I don't know how well this would work in practice, but:
If your strategy involves declaring war and then immediately beginning the attack, having an option to delay the declaration the way you can delay the arrival of armies could be useful, so you could time it to coincide with the moment the majority of troops arrive on your enemy's border.
I know that surprise attacks achieve pretty much the same thing, but at the cost of your popularity. Also, they're hard to initiate against actual allies, since using the 'attack' command means you have to declare war before confirming said command. Surprise attacks only work if you simply move into neutral territory.
I also know that you could just log in at the suitable time and declare war then, but that's not really feasible if it's the middle of the night or something.
Her Ladyship Aragosta A.K.A. "The Backstab Person" Pan-Asian is a better doctrine than Axis when played correctly and you cannot change my mind. You just lost The Game. Join the Madness here: CoW Forum Players! Unite!
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29 Replies
11 Apr 2023, 16:17
K.Rokossovski wrote:
I even doubt if we're understanding this correctly. I have always noticed a big popularity hit when starting surprise wars.
I was present when we deliberately patched out the penalty for surprise attacks in 2020, I discussed this topic myself with the responsible Dev back then. That's also why the wiki article about popularity does not list this as factor. So unless anything changed since then surprise attacks should be no different than declaring war.
I just tested it myself in a fresh game. I was at peace with nation A and B. Surprise attacking nation A decreased the popularity from 71% to 21%. Declaring war on nation B decreased popularity from 69% to 20%. So the effect of both was basically the same (with some rounding inaccuracies). But feel free to test this yourself.
Also this explanation from DxC might apply as well:
DxC wrote:
The thing is, declaring a trade embargo will erode your popularity with that country and countries that see it as popular. The more popular that country becomes the more the embargo will damage your global popularity. Since your popularity has already been damage by using the embargo going from embargo to war isn't going to look as severe as peace to war.
To figure it out it seem like you would need to start two private maps where in one you do the embargo on day x and declare on day y and in the other you just declare on day y. Track your popularity in both maps from day 0 to day y + 5ish.
11 Apr 2023, 16:58
freezy wrote:
Wiki article that lists what influences popularity: https://wiki.callofwar.com/wiki/POPULARITY_AND_AI#Popularity
I'm sorry to say this, but that's exactly what I mean by "vague terms". There's no indication of the weighting of all those factors. I don't think you're suddenly the best guy in the world when you buy one food from them, for example.
And testing all this is pretty cumbersome, key intel is hidden quite deep and hard to summarize, or am I missing some big overview matrix where all relationships between all countries are listed? Sortable and filterable, pretty please with sugar on top?
11 Apr 2023, 17:27
Indeed the Wiki does not specify exact numbers for the existing factors. Some obviously have bigger effects than others. But I don't know them by heart as well so I cannot tell you. Also due to the weirdness of the calculation. These actions do not have defined percentage points, so there is nothing like "doing XY subtracts 25% popularity". The percentage is actually calculated by some formula that weighs previous positive interactions with previous negative interactions, meaning that you get diminishing returns when you have alot of positive or alot of negative actions. Thus the percentage changes are alot bigger at the beginning when there were not many actions yet. So the effect of these actions depends also on how much was already interacted with the country and how much positively and how much negatively. I think it was a deliberate decision to not lay out all of this in the Wiki cos its just a headache to explain, sorry. Instead we opted to just give a general guidance which actions are good and which are bad. If some players wanna figure out actual values they sadly have to test themselves.
With my posts in this thread I was only commenting about the alleged surprise attack factor and others which are not present in the game anymore, thus also not listed in the wiki. I actually quickly edited the wiki to make it more clear that war declaration and surprise attack results are the same.
15 Apr 2023, 09:23
Carking the 6th wrote:
I mean while this is true remind me to watch out for you on a game lol…
Given that I've joined a grand total of five games, and am losing pretty badly in the latest one, I hardly think I'm likely to pose much risk.
Although I have won in some truly epic ways by backstabbing, so you may have a point after all.
Her Ladyship Aragosta A.K.A. "The Backstab Person" Pan-Asian is a better doctrine than Axis when played correctly and you cannot change my mind. You just lost The Game. Join the Madness here: CoW Forum Players! Unite!
16 Apr 2023, 20:08 (edited)
Lady Aragosta wrote:
Carking the 6th wrote:
I mean while this is true remind me to watch out for you on a game lol…
Given that I've joined a grand total of five games, and am losing pretty badly in the latest one, I hardly think I'm likely to pose much risk.Although I have won in some truly epic ways by backstabbing, so you may have a point after all.
