I recently became trapped in a perpetual war with a neighboring faction. Due to geography of the large map the conflict was fought across a tiny front of maybe 40 hexes. This war went on for a long time: it began just as I had launched my first medium ship, and ended when I achieved a science victory.
Now I’m not complaining as such, while these infinite wars common occurrence, this last match has been the most intense game I’ve had. Certainly things were touch and go for a long time; every victorious fleet was crushed by the brand new fleet from the enemy, each new weapon met with new defenses etc. But eventually it got to a point where for every fleet they lost I would lose maybe a ship. And after that the damage to my fleet was caused by pieces of enemy crew smudging the paintwork.
And here lies the problem. I know the AI responds to being roundly beaten, but as I was role-playing a bit I didn’t especially want to conquer their planets I just wanted peace. It’d be nice not to have to eliminate a faction (or near as) to get peace.
Given how much war material they lost, couldn’t the AI have some sort of war attrition metric built in? Nothing that affects stats as such – it would be a pain to have ones production or moral hurt because the AI is too dumb to accept peace – but a decision metric that made peace more likely; to state verbally, “after 10 fleet battles, if I have lost 70% of the battles seek peace, if I’ve lost 95% beg for peace”. If we assume the AI has been successful, say taken a planet, make the decision be something like “if planet has been take, ignore the next 10 battle outcomes”.
Some sort of algorithm that meant one is not left swatting wave after wave of numerous but totally outclassed ships out of the stars would be nice
Just a thought