Conquest Battles and Minor Nation Relations

[Panzergraf]

Conquest battles; they some times pop up, and you get the chance to invade a minor nation.

Some times those minor nations, if they've been or are allied to a major nation, have a lot of ships in their ports.
But very very rarely do I get a Strike Missions VS those ports. Some times I do, usually I don't.

This makes me wonder, when we're conquest-invading a minor nation, are we actually at war with them?

Out of curiosity I went and checked the savefile itself, using JSONeditoronline, and I couldn't find anything about me being at war with either Persia or the Ottoman Empire (which I had active Conquest battles against).
There's a tab for Relations, but that's just between major nations.
There's a tab for Minor Allies, but that just covers minors allied to major nations, nothing about any relations beyond that.

 

[DougToss]

I think the starting relationship between the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ should be set to allied at start, if not permanently so. Similarly a lot of dependancies should be tied to their mother country - Mozambique and Angola to Portugal, the DEI to the Netherlands etc. 

[SevDarastrix]

I still think Ottoman Empire should be upgraded to a Major Nation