Popularity with Bots

By giving them share map or right of way, trading goods on the stock market, and attacking nations with very low popularity. Eventually though they will always hate and attack you. A good idea is to try to not make borders with countries. Like take all their cities, kill the units, but leave the rural provinces on the border with another country empty so they don’t attack you. As long as you don’t have borders or are very close to their island (IE: Japan and UK) ai can’t attack you.

Give share map to all bots far from you (i.e. that you won't be attacking in the first 10 days). This will raise your popularity.

Paulina P wrote:

What is a way I can increase my popularity with the bots

So that they stop attacking me 3 per day

SamPGS_17 wrote:

Trade embargo players and AI you will invade in 24 hours. Declare war rather than surprise attack.

_Pyth0n_ wrote:

SamPGS_17 wrote:

Trade embargo players and AI you will invade in 24 hours. Declare war rather than surprise attack.

This part is apparently an urban myth, doing this will change nothing, you will still lose the same amount of global popularity. It used to be that you lost 25% of your popularity when surprise attacking, but it has been changed now.

Trade embargoing before declaring war preserves your popularity, and means you’re less unpopular with the AI. That 100% has not changed.

There are debates about whether you should declare war or surprise attack - I personally still declare war, because it’s not a disadvantage to me, and I want to preserve popularity where I can (even if I don’t know if it does preserve popularity) because it doesn’t hurt me at all.

but yeah, the one thing you can be sure of is to trade embargo before you attack. I would say the ‘urban myth’ is that this is a myth - it’s still true!

I think @freezy Confirmed it wasn’t true a month ago along with surprise attacking but I am not sure, maybe it was both.

Carking the 6th wrote:

I think @freezy Confirmed it wasn’t true a month ago along with surprise attacking but I am not sure, maybe it was both.

i can confirm that trade embargoing before attacking AI is still recommended and will decrease your popularity less than if you just attack them.

Wouldn’t it just reduce the popularity the same? Like if it only reduces it by say 5% and then declaring war another 5%, it would be the same as attacking doing 10%. Same in the end.

yo

Carking the 6th wrote:

Wouldn’t it just reduce the popularity the same? Like if it only reduces it by say 5% and then declaring war another 5%, it would be the same as attacking doing 10%. Same in the end.

I’ll have to try this. I don’t think this is true to be honest.

Carking the 6th wrote:

I’ll have to try this. I don’t think this is true to be honest.

SamPGS_17 wrote:

There are many rumours and that.

i can confirm that trade embargoing before attacking AI is still recommended and will decrease your popularity less than if you just attack them.

jubjub bird wrote:

SamPGS_17 wrote:

There are many rumours and that.

i can confirm that trade embargoing before attacking AI is still recommended and will decrease your popularity less than if you just attack them.

How can you confirm this? You have empirical data? You're a member of the bytro team?

i would love to know if anyone has anything different, but from both my experience of the game, and from people I’ve talked to, trade embargo does make a difference.

From what I can see, the real debate is over whether surprise attack or declare war has a difference between them in terms of popularity decreased.

please let me know if I’m wrong @freezy

Also man, you can chillax with the pointed questions lol

Usually "I can confirm" implies some certainty so I wanted to know where your certainty came from

jubjub bird wrote:

Usually "I can confirm" implies some certainty so I wanted to know where your certainty came from

that was a much better query btw!

Now _I_ can confirm that Freezy confirmed a while ago that this is NO LONGER a factor (though it used to be, years ago). There are no penalties or rewards in popularity to a "smooth" transition of relations; basically it just depends on starting wars, no matter how they came about.

Read his thread:

Add 'delay' option to declaring war

K.Rokossovski wrote:

Now _I_ can confirm that Freezy confirmed a while ago that this is NO LONGER a factor (though it used to be, years ago). There are no penalties or rewards in popularity to a "smooth" transition of relations; basically it just depends on starting wars, no matter how they came about.

Read his thread:

Add 'delay' option to declaring war

K.Rokossovski wrote:

Now _I_ can confirm that Freezy confirmed a while ago that this is NO LONGER a factor (though it used to be, years ago). There are no penalties or rewards in popularity to a "smooth" transition of relations; basically it just depends on starting wars, no matter how they came about.

Read his thread:

Add 'delay' option to declaring war

As far I can see, no one has confirmed anything about trade embargoing beforehand. I think trade embargoing still helps you, whether you surprise attack or declare war we now know makes no difference.

also, I’ve just read through the thread, and freezy quotes DxC talking about trade embargoes. It’s not entirely clear but it suggest trade embargoes help

SamPGS_17 wrote:

Okay so that was what a lot of people debate about, which is what I thought - i thought that surprise attack and declare war had no difference between them.

As far I can see, no one has confirmed anything about trade embargoing beforehand. I think trade embargoing still helps you, whether you surprise attack or declare war we now know makes no difference.

also, I’ve just read through the thread, and freezy quotes DxC talking about trade embargoes. It’s not entirely clear but it suggest trade embargoes help

I don't have any reason to believe that timing this and delaying this changes the end result of the popularity. Certainly not due to the delay itself, I am pretty sure that there is no time based mechanic coded into this, it just judges the severity of actions and compares positive actions with negative actions.

There might be some weird calculation inaccuracies at play due to popularity on the map changing in the "waiting timeframe", e.g. new wars being declared or new allies being made (also from other players to other players) while you wait for declaring war. This can alter the second popularity jump.

Keep also in mind that the jump in popularity by trade embargoing or declaring war is different depending on how many other positive or negative popularity actions you did beforehand. So a war declaration on map A can result in a different percentage change than a war declaration on map B. This might also be a reason why players think certain diplomatic actions are better than others, if they look at them in different games.

And then there are more factors involved: If you produce troops while the AI hates you, it hates you even more. When you produce troops after declaring war you will have lower popularity than while producing those troops while still being on trade embargo and then declaring war after the production finished. Same goes for interacting with other players on the map that the AI hates or likes, effects are stronger the more or less the AI likes/hates you (so doing those things after declaring war has a different effect than after declaring trade embargo). It is so dynamic that it is really hard to judge what the effect of a single action is and one reason why we dont publish exact values (cos there aren't any in practice )

Btw I don't rule out completely that there is a positive effect of going trade embargo first, but it is hard to get empirical data on this as there are so many influencing factors. The cleanest test one could make is doing this comparison in 2 maps where no other diplomatic changes by other players take place in the meantime, and your trade embargo/war is the first action you do. For example in a new game on day 1, with only AIs on the map.