Alliances with - relations

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In a game I played recently I was Sweden and I had an alliance with Hannover and Saxony. I had 6 diplomats and nothing to do with them since I had royal marriages with the entire christian Europe, so I tried to expand my alliance. Just for fun I tried to invite Morocco to my alliance. At the time relations were -89 or something and to my surprise they accepted! I also asked Crimea, and they also accepted despite -70 relations.
Is it supposed to be like this? This was the first time I tried IGC 1.9, did it change anything, cause I thought you had to have +relations to get another country to enter your alliance.
Anyone else experienced this? Before IGC 1.9 I had never seen this happen.

 

[BiB]

Countries tend to really want to join in an alliance when standing alone for quite some time.

 

[Misha]

Diplomacy & Negative Relations

Interesting. I don't recall often trying to get nations with negative relations into my alliance, although I've always believed that nations you are at -20 with probably would, as there is a +20 relations bump for joining up.

I must admit I was quite surprised to discover that you could get nations with negative relations to enter royal marriages. After I had been rejected at +15 repeatedly, I just figured that was the bottom limit. But in one game like RL14, I had some extra diplomats, & nothing to use them for, & tried for an RM with someone with -50 relations - & they accepted, much to my surprise! Much testing since then indicates that from -149 to -5, RMs are possible & again from +21 to +200. Only in the -200 to -150 & -4 to +20 ranges am I consistently rejected.

I guess the reasoning is that friendly nations will RM as a sign of friendliness, while somewhat hostile nations will RM as a bond of security. Very hostile nations avoid the RM as a possible crimp on future aggressiveness with you, while neutral nations are neither worried about you nor like you enough to RM. Interesting, but undocumented of course.