Whats your definition of a phony war?

[Puwen]

There should be some actual combat, but what if someone just attack with a scouting warrior, or attacking a scout close to your borders.
You think that is a phony war aswell.

Please state your opinions.

[Aggie]

IMHO a phoney war is when you declare war without the intention to actually take part in the fight. You could for instance declare war to a civ on the other side of the planet that can't reach you and then get MA's, just to keep everyone busy.

However, even one warrior can be enough to make it a real war. My game vs Jack Merchant had two examples on the borderline:

1. I had two scouting warriors next to Jack's lightly defended town. The rest of the troops were at least 20 turns away, but still I could have done enough damage.
2. Jack spotted a scouting warrior a couple of turns later and attacks it to declare war and get all civs to join up vs me.

Imvho the first one is more genuine than the second one. But Jack checked with me first and I agreed upon the second one being not phoney. He could only guess for what reason I was there. He guessed right: I had evil plans.

[yndy]

The idea is the one the Aggie wrote. But the amount of action needed to demonstrate that a war is 'real' is arguable. I'll have to see how my game vs Erikk unwraps. We have a no-phony war clause there as well.

[jack merchant]

I should add that in Aggie's second example, the scouting warrior was traipsing through MY territory, with me having ordered Aggie out on one or two occasions before that - but given that this was at the end of the Medieval Age, I felt a bit bad about using this as an excuse to start WW1 too. The first example was perfectly valid IMHO.

I think killing a scout would count as actual war too, though it might not merit making alliances. But what it does is at least temporarily deny the opponent possibly valuable map information, thus inflicting a real cost on the opponent.