I fully agree with the diplomacy points and that it's too easy to get along. I have noticed some distinct behavior there that can hopefully be changed to make it more challenging:
- As soon as an AI turns green / friendly, 99% of the time they will accept your friendship request immediately on that turn or next. If you have researched alliances, again 99% of the time they accept that as well. There seems to be a very low attitude threshold currently. e.g. at cumulative attitude 5 it turns friendly/green but accept friendship should be a much higher value like 50. Same to alliance. More turns need to be pass for friendships to 'ripen', right now it happens too fast. Interestingly though, this happens mostly between AI-human player. I see many AI-AI that are friendly to one another but don't declare formal friendship or alliance. So it favors the human player which is the opposite of what we want.
- Once you are in an alliance, you are basically "locked in" for the rest of the game. You can beat wipe out their religion, cause grievances, get a bunch of negative diplo modifiers. Say you have so many grievances that you have a net -40. This becomes irrelevant because as soon as the alliance expires and they are still friendly, at that very turn, 90% of the time you can go and re-declare friendship and alliance. AIs need to have some cool down or grace period after such agreements expire so their attitude value can adjust. My understanding is that the -8, +4 etc modifiers we see on the UI are the per turn change, and behind the scenes there is some hidden cumulative attitude value x. So during an alliance this x is locked at a high value like e.g. 50. Right after the alliance expires, even if you are supposed to get a -40 per turn, it doesn't matter because you can renew that very turn, before the values re-adjust.
- This one is rule-change need outside scope but will point out nevertheless: it is silly that you can declare friendships and alliances with everyone and even if the whole world is at war, you can stay "neutral" and not have to choose sides. In most games involving diplomacy, your allies or friends attacking one another would force you to choose sides - e.g. you either join war on one side and piss off the other, or cancel your alliance status with both and cause grievances to both. You shouldn't be allowed to stay neutral while still having an alliance pact.
