (I know, defensive pacts are dumb but like I said, I wanted to play with the systems.) I have a -800 relationship, a declaration of rivalry and several grievances against Artica, but since she has no gold to purchase grievances, there's no way I can go to war with her without very substantial penalties. Meanwhile, I have a +325 relationship and no grievances against another ruler I have a call to war with, and almost no penalties if I go to war with them. In other words, I'm better off going to war with a friend than a sworn enemy. This makes no sense unless the point is to encourage backstabbing, which is clearly not what's intended.

Just so you know.

In your Artica example.
Lets say you have 40 points of grievances towards her and she has 50 towards you.

She has no gold to purchase grievances, you said. Actually, you dont want to do that to declare war. Purchasing would mean, you would tell her "give me gold, I ignore your misdeeds" reducing your 40 points of grievances. You actually want to have more than her. So You have to pay HER the gold, to reduce her grievances, to the amount you want.

After you did that, you will have the difference count in your favor toward war justification. Something like 40 to 38 is 2 points for you, for very minor justification. If you get 40 to 10, you have 30 points, should be around normal justification I think.

To sum it up:
You have grievances? Good.
She has grievances? Bad.
Solution, buy her grievances.

Diplomacy in general I think is the worst part of the game. I've had my alliances break because someone declared war on me, and it was an unjust war. Keep in mind i'm the victim! I've given up on keeping track on why all the sudden things happen with diplomacy.

Had a magic victory game with 8 players. Cast the spell. All my alliances broke. All the enemies suddenly made friends and allied with me before the 15 turns were up. Made no sense at all! The AI seemed to have no cool down on bumping themselves up the track to alliance as well. Every turn was a different step. Pact (?)->def->alliance . They were evil, had opposite paths etc. It was just silly. Some better tool tips would help. Wondering how it weighs the alignments and other diplomacy settings. Being good and evil seems to make little difference often. Other things seem to break the alliance easily, like getting war declared on me and my isolationist ally saying goodbye.

I'm glad it has diplomacy, but that part of the game is a train wreck. Can't hardly trust anyone. I would like to see some options to customize the weight in setup of the game. Or maybe someone will make a mod (or maybe there already is something).

Originally posted by Terrkas:

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

Exactly, so the nuances just make things worse. I started this current game with the intention of messing with the diplomatic systems more than I had previously, so I made a defensive pact with a ruler on my border (Raina) and got a few grievances against and declared rivalry with another (Artica). Raina then declared war with 3 rulers (including Artica) on the same turn and gave me a call to war for all three (I know, defensive pacts are dumb but like I said, I wanted to play with the systems.) I have a -800 relationship, a declaration of rivalry and several grievances against Artica, but since she has no gold to purchase grievances, there's no way I can go to war with her without very substantial penalties. Meanwhile, I have a +325 relationship and no grievances against another ruler I have a call to war with, and almost no penalties if I go to war with them. In other words, I'm better off going to war with a friend than a sworn enemy. This makes no sense unless the point is to encourage backstabbing, which is clearly not what's intended.

Just so you know.

In your Artica example.
Lets say you have 40 points of grievances towards her and she has 50 towards you.

She has no gold to purchase grievances, you said. Actually, you dont want to do that to declare war. Purchasing would mean, you would tell her "give me gold, I ignore your misdeeds" reducing your 40 points of grievances. You actually want to have more than her. So You have to pay HER the gold, to reduce her grievances, to the amount you want.

After you did that, you will have the difference count in your favor toward war justification. Something like 40 to 38 is 2 points for you, for very minor justification. If you get 40 to 10, you have 30 points, should be around normal justification I think.

To sum it up:
You have grievances? Good.
She has grievances? Bad.
Solution, buy her grievances.

Again, I understand how the mechanics work. Once you grasp them, which takes a minute since they're so counter-intuitive, they're fairly straight-forward. My argument is that the grievance system is conceptually dumb.

I mean look at your example. In order to go to war with a declared rival with whom I have several grievances and a very negative relationship I have to literally purchase the war from them, otherwise I suffer serious penalties, While at the same time I can answer a call for war against a ruler I have a positive relationship with and no grievances and suffer almost no penalties. This doesn't make sense.

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

Originally posted by Terrkas:

Just so you know.

In your Artica example.
Lets say you have 40 points of grievances towards her and she has 50 towards you.

She has no gold to purchase grievances, you said. Actually, you dont want to do that to declare war. Purchasing would mean, you would tell her "give me gold, I ignore your misdeeds" reducing your 40 points of grievances. You actually want to have more than her. So You have to pay HER the gold, to reduce her grievances, to the amount you want.

After you did that, you will have the difference count in your favor toward war justification. Something like 40 to 38 is 2 points for you, for very minor justification. If you get 40 to 10, you have 30 points, should be around normal justification I think.

