Formal War Declaration

[AnrDaemon]

This is not a tournament. As people say it, "last battle wins the war."
If you manage to save structure when it comes out of reinforcement, you "win". For how long, is a different question.

[Deantwo]

2022-01-23, 15:21:

A Declaration of War is still the best reason to institute a waiting period before an attack. The defender could accept the declaration at any time during a set period (say 24 hrs) beginning the war immediately. If the was no reply before the time period ends then the attacker can begin. Any colonies or structures are not covered by a jurisdiction are unprotected and may be attacked without a declaration. The time period would work across an entire empire and not just a single system. Once it's up, any of the defenders systems could be attacked.

The idea of this was discussed in the past, and not only did people seemingly hate the idea, it also has a lot of issues.
See: (Idea thread) Formal War Declaration

We didn't discuss this in the thread, but a lot of exploitable holes come up when you think about the idea further.
Examples:

• Attacker declare war on your empire. You surrender all your cities to a neutral third-party empire.
  
• Attacker declare war on your empire and all third-party neutral empires. You create a new empire and surrender your cities to it.
  
• Attacker creates a new empire and transfer all their warships to it. You want to fight back, but the waring empire has no cities for you to attack.
  
• You declare war on attacker's main empire. You are now considered the aggressor in that war and the attacker surrenders their cities to an ally.
  

So in the end that idea was abandoned and I had this fantastic idea about declaring war on a location instead of a non-physical entity such as an empire. I made an idea thread about this idea and it has gotten popular, I suggest you read it.
Here: (Idea thread) Conquest of Solar Systems

If you simply prevent the surrender of worlds while a war declaration is pending, you would still have an issue. The defender would simply accept the declaration while everyone is offline and then immediately surrender all cities to aforementioned alt empire or third-party.

If you remove the function to surrender worlds during a war, then you are preventing people from accepting ultimatums without first ending the war. Have to trust the surrendering empire to actually surrender the agreed upon worlds after the war has ended seem unreliable.

[Deantwo]

The best way to have this work if you really want to go all out, would be if the attacker designated a number of solar system at the time of declaring war. Then have the designated solar systems be locked in a un-surrenderable state, instead giving the defender an option to surrender the war which then automatically surrender the designated solar systems to the attacker.

While the war is going on the defender could then declare war against the attacker, designating solar systems they want if they even believe they can fight back. Simply have any aggressive wars by the defender towards the attacker immediately end if the empire surrender to a defensive war against the attacker.

The major issues with this is that it requires a lot of intel about your enemy. An attacker needs to know about all the solar systems they want to attack/capture beforehand, and possibly also need to be able to designate more solar systems during the war.
You can't have this simply automatically designate all the worlds belonging to the defender, because the defender might have far off hidden bases that the attacker shouldn't just randomly be allowed to take over because they won a tiny local war in the main cluster.

Some players here might recognize this idea as having a lot in common with games like Stellaris and other strategic war games. So I would love to hear you guys' ideas on this subject. My main issue is in believing a system like this could be implemented perfectly on the first try.