Improving rivalry

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delor
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:21 pm

Improving rivalry

Post by delor »

Rivalry, right now, doesn't really make a ton of sense. It's instant, it instantly lets you declare war, it's ONLY good for declaring war, and upon a successful military conquest rivalry status is reset so the rival status doesn't delay you from immediately improving relations with the conquered nation. The cases where it is meaningfully anything other than a +10 influence cost to the Declare War action are edge cases at best.

It seems like rivalry should be a step in the process of preparing to go to war with a nation- conceptually, building up public support, building up a cassis belli, and/or making the necessary military planning for the war- just like allyship is a step to federation and federation is a step towards unification. It also seems like, having built up a nation as your public enemy, then making them allies and eventually federation or unified partners should take longer. This works both thematically, and gives rivalry some weight and mechanical impact on the game in ways that are consistent with the delays imposed by relationship changes in the other direction.

I think this could be implemented without significantly expanding or adding new game systems:

1) Add a "must have been rivals for at least 90 days" requirement to Declare War, just like the federation/unification timer. For extra flavor, make it scale with the democracy level of the declarer, ie. democracy <=2 can declare war within 60 days, scaling up to 365 days at democracy >=8.

2) When a nation is conquered, set it to Rival with the coalition that conquered it and start the improve relations timer anew. However, remember the nation that gained executive control of it after the conquest. As long as it remains in control, that nation is allowed to join in defensive wars against the nation it conquered. (to plug the obvious problem of "if I can't ally with it, anyone can just declare war on it and take it from me")
PAwleus
Posts: 107
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: Improving rivalry

Post by PAwleus »

I agree that making a Rival shouldn't allow for declaring war immediately. I don't see anything wrong, however, with automatically removing Rivalry after conquest and regime change.
delor
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:21 pm

Re: Improving rivalry

Post by delor »

I guess one use of rivalry I didn't think of when posting last night: If you're abandoning a nation, you could declare your opposing factions rivals to slow their integration with enemy factions.

Still, the only real application being that sort of deep state "making a state sabotage itself" thing when it's part of the normal diplomacy mechanics for declaring war seems a bit odd, as well as limited.
CessnaSkyhawk
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Mar 18, 2023 5:41 am

Re: Improving rivalry

Post by CessnaSkyhawk »

I agree as well - I feel like its kinda stupid that I can be allies with a nation and then suddenly decide "welp we are going to war now" and invade them one day later. I think there definitely should be similar cool downs going from ally to normal, normal to rival, and rival to war as there are going the other way, and frankly, doing so would probably also make the balance between diplomatic and military unification a lot more even rather than military being pretty much objectively better so long as you have an army/navy. I also think the democracy scaling idea is pretty reasonable as well!
Zanotirn
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2022 2:02 am

Re: Improving rivalry

Post by Zanotirn »

At the moment war with minimal delay helps ambush landed assault carriers when you are not allies with the nations they landed in. If they add delay to war declaration, they'd need to rework the whole landed carrier mechanics - though it could use some rework anyway as the interaction between turn-based missions and real-time army movement in the scope of 30-day allowed period is rather clunky. E.g. they could add a special movement type for armies that works as "I'm sending my forces to that landed UFO whether you like it or not. If any of the nations in the way really doesn't like it, feel free to declare a war over it"
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