AI accepting equal peace while still demanding unequal peace

[Trigan Emperor]

I've noticed, when negotiating peace with the AI, that if they are prepared to negotiate peace, then they will always accept an equal peace, even if they are still making demands. So, often they will refuse to negotiate peace, saying there is still fighting to be done, but if they are prepared to negotiate, even if still making demands like the player ceding cities to them, then one can remove their demands from the table and they will always accept an equal peace.

I have mixed feelings about this, and am unsure if its supposed to be like this or a bug. Often it happens when they're besieging my city and likely to capture it. So on the one hand, my civilization has probably been saved once or twice by the AI conceding to a stalemate while having the upper hand. And on the other hand, the AI is pretty stupid anyway and so it feels like a bit of a cheat to deny them victory so cheaply.

Any thoughts? Foremost, is it a bug?

 

[claudiupb]

This is a well know behavior. From what I remember this was introduced somewhere in the BNW expansion to fix an issue where the AI would not accept white peace even if it's losing, and demanding stuff from you. This can be seen if you try a G&K game.
In my opinion this is an exploit, but I also use it early in the game when stealing settlers and/or workers. AI will usually accept peace after a few turns but it also wants everything you got, so I just make white peace with them.

 

[beetle]

There is patch note someplace where the developer write about doubling the number peace conditions. As @claudiupb describes, that did not fix the problematic behavior of the AI. With the next patch, apparently, the developers introduced this “white peace bug”. This new behavior was never noted in patch notes.

 

[Trigan Emperor]

Thanks. I've decided to treat it as a bug and not exploit it then.