minor civs shouldn't be looking to conquer major ones?
I like the question mark here.
First a digressive-related complaint. Pretty much since the beginning of time (as in all through GC2 and maybe 1 as well?), the math behind the Military rating and the "ripe for conquest" values has been really weak. Long ago, I read some threads from code-and-math-wise players who soundly critiqued it, but I never managed to follow/find any constructive discussion on improvements.
These days, I am still regularly annoyed/amused by AIs that call me ripe for conquest even though my small, hi-tech fleets have pretty much eaten the face off of the gigantic horde of an AI that the game ranks higher than them. (It also remains wildly entertaining and hugely irritating that AIs will declare war when it would take them a hundred turns or more to get a plausible attack underway.)
As far as feisty minors go, I would be quite pleased to see one take advantage of my tendency to stay in development mode for a long while and actually seize one of my outlying worlds. The current AIs are training me to start fleet-building sooner than seems 'reasonable' to me on account of the above-mentioned weirdness in the Military rating and diplomacy code.
Basically, your question mark has made me start fantasizing about a major change to minors code that could have them able to conquer mini-empires (at least on larger maps) with something like a distance limit from the home world. Or maybe just an expanded set of options for the minors so players with different interests in this area could get different results. Maybe the eventual major diplomacy overhaul could include developing the minors along the lines of the independent city-states in Civ V.
