Quote Originally Posted by Pinxit View Post
Play with reason and the game respons with reason. That is my experience of the game so far playing 3 campaigns.
My experience is the opposite: in a game as the United Provinces I wanted to remain a 1 province in Europe and keep my original colonies and that was it, I wanted to play out the campaign as a small nation in-between giants. Pretty reasonable. It started well, but after the first few years World War I began breaking out in Europe, but unlike the real WWI this one is neverending for all parties involved...

That ruined the game for me because, obviously, after a while, they came for me, even though I had good relations with everybody, and no matter what I offered I couldn't get Peace Treaties.

This is the only issue in diplomacy I wish was fixed. A neverending WWI breaks out in every single game. Perhaps deleting the Historical Grievances modifier could help a little... I can live without tech-trading, but the suicidal AI makes the campaign game irrelevant, it's just a big mess with everybody fighting everybody, might aswell just skip it all and go play Custom Battles or multiplayer.

Sometimes it does accept peace, but in the vast majority of the time the AI refuses even the most favourable of peace treaties, even if it has no armies left and its last city is besieged. The effect of having no armies left and their last city besieged should increase their willingness to surrender and accept peace dramatically.

I came to Empire:TW right out of Europa Universallis III, which I was using to fill my thrist for Empire, and comparing the experiences when I started noticing the inevitable WWI behavior I couldn't help but think the campaign aspect of the game is almost one big waste, in the end you're at war with everybody, except for one or two nations or if you luck it out. And if you won those wars you are now a Super-Mega-Power and the game is pretty much over, mopping up the rest of the map wouldn't be a challenge, just an auto-resolve chore.

EUIII isn't perfect by any means, nor has tactical battles, but the developers and players of Empire should try it out to see how nice and fun and reasonable a campaign AI can be.