AI Declares Serial War - this is nuts.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Okay, so, awhile back, Director Ten Shells thought it would be a good idea to extortionate me for all of my treasury and mineral stockpile. At the time I had no military as Iw as focusing on only teching-up, so I paid his danegeld.

Later on, I get another such ultimatum, but this time I have a military and invite him to go shove it in his cloaca. He promptly declares war, and gets turbocurbstomped, which is what happens when the best you have is lasers and you're facing antimatter torpedoes and vindicators.

Then, after a while of successfully prosecuting this war - glassed some planets, captured others - the Imperial Ashdar join in because I'm "persecuting their friends, the Orthin!"

Not that they do anything much, they just declare WAAAAAGH.

And this goes on. And on, and on. Every time the AI sues for peace, I'm like "sure, this is bonkers, let's end it," and then the next turn, or maybe once the turn after that, they declare war again because I'm at war with their best carapace-bud.

By this point, the Orthin homeworld is under my control and I can only credit the fact that they have an empire at all to that huge extortion giving them resources to crash build a colony fleet and expand north of me.

Eventually they both fell out of contact with me, but then something or other brought them both back in at once. I say "cool, whatever."

So this time, the Ashdar sue me for peace, and I accept - and I then immediately, same turn, spend the influence to get Ten Shells to agree to peace.

The start of the next turn, it's right back to war! That's absurd. I spent influence for nothing, but somehow being a treaty-breaker doesn't cost Ten Shells anything?!

Most 4Xs have some kind of lockout on hostile actions after a war. The best ones let you break your word but massively damage your standing in the eyes of everyone else. This? This is just nuts. I'm on the verge of just going and Exterminatusing every damn Orthin in the galaxy who isn't already under my control.

[AMX]

That last DOW sounds like a bug - AFAIK there's supposed to be a cooldown preventing that.
(That it doesn't apply when an ally asks for help has been observed before, and makes some sense - but the last one seems straight up wrong.)

[ShadowDragon8685]

That last DOW sounds like a bug - AFAIK there's supposed to be a cooldown preventing that.
(That it doesn't apply when an ally asks for help has been observed before, and makes some sense - but the last one seems straight up wrong.)

It might be that the Phidi asked them to WAAAAAAGH. The Phidi are also friends of the Orthin, and declared WAAAAGH on me waaay back when, too. I saw off the first and only fleet they ever bothered to send, and hadn't literally heard of them afterwards.

[gaerzi]

Speaking of war problems. In a game I was allied with the Yoral, who declared war on the Phidi. Eventually the Yoral ask me to join their war, which I reluctantly do in order to preserve the alliance as I need the Yoral as a deterrent against the Tinkers, the next turn they make peace with the Phidi but I can't sue for peace because there's a cooldown.

I think that when any ally successfully sues for peace, then all allies should get the option to cease hostilities as well, cooldown or not. On both sides of the conflict.

[sven]

That last DOW sounds like a bug - AFAIK there's supposed to be a cooldown preventing that.
(That it doesn't apply when an ally asks for help has been observed before, and makes some sense - but the last one seems straight up wrong.)

It might be that the Phidi asked them to WAAAAAAGH. The Phidi are also friends of the Orthin, and declared WAAAAGH on me waaay back when, too. I saw off the first and only fleet they ever bothered to send, and hadn't literally heard of them afterwards.

Yeah, this is probably what happened. The ally war request events can give the AI's a way around the standard cooldowns. There's a bunch of changes in the in_development build (r38148) that try to cut down on this kind of frustrating behavior by adding logic so that AI's will actually refuse other AI's requests for help if they've just made peace. It might well have helped in this case.

[sven]

I think that when any ally successfully sues for peace, then all allies should get the option to cease hostilities as well, cooldown or not. On both sides of the conflict.

This is probably a bug. AI's should extend peace offers to all their enemy's allies when they make peace. It looks like there may be a bug in my code for handling some of those cases though (specifically, I'd suspect I'm not properly handling complex cases where you have a war between 4+ sides who are all allied or not in tricky patterns).