Quote Originally Posted by stufer
This is a problem with RTW 1.2 I think. Remember that the save/load bug is active in this version. When you load up, the AI does some strange things. Such as accepting becoming a protectorate when they are stronger than the other nation. You can get the ai to do these things for you if you want to exploit it. I sometimes exploit it if I want peace with someone and they should by rights surrender but still won't. Mostly, a reload will produce the results you want.

Certainly I experienced this in RTR as well - quite a few times. Should be sorted by the time it moves to 1.5 as that bug is cleared up there.
This makes a lot of sense actually. I always wondered how the ai seemed to be able to create protectorates so easily.