Popularity with Bots

freezy wrote:

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

DxC explained in that post why going Trade Embargoes first should not change the overall popularity end result. By changing from Peace to war, lets say you get a popularity hit of 20% as an example. By changing from peace to trade embargo first you also get a popularity hit, lets say 10%, again just as an example. Then by going from trade embargo to war you get another 10% popularity hit. The jump from trade embargo to war seems lower and people seem to notice this and think that the penalty overall is lower, but the actual overall change from peace to war would be the same in both scenarios (20% overall).

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. Then 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 if the more or less the AI likes/hates you (so doing those things after declaring war have 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.

thank you! I will forevermore refer to this post when questions are asked on the topic