Age of Wonders 4: Grievances and Wars

by Fernando Diaz / Age of Wonders 4, Articles / 03 May 2021

Grievances are past actions that an empire has carried out against another empire. They can arise from simple actions like trespassing and ignoring province claims or more serious actions like breaking treaties. Grievances play a vital role in diminishing relations with other rulers and generating war justifications.

Actions that Add Grievances

Being insulted upon first encountering another empire

Being spotted in another empire’s territory without an Open Borders treaty

Building on a province claimed by another empire without a Province-Claiming Pact treaty

Being attacked by another empire

Fabricated Grievances

Managing Grievances

If you intend to wage war, it’s essential to gather grievances against your opponent while preventing them from accruing grievances against you. However, sometimes it’s impossible to avoid grievances. In such cases, you can pay the other ruler to forget a grievance, but there’s a limit to how much the AI will forget at a given time. You can also sell your grievances for 10 gold per severity or forgive them, which will yield an alignment bonus and a temporary bonus to relations with both parties.

War Justification

War justification is needed to declare war on another ruler. Without enough justification, your relations with other rulers and free cities will suffer, as will your empire’s Imperium income. The balance of grievances on both sides determines the war justification. The levels of war justification and their effects are:

Completely Unjust (-51): -80% Imperium, gain Evil alignment, lose relations with all empires

Very Unjust (-50 to -26): -60% Imperium, gain Evil alignment, lose relations with all empires

Unjust (-1 to -25): -40% Imperium, gain Evil alignment, lose relations with all empires

None (0): -20% Imperium, gain Evil alignment, lose relations with all empires

Minor (1 to 25): 0% Imperium, gain Evil alignment, lose relations with all empires

Moderate (26 to 50): +10% Imperium, gain relations with all vassals

Major (51+): +20% Imperium, gain relations with all vassals

Gaining Grievances for War

If you plan for war, you can fabricate grievances or gain them through a call to war from an ally. Answering a call to war requires a response within three turns and may break your diplomatic state if declined. When joining an ally’s war, they will share the grievances used to declare the war, which should allow you to declare a justified war.

Declaring War and Vassals

When declaring war, the game compares the armies of both empires and their allies. Vassal cities and vassalized rulers are automatically drawn into their overlord’s wars and can only exit when the overlord resolves the conflict. Vassals can improve relations with others, but they cannot declare wars or have wars declared on them, as these interactions must go through their overlord.

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Fernando Diaz

Fernando is doing what he always did, sharing his honest opinions about games whenever he can. The difference is now he is writing and not talking about it.
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