Not So Dumb Diplomacy: Has something changed recently?

[Didz]

Has there been a patch or something in the last few days, only I'm starting to see a trend towards sensible diplomacy amongst the AI factions. Yesterday, it was a reasonably sensible declaration of war by the French (which went a bit pear-shaped, but actually might have worked). Today I've just had my first ever request for peace from an AI faction.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Quite impressed with this, although four days ago Sweden's declaration of war on my ally Hannover was pretty dumb and pointless. Sweden was (and is) at war with half the world including Denmark who are blockading its only trading port and so even if they wanted to invade Hannover they could not get to it.

Nevertheless, I had no choice but to declare war on Sweden because Hannover asked me too, and not obliging would have severed a historical link between Hannover and Britain. So, I declared war and sent my home fleet into the Baltic.

There wasn't really much for it to do, the Danes had pretty much got the Swedes bottled up in their ports and going nowhere, and Russia was knocking on the gates of St. Petersburg. But I kept my fleet busy destroying every Swedish port every turn and forcing them to repair them again before bombarding them to ruin again. And I was pretty much prepared to keep doing that for the rest of the game if necessary.

Then I got the above proposal which is pretty much the most sensible thing the Swedes could do. The only thing missing of course is the peace deal with Hannover, but as making a seperate peace deal with them will not damage my relationship with Hannover I think I can accept the deal and just keep a watching brief on any hostile move against my ally.

So, like they say two's a coincidence, but if this carries on I might have to conclude that CA have done something right at last.