You raise valid points, Beam. However that is not exactly what I'm ranting at. Just like when I ranted at what craters or man-o-wars (okay... and dromons, but less
) were in our PBEM, I was not ranting at you Beam using this strategy to beat me.
Stapel has all rights to send a horsie to my land, to blackmail me with it as a threat (though I replied it wasn't a real threat, and it got killed
), etc... And he has all rights to get a war happiness when I declare war on him. I agreed to that, or should I say, I never complained about it (because I had not encountered this situation so far, probably).
Now I'm experiencing something new, and I'm trying to evaluate it.
Sending a single unit to get war happiness for the rest of the game (though Stapel immediately offered me peace, I guess he knows what he's doing) ???
It's a bit like if a country provocked another one by initiating an incident at some lost border, and the other country retaliated by nuke !!
Ever heard of "proportionate retaliation" ? Well that's what I'm speaking of : you lose almost nothing, but get much, very much. Forget the Republic slingshot or the ToE trick, this is more powerful. The game must have limitations (corruption, pollution, etc...), but there's something missing here obviously.
I reckon I enjoyed a good war happiness in our game too, Beam. I can agree it shouldn't last so much time (in fact I must have kept it until we were really at war, or did I keep it until the end ?
). But I feel better about it : I was only scouting the sea and meeting friends in our game, whereas Stapel threatened my cities, workers and improved tiles. Quite a difference.
Here's hoping Civ4 will act differently here again. And I'm willing to try akots's idea for my next games. I'll look at how many trades I have done in my PBEMs so far, but we must surely not lose much.
In Civ4 I hope to trade more with the human opponent too. What if the AIs are so strong that we have to ally against them to survive ? It could be nice to have an AI actually
winning a PBEM (not the case in Civ3). Or we could imagine a situation where no direct action between humans are possible (stalemate) unless massive destruction, and so the humans have to compete for something else (space race, cultural race, etc...), and so both believe they get the advantage in a particular trade (leading to intense trading between humans, so as to get the best of it).
I'm dreaming... And a few points still obscure to my taste (see other posts).