Patch Question #2: DOW on Enemy of Enemy?

[Marshal Villars]

Just curious what you guys think of the rule which prevents players from declaring war on the enemies of your enemy?

Seems to me like sometimes it is good. And other times it is bad.

The other night I was playing a game as Prussia and whenever I was ready to pouce on Austria, I discovered I could not declare war because some country like Spain had declared war on both of us. Very funny. This happened not once at a critical moment, but TWICE!!!! LOL. So a war with Spain, which was not being pursued actively by either side prevented Prussia from invading Austria.

The downside to not having this rule is apparently the games can degenerate into "chaos" with your ally being at war with your other ally. This rule was apparently put in place to keep the larger European wars in factions as they were historically. Actually I feel this works better in PBEM games since players are smarter than the AI and seem to do this more naturally. But it still happens.

Thoughts?

[evwalt]

I am not sure I have ever seen this happen but my 2 cents worth

Wasn't in real life around this period, Poland at war with both Sweden and Russia, who were at war with one another at the same time? Under this rule, that would not be possible.

I would think the easy thing, game wise (I can't speak for programming), would be to remove any DoW restrictions for human players but keep the restriction for computer players to minimize its problems with wars.

[Marshal Villars]

Evwalt, yes, during the Deluge in Poland in the late 1600s, Poland was at war with both Sweden and Russia simultaneously...who were also at war with each other. Sweden basically invaded Poland to keep Russia (their enemy from taking it). However, this is really the only three sided war I can think of in almost all of my reading on the 1618-1804 period.

[morganbj]

The rule was put in place to ensure that anomalous situations didn't arise during detailed combat. The code was too complicated to sort out the relationships that might exist among three different players. The same might be true for QC, but I know Eric cited detailed battles as the reason several times during production.