Please go in to detail. I must know this knowledge…
CarKing the 6th of the Abrahamic Caliphate
17 Apr 2023, 10:51
Carking the 6th wrote:
Please go in to detail. I must now this knowledge…
In a HWW game I was in, Mongolia and I were allied (I was Nationalist China, and made friends with most neighbouring player-controlled countries in the early game). We made a joint attack on USSR, in which Mongolia obtained more of the good cities than I was happy about, but by the time we were finished my expansion in other areas meant that a) my army was several times larger than his, and b) apart from a few tiny colonies I was unaware of his provinces were completely surrounded by mine, so I then moved some stacks designed to loosely correspond to his into each of his cities, and a few of his more heavily fortified rural provinces, and declared war as soon as the majority of them had arrived. Within 24 hours he only had one city left (Rekjavik, of all places).
By the time I'd gotten around to this it was bordering on end game, so he trusted me to a much greater degree than he did earlier as his goals had been compatible with mine.
He was also making a fortuitous attack on Turkey at the time (which he did not come out of looking good), but I was going to attack him at that time anyway and said Turkey offensive was merely a happy coincidence.
I've also betrayed people by proxy by gaining access to their maps, working out which of my more trusted allies are at war with them or planning to attack them soon, and feed them information. I think of this as a 'Xinjiang Military Audit' because Xinjiang was the first country I used this against successfully. I try not to give more information than my ally could potentially receive through a spy mission, though.
Now I've told you about this, I'm definitely going to think twice about attacking or betraying you in a game.
Her Ladyship Aragosta A.K.A. "The Backstab Person" Pan-Asian is a better doctrine than Axis when played correctly and you cannot change my mind. You just lost The Game. Join the Madness here: CoW Forum Players! Unite!
17 Apr 2023, 17:13
Lady Aragosta wrote:
In a HWW game I was in, Mongolia and I were allied (I was Nationalist China, and made friends with most neighbouring player-controlled countries in the early game). We made a joint attack on USSR, in which Mongolia obtained more of the good cities than I was happy about, but by the time we were finished my expansion in other areas meant that a) my army was several times larger than his, and b) apart from a few tiny colonies I was unaware of his provinces were completely surrounded by mine, so I then moved some stacks designed to loosely correspond to his into each of his cities, and a few of his more heavily fortified rural provinces, and declared war as soon as the majority of them had arrived. Within 24 hours he only had one city left (Rekjavik, of all places).By the time I'd gotten around to this it was bordering on end game, so he trusted me to a much greater degree than he did earlier as his goals had been compatible with mine.
He was also making a fortuitous attack on Turkey at the time (which he did not come out of looking good), but I was going to attack him at that time anyway and said Turkey offensive was merely a happy coincidence.
I've also betrayed people by proxy by gaining access to their maps, working out which of my more trusted allies are at war with them or planning to attack them soon, and feed them information. I think of this as a 'Xinjiang Military Audit' because Xinjiang was the first country I used this against successfully. I try not to give more information than my ally could potentially receive through a spy mission, though.
This brings me back to one of my earliest games that I can remember. I was in a CoN as South USA with North USA as my ally. We were trying to make a coalition with Canada I believe but they go inactive so eventually we agree to attack them. I (quite suspiciously to be honest) move into his cities and betray him for a North African coalition that I had been talking to for a while and planned this with. He said he saw it coming that I was going to attack him but did nothing. If that’s true then I guess it’s on him, but either way I ended up locking down Canada and either won the game with the North African coalition or went inactive and didn’t come back to the game for a while… I think it was the former, and believe that was my first ever victory, or maybe another one as South USA, not sure. Or was it Turkey? Turkey is my favorite CoN country after all… idk sadly because it was a while ago on an old account, during the non-Urbanized Nuclear ships and subs days… good times.
Lady AragostaNow I've told you about this, I'm definitely going to think twice about attacking or betraying you in a game
Good… very good…
CarKing the 6th of the Abrahamic Caliphate
18 Apr 2023, 20:31
This would be a good suggestion.
My father once said this: “If you don’t know anything, don’t assume you know and don’t say anything you don’t know is true” I always got annoyed when he said that, but to be honest he’s kinda right if you think about it Have a good day!
19 Apr 2023, 00:29
NEPTUNE the great wrote:
This would be a good suggestion.
Yes.
“A battle fought without determination is a battle lost.” - Josip Broz Tito
Instead we opted to just give a general guidance which actions are good and which are bad. If some players wanna figure out actual values they sadly have to test themselves.
