You only get locked to an Eternal War if you feel the need to keep on piling more wargoals and won't personally accept less than all of them, silly.
Nah, that happens anyway: Let's say you start with a very simple goal: One state. You invade, you kill everyone, you take the state. Now, in CK, you sit on it for a bit, eventually your opponent comes to the realization he ain't getting it back, and decides that at this point, it's fair enough to call it quits.
Not so here: With no armies to slaughter, that war is just going to stay static forever. Now what? Well, you could continue invading him, but then the problem continues: You sack another state. Now he's lost TWO states, but no, he's even LESS willing to call it quits than before. He'll just keep annoying you with single unit trickles indefinitely. Which, incidentally, does next to nothing for your warscore when you kill them. And it was going to go nowhere if the state was tasty and combined, even reduced for successful conquest, cost exceeds the score gained from the occupation plus destruction of your opponent's military. If you sack more states to stop this, the problem continues to go unresolved: The cost for his mounting losses continually exceeds his willingness to accept them.
Eventually, you've taken everything. But this still won't be acceptable. This is the point at which you either resort to using "yesmen" to resolve the issue, or you just shrug and just figure this will never be resolved and move on to the next target. This is basically how it plays out every time I've played this game: Even after I've crushed the entire world beneath my shiny black boot, there are just these guys who will never, ever, quit.
And actually, CK2 is the first one to have a more dynamic warscore where occupation of contested area increases warscore indefinately. And that's a very good addition.
Yes, yes it is. I imagine that it was instituted precisely to prevent this kind of problem. Admittedly, it introduces slightly lesser problems where the pointless occupation of some irrelevant vassal territory that isn't even being contested can induce the AI to capitulate when it is otherwise still fighting.
HoI's system of capitulation is very different, and shouldn't be compared.
Well, it's comparable in the sense that the system recognizes total and crushing defeat. This game, on the other hand, has a habit of pressing you into wars of total annihilation where an opponent would rather fight to total annihilation than accept any form of limited defeat...which is fine, except it also doesn't recognize total annihilation, either.
EU3 technically doesn't have a chance of getting locked into an Eternal War, since your wargoal only affects demand costs, infamy and prestige gain.
Yeah, I haven't actually really played EU3. The process of setting it up was just too confusing with all the various patches, expansions, mods, and whatnot that I allegedly needed for this or that. It felt distinctly cumbersome and inaccessible compared to all the other ones I've played.