(P)REVIEWS - Civilization IV: Warlords Review by Solver
Wars Revamped
Wars in Warlords feel different. Possibly the most notable difference is
that you are much more likely to experience wars which have more than 2 civs
involved. It seems that the AI is now more willing to join an attack on a
weaker enemy who already has a fight, particularly if said AI also gets
something in return. On the other hand, the AI quite likes vassalage
relationships. AIs won’t become vassals of other AIs too often, but you’re
likely to see some inter-AI vassalage action almost every game.
This applies not only to peaceful vassalage but also to surrender.
Indeed, it seems that the AI has been improved as far as early attacks go, and
I have seen more cases of one AI declaring war somewhat early on its neighbour,
and managing to be somewhat successful with it, too. If Feudalism is already
discovered, it’s likely enough for such a conflict to end in a vassalage
relationship.
Vassals, of course, get involved in any wars that their masters get
involved in. This leads to bigger wars breaking out, particularly if you, as
the human player, decide to stir things up a bit by declaring war on someone
who is either a master or a vassal. Even without that, however, there’s the
potential for more interesting things.
In one of my first games with the final version of Warlords, I really
grew to appreciate what wars with more nations involved can do. Isabella, who
remains just as nasty in Warlords as she had always been, declared war on Asoka
and vassalized him not too long after that. Ramesses, for whatever reasons,
decided to declare war on Spain. That created a 2v1 situation,
since Asoka was obliged to join. Seeing that Ramesses was getting stretched a
bit, Chinese declared war on him soon afterwards. I stayed out of the
situation, yet there was a fully fledged war going out there with four
civilizations involved. Okay, of course, given my past experiences with
Isabella, I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of declaring war on her and hitting
her exposed flank.
This is the sort of thing which you can expect to happen more often in
Warlords. It will not happen every game, and it often requires that you join in
to make the most out of the situation, but you should certainly expect more,
uh, global crisis situations.
Thanks to my friend Yin, I made an experiment with the Warlords AI and
vassalage. I took a Standard sized Pangaea map, added one more AI to it (sorry,
didn’t have the nerve for even more), and turned the Aggressive AI option on.
It was pretty rough. Of course, Alexander just had to declare war on me early
on, but other than that, it went nicely. Post-Feudalism, I saw interesting
relationships develop. Saladin turned out to be the big one, and he vassalized Germany peacefully. His aggression boosted
by the respective game option, Saladin proceeded to declare war on Louis XIV,
who was sitting back in relative peace, and so France also became Arabia’s vassal through capitulation. [ ... Previous Page | Next Page ... ]
