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Fister Roboto posted:Yes. It's not difficult to beat the AI from a strategic standpoint, it's just really loving tedious. It's much less "oh no, the brilliant AI found and exploited a weakness in my near-perfect defense, I am truly undone" and more "welp I wasn't paying attention to my territory in the rear end-end of nowhere and the AI landed all its armies there and carpet-sieged a ton of useless provinces, better go mop them up I guess". I mean, what do you want to happen? Should the AI just put it's hands up and concede the war because obviously the player is going to outsmart the AI? Like, I'm just not sure what you want from this.
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Jan 31, 2019 20:17
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Sampatrick posted:I mean, what do you want to happen? Should the AI just put it's hands up and concede the war because obviously the player is going to outsmart the AI? Like, I'm just not sure what you want from this. Pretty sure they want the AI to stand and fight and lose (because the player has set up a situation they had an advantage in). Instead the AI is going "well gently caress I'm not winning that" and does what it can to gain warscore.
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Jan 31, 2019 20:29
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doingitwrong posted:I regularly smash and grab a couple provinces. It can be a bit tough with bigger allies on their side, but the key is timing. Try to pick a moment when their allies are in another war or might otherwise have a reason to suffer from exhaustion unrelated to you. Sometimes, they don't joint the war at all. Or if they do, they don't really want to be there. Then, you aim for a couple key battles or sieges or whatever to get them to the point that they'll white peace, leaving you with your real target to fight it out. Sampatrick posted:I mean, what do you want to happen? Should the AI just put it's hands up and concede the war because obviously the player is going to outsmart the AI? Like, I'm just not sure what you want from this. So the tl;dr is: It would be nice to see the weighting change so its less suicidal to 'help' its ally in a negligible way. Another thing that would help is that if an ally does not contribute in one or maybe two years of war (hasnt fought a battle or sieged a fort) then it does not count towards the "Wartarget refuses to concede because it has allies in the war" modifier.
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Jan 31, 2019 20:31
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Sampatrick posted:I mean, what do you want to happen? Should the AI just put it's hands up and concede the war because obviously the player is going to outsmart the AI? Like, I'm just not sure what you want from this. I want the AI to play more like a human player. If a human player is in an unwinnable war, they would probably recognize that and try to surrender as soon as possible with the most favorable terms possible, so that they're in a better position for a comeback. They wouldn't try to tickle their opponent to death, all while accruing war exhaustion, devastation, and debt. Ironically, an AI that knows when to cut its losses would probably provide an overall greater challenge for the player.
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Jan 31, 2019 20:56
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ZypherIM posted:Pretty sure they want the AI to stand and fight and lose (because the player has set up a situation they had an advantage in). Instead the AI is going "well gently caress I'm not winning that" and does what it can to gain warscore. Except they don't actually gain warscore in any meaningful way because they only take unforted provinces, while also leaving their homeland completely undefended Fister Roboto posted:I want the AI to play more like a human player. If a human player is in an unwinnable war, they would probably recognize that and try to surrender as soon as possible with the most favorable terms possible, so that they're in a better position for a comeback. They wouldn't try to tickle their opponent to death, all while accruing war exhaustion, devastation, and debt. This + an AI which aggressively uses diplomacy to piss you off and cockblock you if you're strong would be perfect IMO (the latter being necessary to prevent you from just snowballing by getting 'free' territory from anyone without a bunch of big allies)
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Jan 31, 2019 20:58
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Fister Roboto posted:I want the AI to play more like a human player. If a human player is in an unwinnable war, they would probably recognize that and try to surrender as soon as possible with the most favorable terms possible, so that they're in a better position for a comeback. They wouldn't try to tickle their opponent to death, all while accruing war exhaustion, devastation, and debt. "I want the AI to play more like a human player" is a nice sentiment but it's not implementable feedback. How does an AI recognize it's in an unwinnable war? Currently, that's modelled with with a set of + and - reasons for accepting a peace deal. If it thinks your side is more powerful, it has reasons to drop. If its home territory is under siege it has reasons to drop. If its army is small, if its provinces are occupied, if it's suffered a lot of losses (modelled as war exhaustion), if its ports are blockaded, if it thinks you're making gains, and so on. It's even modelled in peacetime with the Threaten War diplomatic action. You can see the values that it's assigning to the provinces you want to demand and why it is or isn't agreeing to your demands. Full list here: https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Warfare#War_enthusiasm What you're saying is that the current variables either don't capture something crucial or are tuned in a way that they give bad results. What would you adjust up or down to make the AI more likely to understand it's in an unwinnable war without turning it into an utter pushover (and so not modelling the stubborn refusal to surrender that makes wars necessary at all).
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Jan 31, 2019 21:46
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doingitwrong posted:"I want the AI to play more like a human player" is a nice sentiment but it's not implementable feedback. How does an AI recognize it's in an unwinnable war? edit: Like Fister Roboto said, when you in a really bad situation, peacing out earlier rather than later is a net gain (fewer manpower and treasury losses trying to win/not lose as bad), but the AI is never willing to do that. It hangs on forever in the hopes that the player will get into another war or a far off weak ally will somehow turn the tide. Once again, I am not suggesting/asking for something drastic, just nudging with some logic values to make the system less painful to deal with. AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 21:52
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I have no loving idea how to fix it, I'm not an AI programmer, I just know that the current AI is not challenging enough and extremely tedious to deal with, and that's a serious problem. Anyone saying "well you just want the AI to be a pushover!" is completely missing the point.
