If you declare two wars, your a warmonger and repeatedly denounced, attack and capture a city state, and your an international outlaw. .
I've heard this before, maybe it was you saying it, but what is your source for the 1 free war thing?
There are the .XML categories for AI's opinion on warmonger status. It is
NOT an on-off switch.
The higher the number the more they hate you.
Code:
Warmonger (They believe you are a warmonger)
Critical 100 Severe 70 Major 40 Minor 15 None
There are also specific opinion modifiers like capturing capitals +80 enmity, and reckless expansion +35 enmity (though this could also be related to settlement)
I don't doubt the game could keep track the number of wars you start. But it's certainly not an on-off switch.
Also, using a defensive war to expand, which was a popular exploit from Civ3/civ4 days as the human wouldn't get dinged with a warmonger penalty, no longer works. As you capture more and more cities, you could acquire land the AI wants and they will still hate you for it.
Code:
Land (They covet our land)
Fierce 30 Strong 20 Weak 10 None -6
Oh and maybe people weren't aware of this. Killing a city state is like eliminating a Civ. It's never practical to kill more than a few. In most games I kill none.
as for your comment of the AI not following 'rules' play a game with info-addicit mod. It has an international diplomacy tooltip that shows you the AI's opinion on each other, and they very clearly follow the same rules.
On topic. Where's your source for the 1 free war in Civ5? There's nothing in the .XML as of last August, and we havent had a major patch since.
Here's my study of the .XML
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=439101
This thread has made it amply clear that people continue to use Civ4 logic to judge Civ5 diplomacy. Which while not perfect and needs work in several areas, is being vastly undersold.
Really diplomacy works hmm so thats why there are so many threats like this and others that complain or point out major problems with the AI
First of all, AI is a broad subject. combat/economic/diplomacy. Thread title is vague and people are generally complaining about everything. And this isn't new. I've been writing about AI since Civ3 days and ways to improve it.
combat AI for Civ has always been terrible, I think the difference is you have a group of people looking back at the old games with rose colored glasses thinking grass was greener. It wasn't. Civ4 was just a very refined game with the stacking system with a lot of limiting rules to hide the AI's weakspots. I suspect Civ6 , if 1upt is kept, will add new restrictions on how units can be used/moved to hide AI's weakness in this area.
Diplomacy is just different. I don't really blame people for not getting it, Firaxis has done a poor job of documenting it through interviews/previews and the in-game tooltips suck. They need to get infoaddict style features into the expansion. I recommend people play a game or 2 with infoaddict mod, the game keeps track of a lot of things, behind the scenes and the mod shows you that data. None of it will give you an advantage. Just more graphs and charts rather than the game's vague default tools.