To sum it up:
You have grievances? Good.
She has grievances? Bad.
Solution, buy her grievances.

Again, I understand how the mechanics work. Once you grasp them, which takes a minute since they're so counter-intuitive, they're fairly straight-forward. My argument is that the grievance system is conceptually dumb.

I mean look at your example. In order to go to war with a declared rival with whom I have several grievances and a very negative relationship I have to literally purchase the war from them, otherwise I suffer serious penalties, While at the same time I can answer a call for war against a ruler I have a positive relationship with and no grievances and suffer almost no penalties. This doesn't make sense.

But you clearly showed you didnt know how it worked. You just said artica cant buy grievances from you, so you can go to war.

You suffer more penalties against artica, because your relationship meter doesnt matter. The ONLY THING that matters are your grievances vs her grievances.

You have 10, she 50, bad idea to start a war, unless you win fast.
You have 50, she has 10, nice, go to war with bonus.

Grievances show how much a ruler "wronged" you. By you wronging artica more than artica did wrong you, you show the world "look, I dont care for her claims, well being, whatever. Also, now I go to war."
While going to war with a lot of grievances is more like "look, she constantly harasses me, its time to finish this. To war!"

Maybe you just havent noticed it yet. But if you hover over war or grievances tooltips, there is another tooltip for war justification. Go to that one, read it. It shows how many more grievances, you need to reach certain justification levels. If you have less than your opponent, you move further into unjustified war territory.

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

Originally posted by DesertRose92:

Probably your neighbor has more grievances against you than you against them, thus making going to war not justified, while the far away ruler have no grievances against you nor you against them, thus making it balanced.

I understand how it works mechanically (you're right, they have 4 grievances against me while I have 3 against them.) My point is that conceptually, it makes no sense that I would be more justified (in terms of game mechanics) in going to war with a ruler I have no grievances with than one I have multiple grievances with (and they with me), unless I buy grievances from them i.e. give them money.

In the game I mentioned, the ruler I want to go to war with doesn't have the gold to buy any grievances from me, so in order to get out of an unjustified war I'd have to buy all grievances from them, which means I'm giving them over 1000 gold.

I mean I get the developers wanted to keep players from just declaring war on anyone they want, but this system (again, conceptually speaking) seems silly and makes my brain hurt.

Why doesn't it make sense?

It would make sense to me - if both parties have done something wrong to each other, then an objective outsider would not be able to easily decide that one or the other has a claim to righteousness. To me the system makes sense. I'm not saying it's the only possible way to make sense but at the same time I simply don't see anything to get riled up about.

And as a word to the wise - you may be overestimating the penalty of going to unjustified war. One misconception I had personally was I thought that all your resource gains are penalized if you go into an unjustified war. This is not the case, but I know why I believed it and it's because on the declare war screen it uses the wording "global income penalty." The thing is this only applies to materium income as evidenced by the little imperium icon, and doesn't affect your gold/mana/etc. While imperium is certainly a valuable resource, it may in fact have very little impact in the short term on your ability to project your forces across their borders (mana/gold being the biggest factors there). I would assume that if you are declaring war, you have the foresight to end it quickly not get into a drawn out conflict.

TLDR: maybe it's not as bad as you think to delcare an unjustified war, as long as you end it quickly. Sure you get some reputation hits, oh no.

Agreed, this can get annoying especially in a situation where i.e., you're already dominating a map and would like to finish it quickly, but there's another ruler who hates you yet refuses to declare war (probably because you're stronger). Your only option is to declare unjustified war and take the penalties, or try something else like magic victory. It's not a great system.

Originally posted by Cordell:

Diplomacy in general I think is the worst part of the game. I've had my alliances break because someone declared war on me, and it was an unjust war. Keep in mind i'm the victim! I've given up on keeping track on why all the sudden things happen with diplomacy.

Had a magic victory game with 8 players. Cast the spell. All my alliances broke. All the enemies suddenly made friends and allied with me before the 15 turns were up. Made no sense at all! The AI seemed to have no cool down on bumping themselves up the track to alliance as well. Every turn was a different step. Pact (?)->def->alliance . They were evil, had opposite paths etc. It was just silly. Some better tool tips would help. Wondering how it weighs the alignments and other diplomacy settings. Being good and evil seems to make little difference often. Other things seem to break the alliance easily, like getting war declared on me and my isolationist ally saying goodbye.

I'm glad it has diplomacy, but that part of the game is a train wreck. Can't hardly trust anyone. I would like to see some options to customize the weight in setup of the game. Or maybe someone will make a mod (or maybe there already is something).

I had a magic victory where the same thing happened - as soon as I cast the summoning spell (or whatever it's called) everyone declared war on me. I can't remember if it warns you about this happening or not. Funny thing was every ruler ran armies up to my border - and then just stopped. I probably would've won regardless, but they definitely could've made things more difficult.

