This would have merits and.... reverse merits?

The merits would be less steamrolling, the cons would be that I as a player is now supposed to be ranked nr 2 instead of nr 1 (easily done though).

I think the score system should mean less with whom the ai decide to go to war with...
But I have odd ideas about everything I guess.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

The thing I did to solve this ganging up on the weak diplomacy issue was to link wonders to the influence resource. This seems unrelated, but when larger factions are spending all their influence on wonders, the weaker factions can save it up. Saving it up in my mod greatly increases relations. So you can specialize your cities in diplomacy by hoarding every bit of influence. You also get alot from Prestige, which can be strategically accumulated with the right faction traits. I hope the vanilla game includes some more in depth factors like this for diplomatic relations.

And this

Unfortunately, I can only do what modding allows. I have a better setup as far as relations overall. For instance, if a faction has +1 Faction Power over you, they will not change their demeanor. That setting has been increased so that they need +100 Faction power to feel a little superior. They need 200 to feel very powerful. They need +500 to feel they are dominating you. That was from +1, +20, +50 in vanilla. So there are some problems like this that I can solve. I can't add new factor to relations yet, but I have made a request for the devs to increase what we can do. There are other things that I did, like make the close borders penalty high enough to start a war. These things are balanced with each other so that a strong faction only goes to war with nearby weak factions. Little things like that are so very needed to fix diplomacy. Increasing the penalty for starting a war prevents the dog pile effect as well.

Influence is a powerful thing. It ties diplomacy into every possible game mechanic. For instance, I can make a quest that could give you enough influence to avoid a war. I could even make a quest that ends all wars in the realm and solidifies your influence dominance. But as many say, some new core mechanics to diplomacy and really Sov-Sov interaction are needed to make this aspect flourish. Hopefully we get some of that in the expansion.

Yes. If you want to take my mod apart and find all the stuff you like, you can add it to your game. I would separate everything, but there is so much content it would take as long as it did to put it together. Honestly, my mod is superior in balance, depth, features. It's more challenging, but for the right reasons.

Although it is easier to negotiate from a position of strength.  If you are 300 points behind, there is not much incentive for another faction to ally themselves with you and declare war on the faction that is 300 points ahead of you, and 150 points ahead of the one you are asking.

If the faction that is the farthest ahead asks the middle of the road guy to go kill you, there is much more incentive to do so.

On the other hand, if you're 300 points behind the leader and someone else is 150 points behind the leader, then an alliance between you and the guy 150 points behind the leader will at least bring the sum of your power ratings closer to the leader's power rating, and may even surpass the leader's power rating (if the leader had a power rating greater than 450). Alternatively, depending on the relative difference in power between me (lagging 300 points behind the leader) and you (lagging 150 points behind the leader), I might look like a tempting target for you to take over to reduce the gap between you and the leader - but if I'm at 300, you're at 450, and the leader is at 600, I should look like a strong enough target that you would consider not invading me to make up the difference in power, and I'm also a strong enough faction where I should be a viable ally for you to consider in a bid to challenge the leader. If this were something less close (say I'm at 30, you're at 180, and the leader is at 330), I'd be a very tempting target to take over in a bid to reduce the leader's lead, since I'm not strong enough (at least by power rating) without allies to challenge you in a war, and I'm also not strong enough to bring much to an alliance with you, unless by bringing me into an alliance you could secure my allies for your attempt against the leader. Absolute differences in power can be very misleading, and are a rather poor basis for the diplomatic modifiers.

I personally think that the diplomacy modifiers based off of power ratings should be based on the relative difference in strength rather than the absolute difference in strength (so, (my_strength - your_strength)/(my_strength) when determining my diplomatic modifiers towards you, and (your_strength - my_strength)/(your_strength) when determining your diplomatic modifiers towards me) since there at least should be huge differences between the difficulties of defeating a nation of power 30 when your power is 330, and defeating a nation of power 300 when your power is 600, and defeating a nation of power 3000 when your power is 3300. In the first situation I should completely dominate the lesser nation, in the second I should still be dominant, but it should take a fair amount of my strength (roughly half) since the opposing nation, while weaker than my own, is at least closer to being in the same weight class. In the final case given, I should not have wanted to go to war with that particular enemy unless I was certain that I could focus my Empire's full strength against that particular nation, or that the other surviving nations are so weak that they could not threaten me even in conjunction with my target. Strength 3000 versus strength 3300 should be a very tough war, with only small changes in the strategic situation having the potential to greatly tip the balance of power. If two such nations were to fight one another, the stronger should still need to put about 90% of its strength into the war effort if 100% of the strength of its opponent is involved.

"I like war, don't you?" means they are a warlike faction and gets negative bonuses to everyone to simulate their desire for war (it's not a question).

"We want to bring order to the world" means they think they got the game in the bag (their score is high) and are pushing to the finish line (by mowing over everyone else). The stronger they are, the higher the penalty.

As for the OP, I don't think it should be one way or the other. Wars of opportunity (like it is now) SHOULD exist, picking on weaker factions to grow stronger is something I think we all can understand. However, there should also be times when you see a certain faction growing too strong and several factions band together to take them on. This would probably make a far more ideal "final war" situation. I think there's room for both type, and more varied responses (depending on faction/leader) would make the game better than just making it one way or the other.

The AI should both Destroy very weak factions AND gang up on very powerful ones, while also looking for opportunities to declare war on those that are already engaged. Anyone who has played MP Dom3 enough knows this is the strategy.  Weak nations, you take over and you do so very fast before another can attack it or you and force you to fight on multiple fronts.  When a single nation starts to become very powerful, the other middle nations should gang up on it to take it down, otherwise they are giving in to defeat.

True, the AI is pretty clueless, one of the reasons I disregard the AI in the current game and call it a game for conquest. (I like when diplomacy is actually important )

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

i approve of this thread.