What is the "Land Target Rule"?

Can anyone tell me what the land target rule is and where I can read about? I have seen references in several threads and in TMIT's youtube games. Is it possible that there are 2 rules by this name, one involving AI war targeting and one involving AI capitulation?

Capitulation - The victim will give up faster if there are enemy cities bordering them.

War targetting - The AI knows that it sucks at naval invasions, so it heavily favors targets on the same continent.

Makes sense...but how does one abuse either of these?

stefista said:

Makes sense...but how does one abuse either of these?

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Lets say you have two other civs on your continent. When you go to war with one of them and start taking it's cities, you leave the cities next to the third civs borders. This will make them capitulate more easily, since they both have borders to each other.

The AI will count you as a land target if 8 (that's what I was told) of your tiles are adjacent to their tiles. Diagonal tiles count too. The AI will value land targets over "worst enemy" which in fact doesn't mean diddly squat when the AI is planning a war - it will instead heavily weight the fact that there's a potential roast bordering them.

How does one abuse this? Reminds me of our late Co-op da Whoop game, Dario, where we had the Stalin/Burger King combo as our northern borders. Stalin however settled so awkwardly that he actually left a tiny belt of jungle between his border and ours which meant that we never became a land target until very late in the game. Stalin doesn't value cultural buildings very high and we took care we didn't either just to avoid this. They did declare war but it wasn't on us but instead on another AI that was behind us. I don't think they would've "thought" twice if we had had a 8 tile border with them but since we didn't, they took other things into account.