It hasnt actually happened to me. And i'm not really sure what the problem is. Yes i know it puts the plaer in a tough spot, but thats the game, you make your decision based on your strategy.

What i mean is, that i dont know what kind of information from the AI a player might expect. It makes its own decisions and we have to deal with them. Making those treaties is sometimes a heavy decision to make.

Sorry but i like this stuff.

A tough spot is a good thing, but this is a deeply illogical spot, IMO. I'm not saying that I expect a sudden increase in diplo intel for TA. What I am asking for is a tweak to the context so that choosing to honor an alliance outweighs the "dishonor" of breaking a treaty with someone who attacked your ally.

In other words, I think that an AI who has a treaty with me and attacks one of my allies is *the one who broke the treaty.* I'm the innocent party, but I get the black mark, and not the aggressor AI. Good relations are hard enough to maintain as-is.

Agreed.

However, I don't think that the AIs really take alliances into consideration well enough. If the weakest civ is allied with the largest, a middle power civilisation will happily declare war on the the weak civ and then acts surprised when they get their asses handed to them.

What bothers me, though, is that honouring an alliance is viewed by everyone else as an act of aggression, which seems counter intuitive. It gets bad, though, when attacking one civ leads to a fantastic series of world war one style conflicting alliances. It's not that this is a bad setup... it is, in fact, one of the risks of any alliance. However, the AI's lack of foresight in this regard is often frustrating.

Starstriker's right on the money here about this major AI weakness.

Several times, I've watched an AI that was "on my list" walk right into the trap described here when I was the largest civ and working twoards a diplo win. A move like that also seems to make it easier to persuade other AIs to attack the stupid mid-ranked aggressor.