I definitely can confirm and express my dislike towards the AIs not going to war, ever, in the 8-18 version (using the base Comm.Patch). Recent games:
- Emperor diff, Large, 10 civs: I wiped out one civ early on in the game, no one hated me. I took a runaway's capital, with the tooltip saying that a lot of my neighbours would be "extremely upset" - nothing happened, no denouncements, friendliness and lucrative luxury trades ensued. Rinse and repeat, no one bats an eye as I conquer next civs.
- Immortal diff, Large, 12 civs: less space, but still no wars in 150 turns of playing. Even from super-aggressive civs like the Goths (modded). Accidentally declared war on a civ, another paid me to sign peace, the attacked civ wasn't upset at all after signing the peace treaty, lucrative trade ensued. It's as if absolutely nothing happened.
Previous version of the CommPatch had more reasonable approach to war and denouncements (civs disliked me because I took other cities and capitals, disliked me because of ideologies, different friendships, declared wars on me instead me on them, warmonger penalties were working, all as normal) and a wider variety of moods than Neutral and Friendly. I do hope this is going to be addressed in future updates to CP.
Seems like people doesn't really seem to understand the reasoning behind this, so I will explain. AFAIK while the (standard/expansive) AI is expanding, the AI is far less likely to build up an army to attack someone (expanding involves using hammers and gold on infrastructure as well as defense meaning there's less hammers left for soldiers). As long as the AI has room to expand, the AI will keep expanding, when the room runs out the AI will usually focus on other things including building an army (this of course excludes AI with specific goals, who will instead focus on them, they can be building wonders of trying to take capitals, getting ahead in science and whatever).
The reasoning why you're seeing less aggression in these later versions is because expansion was tuned down, meaning there is more room left for a longer period of time, this leads to the expansive AI not actually having to DOW people early on as there is plenty of land left to grab.
This being said, playing on smaller maps the AI is definitely still aggressive as all hell, on a small sized Oval map the map runs out of space in the classical era and you usually see a DoW at that point, especially if someone really expansive is in the game.
It does make sense on paper, but does not work in the game. One can breeze through a game on Normal-Large maps without ever seeing conflict between any civ, 80-90% of the time. I did not see wars in 8-18 version even when settling space ran out by the Renaissance. It was a terrifying stagnantion across the board. I, and most likely a lot of other players, do not appreciate that.