I'm used to diplomacy AI in 4X games being wonky and frustrating, but I think what bothers me about grievances in this game is that it's a concept that was put in that doesn't really do what was intended. It seems to discourage declared rivalries and grievances against rulers you intend to go to war with - you just make things more difficult for yourself.

See, I actually think the system makes sense. Justifying a war is a tedious and difficult process of carefully collecting grievances against your opponent while avoiding offenses of your own, all of which requires advance planning painstaking to the point of bending over backwards. And justifying a war should be a tedious and difficult process! The thing is, if you want to go to war, you don't have to justify it. You can just do whatever you want, and damn the consequences. Just ask Russia!

I think the problem isn't so much that the system doesn't make sense, but more that it feels restrictive and limiting to the player, even though there is no hard limit imposed.

Overall, I don't actually mind it that much. I find the restrictions interesting to play around. But I can definitely see why that wouldn't be the case for everyone.

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

I understand how it works mechanically (you're right, they have 4 grievances against me while I have 3 against them.) My point is that conceptually, it makes no sense that I would be more justified (in terms of game mechanics) in going to war with a ruler I have no grievances with than one I have multiple grievances with (and they with me), unless I buy grievances from them i.e. give them money.

In the game I mentioned, the ruler I want to go to war with doesn't have the gold to buy any grievances from me, so in order to get out of an unjustified war I'd have to buy all grievances from them, which means I'm giving them over 1000 gold.

I mean I get the developers wanted to keep players from just declaring war on anyone they want, but this system (again, conceptually speaking) seems silly and makes my brain hurt.

Why doesn't it make sense?

It would make sense to me - if both parties have done something wrong to each other, then an objective outsider would not be able to easily decide that one or the other has a claim to righteousness. To me the system makes sense. I'm not saying it's the only possible way to make sense but at the same time I simply don't see anything to get riled up about.

And as a word to the wise - you may be overestimating the penalty of going to unjustified war. One misconception I had personally was I thought that all your resource gains are penalized if you go into an unjustified war. This is not the case, but I know why I believed it and it's because on the declare war screen it uses the wording "global income penalty." The thing is this only applies to materium income as evidenced by the little imperium icon, and doesn't affect your gold/mana/etc. While imperium is certainly a valuable resource, it may in fact have very little impact in the short term on your ability to project your forces across their borders (mana/gold being the biggest factors there). I would assume that if you are declaring war, you have the foresight to end it quickly not get into a drawn out conflict.

TLDR: maybe it's not as bad as you think to delcare an unjustified war, as long as you end it quickly. Sure you get some reputation hits, oh no.

This is from my second (or third?) post, which explains in more detail (probably should have included this in my first post):

"I started this current game with the intention of messing with the diplomatic systems more than I had previously, so I made a defensive pact with a ruler on my border (Raina) and got a few grievances against and declared rivalry with another (Artica). Raina then declared war with 3 rulers (including Artica) on the same turn and gave me a call to war for all three (I know, defensive pacts are dumb but like I said, I wanted to play with the systems.) I have a -800 relationship, a declaration of rivalry and several grievances against Artica, but since she has no gold to purchase grievances, there's no way I can go to war with her without very substantial penalties. Meanwhile, I have a +325 relationship and no grievances against another ruler I have a call to war with, and almost no penalties if I go to war with them. In other words, I'm better off going to war with a friend than a sworn enemy. This makes no sense unless the point is to encourage backstabbing, which is clearly not what's intended."

If I answer the call to war against Artica I suffer:
+20 grievances to non-Allied rulers
-50 relationship to non-vassal cities
-50 relations to vassal for 20 turns
-15 vassal city allegiance
-40 percent imperium

This is a ruler I have -800 relationship, 2 grievances, an a declaration of rivalry with.

If I answer the call to war against Meshara I suffer:
-50 relations with non-allied rulers

That's it. This is a ruler I have a +325 relationship with, no grievances.

So clearly the penalties are much harsher for going to war against Artica, my declared rival (and who I've been trying to stir up a war with) , then they are against Meshara, whom I have a good relationship with. That's what doesn't make sense, the fact that the penalties are much greater for attacking a rival than a friend. Seems backwards to me.

You're right though, the penalties for a unjustified war aren't *that* bad, depending on where you are in the game. The imperium penalty could really hurt.

Originally posted by zombiewoof:

So clearly the penalties are much harsher for going to war against Artica, my declared rival (and who I've been trying to stir up a war with) , then they are against Meshara, whom I have a good relationship with. That's what doesn't make sense, the fact that the penalties are much greater for attacking a rival than a friend. Seems backwards to me.

Again, that is most likely, because she has a justified war against you.

Like your score is 20, hers is 50. Bad idea.

With the other one where both have no grievances, it is 0 vs 0. Still unjustified, but better than having -30 justification.

If you still have the save, could you provide screenshots of the grievances against each other?
Once for artica and once for Meshara?