I'm unsure if this is something you can even affect, but here goes: would it be possible to adjust the way AI empires vote on war declarations?

It seems that, the way it is set up in vanilla, the AI empire will look at its own strength and compare it to the war target, and if that result is unfavorable, it will refuse the war.

This, however, is completely missing the point of the federation. The AI empire will never consider that it has allies to rely on. As a result, if a player joins a federation with AI members, then that player will struggle to declare wars in certain situations despite completely overpowering the war target themselves.

I encountered this in my current game. I have two awakened fallen empires in my galaxy, and they are the last challenge left that has yet to be conquered. Both are ranked "pathetic" compared to me. But when I attempt to declare war, the federation war vote window shows the strength of the war target as "overwhelming" - even to me. My assumption is that this is the rating that the weakest AI empire in the federation sees. For some reason, it becomes the rating that is shown to every member of the federation, and then presumably influences their decision. It does not factor in the combined strength of the federation at all, just the strength of its weakest member. Or possibly the strength of its president, which just happened to be the weakest member taking its turn at the time.

All of this is made worse by the fact that war declaration votes are the only type of federation vote you cannot spend favors on. So you can't even beg your allies to say yes just this once despite how bad it looks on paper.

This should definitely be treated as a broken feature, because what's the point of a joint federation war declaration, if not pooling everyone's strength? Additionally, it actively hampers the player's ability to engage challenging endgame content to the point where they are forced to abandon the federation they have worked the entire game to build up, just to be able to continue playing.

The feature request would thus be: make AI empires consider the strength of their whole federation, and not just their own, when voting on a war that a different federation member wishes to start.

Question is - can a patch mod like this one even do this? Or is that "too hardcoded"?