Logical Peace Offers

[Ashamaru]

As it stands, whether or not a nation will accept your peace offer is based on hard modifiers. Ok, that's not a bad thing, however, most of the modifiers stay around even when you have sieged half their nation, killed their army, and have, say, 300k troops standing in their lands.

Length of war should go away after you are dominating them in the war because who cares at that point, military strength (when they have no military) is only +4 or +5, same thing for sieged provinces, +20 or so when you have their entire nation sieged, and then there's the alliances which are terrible.

If you have a bunch of colonial nations that are halfway across the world and can't get to you, why do they count as anything? ("One province minor, save me!" - Commonwealth 2015) And, even though they can't participate in the war because they're so far away, they don't wan't to peace out either. The only modifier right now is 'relative strength of the alliance' which doesn't take into account strategical position and is also only +20 or so even if you dwarf them by hundreds of thousands of units.

If the nation you are fighting has any special modifiers, like the revolution -50 modifier, they will likely not peace out for as much as you wan't until you get 100 warscore.

I understand there are balancing issues.... Perhaps, instead of messing with the modifiers, make a point where they simply can't refuse your peace offer. When you have sieged half their nation, killed all their armies, they have no relevant allies, and you are standing 300k troops in their land, let's face it, they shouldn't be able to refuse. Who cares if you haven't sieged that part of their nation, or if they have a special modifier. At this point, the war is won, there's simply no arguing it. All that remains is to monotonously go through the rest of their land, inch by inch, sieging one fort after another just to scrape up the warscore you need for a decent peace deal. A nation in this position would want to get out of the war and rebuild as quickly as possible. No king is a cold enough bastard to let enemy armies ravage through the rest of his nation looting and pillaging and slaughtering his people simply because they haven't done so yet.

 

[RyanX]

I agree. The -50 in e.g. the League Wars can really crush your hopes at a supremacist victory if GB or the Ottos are the Protestant leaders and you simply dont have the navy to cross the channel or the Bosphorous and kill them. Similarily, coalitions can sometimes extend to self destructive lenghts for the AI when the war leader is fully occupied, but other co-beligerents, who can't access you (e.g. Sweden if you control the straits) are taken into account when calculating total alliance strength.

It all boils down to when secondary participants should be easier to peace out for a white peace when one side has the military advantage and a ticking warscore in their favor, rather than them being utterly loyal and willing to see their countries burned to ash, just so OPM Mecklenburg can annex OPM Luneburg.

 

[ShadowCammy]

"I know you have us 100% sieged and our allies can't help, and we'll all probably die within the week, but this war just isn't long enough"
-AI

 

[Danfish77]

While that's all well and good, the problem is that modifiers and game logic have to work on objective data and heuristics, not feelings. How do we determine if a war is won? The more nuanced the calculations become, the harder to code, the harder to debug, the harder to balance, and the more resource-intensive to simulate.

I agree that there could be improvement, but we should start looking at the rules we want implemented. Here's a start: If an ally is on a different continent and has no transports, their army doesn't count in a war for relative strength (unless they are a co-belligerent).