Like a large number of players, I've been noticing that by the middle of the game, the end-game results seems to be a foregone conclusion... oftentimes, my empire is big enought that I don't need to bother finishing the game.

I really liked the change that Brad inputed to the AI where they pay attention to aggressive civilizations and will band together and go after them. But... I was thinking about what would happen if AI's became friendlier with each other as they grow weaker.

Think about it. If there was a "+Strength in numbers factor" that modified your foreign relationship. This factor would appear with the smaller empires. That way, they could band together to prevent a big fish from taking them on even if the superpower wasn't acting aggressively. This would allow the superpower to be identified before they could starting getting aggressive and picking off the small fish one at a time. It would also produce some interesting results in which a bad starting position, might give you the chance to become part of a coalition and take over the superpower...

Brad... what do you think?