I agree that this phenomenon happened in vanilla MTW/VI as well. However, I don't think Digital is imagining things, as I've noticed that it does happen more often in XL.

I still wouldn't exactly call it a *frequent* event, fortunately. I would say, however, that a faction surrendering its last province without a fight happens at least twice as often in XL as it does in the original game. I know that VikingHorde did change the AI scripts for some of the factions, so I wonder if that has something to do with it.