"AI now less fond of peaces that result in enemy territory being split up into multiple parts"

[Chaingun]

They do it less frequently, you'll still see plenty of cases where it happens.

Yes, I could entirely force a behavior where AI doesn't ever split up opponents when avoidable, but then it would play worse than otherwise: There are fair reasons to pick a better province that splits up an enemy, and there are currently no penalties for doing so. Not saying that the latter is an ideal state of affairs - there's a fair chance we might introduce such penalties in the future.

 

[Chaingun]

Why should splitting a country in two not be valid? Historically that tactic was used by at least the Swedes. The point being that it severely weakens the opponent and perhaps even allows you to easily gobble up one of the parts later.

Where have I said we would make it invalid? Regardless, you have to admit placing stretches of your own territory inside someone else's isn't a 100% beneficial strategy completely without downsides. The game does simulate some of the downsides already, but arguably not to the extent where the player will stop think doing it to the AI ("ugliness" excepted).

 

[Chaingun]

Who do you think benefits the most when the AI countries are messing each others up?

 

[Chaingun]

By that logic you should make the AI less likely to declare war on other AIs.

Correct, this is exactly one of the considerations that goes into AI war declaration frequency. Over-aggression leads to weakness (it's pretty obvious with for instance a depleted manpower pool).

 

[Chaingun]

Interesting. What happens when you turn this off?

The reason I (and most players, probably) pretty much never play more than 200 years into a given game is that no AI, no matter how big they start, can match my blobbing speed, which means I inevitably become way bigger than everyone else and there's no point in going on anymore. I didn't know it was intentional.

A more aggressive AI could make lategame more interesting.

I should be careful what I say. I didn't mean to say there's "if player is human" code at normal difficulty, rather, I intended to point out one of the aspects that must be considered when determining how frequently the AI should be at war.

Regarding your particular point that AIs stop growing, I'm pretty sure there's a limit to how large they want to grow that you can mod in the defines IIRC (interest to conquer or something, too tired to look it up right now). The AI will not match a good human's blobbing speed either way because it's simply much more inefficient at everything, and does not formulate "grand strategies", instead being composed of multiple fairly independently operating subsystems.