I agree that we should be able to declare war even if the AI is too busy to talk to us about the matter. This is something that people will deem to be silly

Why is the AI too busy to talk?

It seems that every time you conclude a treaty or make a trade, the other sovereign is so overcome by your glorious presence that they need a few years to recover.

...

A developer must have put it in there as a temporary measure to prevent some abuse, and no one bothered cleaning it up.

Fixed in the next patch.  The exploit was that you could decalre war against weak players then force them to give you money for peace, repeat forever.

The fix is a fairly simple one.  From now on the "to busy" check only happens if you are at war.  If you aren't at war then you can contact them as many times as you want.

But you can't sue for surrender unless you are at war. Often, I wipe out a faction's cities, and then want to sue for surrender to obtain the sovereign....but he's always 'too busy'. Too busy getting his butt kicked....he should be willing to have an audience with his better.

In addition, when a sovereign surrenders to you, you get him added to your fold, though with a negative trait applied. This is a really cool feature, though left very incomplete.

If he's 'too busy', you are forced to kill him instead....and you don't get him added to the fold. But sovereign's can't die?!? I recommend him surrendering to you at the last minute...just like he 'escapes at the last minute', but he receives a different negative trait; something that better reflects getting stomped on.

Lastly, there are times when a faction gives up. All their cities are razed. He/she stands there doing nothing. This makes no sense. Imo, first off, the cities should not be razed, but should at the very least become neutral cities, comfortable with simply sustaining themselves. Second of all, the faction sovereign should be as obtainable as if he were a hired hero. There could be a tech for 'Sovereign hiring'. There could be a cost associated with hiring a sovereign. Most importantly, there should be a negative trait added that is reflective of the sovereign's new underwhelming status as mercenary.

Yea, I can't stand the cities razing themselves in a histrionic fit.  I once saw AI Relias rage quit when he still had 7 cities.  7!  A whole area of the game was left open where he quit.  What are we going to do, move in late game and build cities?  Cities that take hundred years to be worth a damn?  Boo to that.  

You HAVE to be kidding. 50 turns? My average war does last a quarter of that. I doubt I have ever been at war for 50.

Agreed. I thought the 10 turns was too long.

Very good news indeed! Another of the nasty issues like autocombat fixed. This already fantastic game is getting better an better and I come more and more to the conclusion that the first real successor for Master of Magic has finally arrived after 21 years!

Am I too ecstatic to predict FE's impact on the turnbased market to be the same as Baldurs Gate's on the RPG market? Probably, but BG had everything what all RPG fans were waiting for at this time and the same goes for FE. Hopefully the (deserved) bad reputation of Elemental doesn't impair it's success too much. For me, the main problem with the original Elemental were not the bugs and crashes. It simply wasn't fun to play and getting boring after a short time. FE is exactly the opposite.

Even if there is still much work to do on FE (the AI is getting better but still has many issues and is IMHO the most important factor for long time motivation), the old feeling of "just one more turn" is already very strong.

Thanks for this gem!

I would think that a better fix to stop people declaring war again would be to either enforce the peace treaty for (say) 10 turns, or to have a reputation that goes very negative so that the AI's wont trust you again (with money for peace) if you declare war again immediately.

But there is a bug where you can contact a civ that is busy if at least one faction you can talk to, and then you use the arrows to go to that busy AI.  Can you fix that (possibly by removing them from the arrow list when they are busy)?

How about just making the AI deny requests for peace at the same turn, meaby boosting the declare war/agree to peace logic? If someone declares war to them more often than once, they should pay less and less because they might see a pattern here.
If you make it "smart enough" in that section, you would not have to have the "Too busy to talk" thing in, since that's just annoys players (well annoys me anyways)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej