It's usually well known here that the AI sometimes gets like a bulldog in war, bites down and won't let go. Often it fights to the last man, without surrendering even against inevitable odds. But I've been looking over many historical wars (the many punic wars). It seems that Carthage lost several wars, and only on the last one were they burned to the ground and wiped out... unlike the AI, where there will be only one Punic war, to the death. At first I used to assume this was a fault in hard-coded diplomacy. But then I got to thinking, isn't that how modern wars are often fought? Iraq, and Japan and Germany in WWII. They fought ferociously all the way back to the homeland, and didn't give up when a few islands were taken by superior forces. Has war, then, changed from the Punic days? Do countries fight to the bitter end more often than they used to? I can't imagine someone invading Puerto Rico with an overwhelming army, and the US saying "Ah, looks like we lost the war, since they got the islands. Let's sign a treaty, and not fight to the bitter end", but isn't that pretty much what happened in the early stage of the Punic struggles? Or maybe all this analysis is silly, and it's just a messed up diplomatic system no matter how you look at it. ;)