Formal War Declaration

[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.