How to avoid perma-war?

[athanaric]

all advices are good... but if the game was to forment peace with every body, it wouldn't be called ''Total War''... it would have been... ''total diplomatic Intrigues''...

The title "Total War" was likely chosen as some sort of catch phrase, a memorable name carrying powerful connotations. However, real life total war tends to be a horrific thing which doesn't very often occur in human history. I can't see how the actions of, say, the Taliban (one of the factions that wages total war in our time) could be entertaining to recreate in a video game.
I'd say the "Total War" thing was taken a little bit too literally by the RTW developers. In fact, the idiotically aggressive behaviour of the AI in TW games is the one big flaw in an otherwise brilliant game concept. It's also impeding and limiting the historical accuracy of EB. There are concepts like cooperation or even mere pragmatic non-violent coexistence in real life.
Campaigns in this game get boring over time simply because you're forced to fight an infinite war against the same infinitely dumb enemy. Who is also cheating.