The favors system offers interesting choices, but currently it's a little too easy to draw allies into wars in which they have no interest, or even against their own interests. As a minor nation for example, if you ally a larger one and curry favors you can easily expand to become much larger than your ally without doing much of the fighting yourself. I.e. allies can easily become pseudo-vassals in the current system. As a concrete example, I played Hormuz recently and was able to take all of the mamlukes just by allying the ottomans, in return the ottomans got nothing. Likewise, as a player, your allies will call you into wars frivilously and it's usually best to just ignore the war because actually fighting it gains you no more than sitting at home apart from a little cash maybe (this is quite boring from a gameplay pov imo).
To solve this: When called to war with favors, there will still be a fixed amount of 10 to call someone in - however that will only reduce the war score which your allies will accept you unilaterally taking to 20 (rather than 100) - the remaining (up to 80) war score will function as for a promise of land war,
This means you can still use larger allies for a few provinces, but you will take a trust hit if you take a massive amount for yourself and give nothing in return. Of course you can still offset that trust hit by building up trust with favors - so one-sided play is still possible, just more expensive favor-wise.
I hope the effect will be that you are more likely to give something to your allies in wars especially if their war contribution is high. So I think it will make alliances, wars and peace deals slightly more strategically interesting, and hopefully wars of mutual interest will be a bit more common than currently. It will make the starts of small nations slightly more difficult, but imo in a good way. I think it also would require almost no change in UI or AI.
To solve this: When called to war with favors, there will still be a fixed amount of 10 to call someone in - however that will only reduce the war score which your allies will accept you unilaterally taking to 20 (rather than 100) - the remaining (up to 80) war score will function as for a promise of land war,
This means you can still use larger allies for a few provinces, but you will take a trust hit if you take a massive amount for yourself and give nothing in return. Of course you can still offset that trust hit by building up trust with favors - so one-sided play is still possible, just more expensive favor-wise.
I hope the effect will be that you are more likely to give something to your allies in wars especially if their war contribution is high. So I think it will make alliances, wars and peace deals slightly more strategically interesting, and hopefully wars of mutual interest will be a bit more common than currently. It will make the starts of small nations slightly more difficult, but imo in a good way. I think it also would require almost no change in UI or AI.
