Is there a downside to breaking peace treaties?

[zenopath]

So the AI offers me a system if I call off my war. I say yes, because I know I'll save some tanks and have fewer collateral damage. I take a few turns to gather up my troops, reorganize a bit, move my fleets to a more advantageous position. A few turns later I just attack again, having benefited from the temporary ceasefire...

Seems to me like there should be a 10 turn window where you simply can't attack. Or maybe a reputation penalty if you break peace treaties right away? I might have missed it, but I don't see any such penalty. Anyone know if there is anything to prevent you from abusing the AI like that or downsides to doing so?

[sven]

Seems to me like there should be a 10 turn window where you simply can't attack. Or maybe a reputation penalty if you break peace treaties right away? I might have missed it, but I don't see any such penalty. Anyone know if there is anything to prevent you from abusing the AI like that or downsides to doing so?

There's nothing to prevent you from breaking a peace treaty. A lot of games in the Civilization series did have features of that sort, and I always felt they were unrealistic. I mean, there's plenty of famous examples in history where one side would sign a peace treaty, only to betray it almost immediately afterwards (the Mongols, for example, had some absolutely brutal campaigns where they used that tactic to great effect). Of course, the Mongols got something of a negative reputation for those maneuvers -- and I think reputation hits, of various sorts, are the appropriate consequence of betraying your word in a 4X game.

That said, SiS does not currently have the infrastructure in place to track and inform the player of just what peace treaties they're currently bound by, and impose appropriate penalties for breaking them. It's yet one more thing I'd like to get around to adding to the game.

[gaerzi]

A hit to reputation, and a penalty on the probability that other AI empires will agree to sign treaties with you -- any kind of treaty?

[zenopath]

Well, it should at least cause the AI to stop offering you free systems.
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."

I also find it amusing that the AI will start asking for their systems back if you agree to a peace treaty.

AI: "Please give me back X system."
ME: "Nope."
AI: "Well I hate you now, since you rejected my request so I am going to declare war on you again."
ME: "Fine with me, I only accepted your last peace offer out of pity. Honestly ever since I broke your main fleet you've had no way to stop me from full conquest except the mercy you've now rejected. It will not be offered again."

[10JML01]

Yes to the previous post. This is really strange.

Also what is strange is that befriended races will request "their" systems back. "Their" systems being pirate systems that had just kidnapped a bit of population from somewhere else, and that I have rightfully conquered and freed from slavery. This pisses me off a bit.
It would be okay if e.g. race1 had conquered systemA by race2. I then went to war with race1 and conquered systemAs population. If race2 now asks for their system back, or more importantly offers some credits and/or systems, that would be okay.

[zenopath]

Yeah its pretty weird. Another situtation that annoys me is when you rescue or annex a human colony from a group of death head pirates. Seventy years later that world is a thriving hub with multiple species, but human AI will still come along and be like:

"So I notice you have found a former human colony, think you could return it to us?"

Thats annoying, cause when you tell them no, you take like a 20 rep hit for basically refusing to hand over a world that the human player never controlled.

[nweismuller]

Yeah, given that splinter colonies are quite possibly centuries or millenia out of communication with the other members of their species, I can easily see them being strongly integrated into their host society and having few remaining connections with their distant cousins.

(That said, I can sort of see Ashdar and Human pan-species policies- the Humans are, after all, not to put too fine a point on it, basically a military dictatorship forged through extreme hardship and the Ashdar have a strong cultural focus on the glories of the old Empire, it seems.)

I think I'd be happy if, once you take the diplomatic hit for hanging onto a splinter colony, that the issue would be put to rest, rather than flaring up again and again. OK, sure, fine, the major Human regime is offended I don't want to hand Splendor back, because Splendor was never part of their state, I've long since integrated it as one of my primary shipbuilding planets, and I've adapted the Combine's legal code to smoothly handle Human citizens, but I'd think it's a weak enough diplomatic case not to support multiple times that relations are damaged over it.

[username]

The Human case for a pan-species polity is actually far weaker than the Ashdar case, since the Ashdar represent an old empire, while the humans are not any continuation of any previous human empire, but simply a group of humans forging their own new empire, potentially one of many. So while the Ashdar retain their claim to all Ashdar worlds by virtue of being the Old Empire, since all of those worlds belonged to them in the past, the Humans represent a new state with no prior claims, as they cannot actually remember their history.

[nweismuller]

Oh, I agree that Human claims to represent any old Human nation are definitely very weak. But I can see a psychological/ideological case for a pan-Humanist policy amongst the Human leadership. I'm not saying it would be convincing to Human splinter colonies, but rather that Humans in the primary Human nation might easily develop a view of themselves as the rightful leaders of all the far-scattered fragments of their species to present a united front against a hostile galaxy.

(Likewise, the Ashdar Colonial claim on old splinters is somewhat spurious, but the Ashdar Colonials seem to consider themselves rightful inheritors of the old Empire's legacy- not unlike claims by the Holy Roman Empire to be the rightful inheritor of the Roman Empire's legacy, despite the fairly weak connection.)