First, those two turns were not selected because they show an absence of the AI's anomolous behavior; they were selected because they were close enough to the period of extrema that they should still exhibit the behavior in spades, which the one labeled Turn 12 certainly does. That's why I keep referring to it as some sort of "breaking point".
I've had different results playing from the save game labeled Turn 14 until 261 BC, because sometimes in addition to Pontus gaining a territory, the Egyptians and Seleucids will exchange one as well. This might just be due to a different roll of the dice in an autocalc situation.
I decided to move a little further back toward the point of extrema, and started at Turn 10 instead, since it seems to be on the other side of the "breaking point". I played forward to turn 19 without any save loads or making any new alliances, anticipating that the AI would exhibit its standard behavior and that by turn 14 there would be an equal number of territorial acquisitions to those that were in my save game.
Unfortunately, the results were not exactly what I expected. The AI was actually less aggressive up to turn 14, as there was precisely one less territorial acquisition. Pontus neglected to take a rebel territory. I don't know if the lack of alliances had any effect on this or not. However, if I continue playing from this point without save/loads until turn 19, Pontus remains dormant and Brittania and Carthage become more active.
I think I've discovered why "toggle_fow" must be typed twice to turn off fog of war. The fog-of-war flag is set to whatever is in the preferences.txt file and is overridden, but does not change value, by the information in the load game. Hence, if the fog-of-war flag is set to FALSE in preferences.txt, the first time you type it it will be set to TRUE and the new value is applied immediately to the game, so that fog of war stays enabled as it was marked in the save file. On the second invocation, it gets reset to FALSE and fog of war gets disabled.
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