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Jan 31, 2019 22:35
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That's just how the game be. Once you get past the first one or two hundred years, the game is essentially over. That's just how strategy games work. If you want to make the game harder, turn the AI to very hard and always play ironman saves. Do achievement runs. It doesn't matter how you change the AI, there will always be a point in the game where you are far enough ahead that you essentially cannot lose anymore.
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Jan 31, 2019 22:45
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I think the AI should just prioritise protecting it's capital more, as well as containing the enemy forces. In my last game I had the Ottomans declare a big coalition war against me. The Ottomans outnumbered me by themselves, if you count the allies I was outnumbered 2-to-1. Their manpower advantage was huge. However, they proceeded to siege down my useless provinces in Arabia and Egypt while I killed their friends and sieged their home country and won the war. If they had simply sent all their forces to Greece and Italy they'd have crushed me completely. It's just ridiculous that the bigger army decides to run away sometimes.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:00
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Did you have quality/offensive/other mil ideas/tech advantage? That's usually what causes the AI to not want to fight. Otherwise, they will absolutely pick a fight with you.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:01
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Walh Hara posted:I think the AI should just prioritise protecting it's capital more, as well as containing the enemy forces. I think the AI could do a lot more to figure out which areas on the map are worth fighting over and which are obviously peripheral to the conflict, and could then use its units more appropriately. Of course this is a very hard problem to optimize for in general, but just looking at development and proximity to the capital seems like a good start. In a recent war I invaded Holland from France, and after months of searching I was able to force a fight in Madagascar where there were 40,000 Hollandaise troops for some reason. The tactical AI for movement seems mostly fine but the overall deployment of units doesn't make a lot of sense. (Also, why do AI enemies keep suiciding transports into my tradeship fleets which aren't even hunting for trouble?)
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Jan 31, 2019 23:12
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Sampatrick posted:Did you have quality/offensive/other mil ideas/tech advantage? That's usually what causes the AI to not want to fight. Otherwise, they will absolutely pick a fight with you. I can't remember if I had tech advantage or not (probably not), but I had defensive/aritstocratic at the time and did not have the impression the enemy troops were individually weaker than mine. I really had the impression a human playing the Ottomans would have had a very easy time beating me and that I only won because the AI was sending way too many troops to provinces that are of no importance and had no defence.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:14
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Ehhh, invading Italy and Greece sucks because of mountain forts. It's probably partially the AI being stupid and partially the AI being terrified of being attacked on a mountain fort.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:16
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Fister Roboto posted:I have no loving idea how to fix it, I'm not an AI programmer, I just know that the current AI is not challenging enough and extremely tedious to deal with, and that's a serious problem. Anyone saying "well you just want the AI to be a pushover!" is completely missing the point. I'm not an AI programmer either, but since we're hanging around on this dumb forum shooting the poo poo about this dumb game we both like, let's try to work out what kind of changes would make it better. I think it's pretty obvious that one of the big weirdnesses of the AI is how it understands central vs peripheral territory and its willingness to march very long distances. There's something about the way the game is calculating the value of those actions that doesn't match our own fantasy of looking at the map as a real place. This gets goofy in games with lots overseas colonies, where your various colonial vassal keep sailing all their troops across the ocean every few years when you start a new war. Or the oft-cited phenomenon of AIs marching across continents. The struggle there is that what you think of as central vs peripheral is really hard to pin down in code. I wish there was a way to not call my subjects to war from the start but have a permanent ability to call-to-arms them, if I decide we need to mobilize after all. I like the idea of a war participation modifier where you can peace out an enemy who's been involved but hasn't done much. One option to tweak the length of war resistance might be to set the initial rating higher, but give it a faster decay if they're not fighting. Some of the real problems aren't the AI doing dumb things but that it's really tedious to do them yourself. Individually occupying provinces in the wake of successful fort sieges being a big one. It's one of the main reasons to keep a vassal/PU/colony around for me—I let them do that boring work. I wonder how hard it would be to give control of one of your own armies to the AI. Sampatrick posted:That's just how the game be. Once you get past the first one or two hundred years, the game is essentially over. That's just how strategy games work. If you want to make the game harder, turn the AI to very hard and always play ironman saves. Do achievement runs. It doesn't matter how you change the AI, there will always be a point in the game where you are far enough ahead that you essentially cannot lose anymore. I'm playing with a mod called The Idea Variation right now and one of its features is an evolving difficulty setting. As the game goes longer the AI gets more bonuses (and you can set it to give you more maluses). This helps deal with the challenge by helping them keep up with your snowballing power trip. I think it's a great idea and would love to see Paradox mess with a difficulty mode that intensified with each passing Age.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:36
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Arumba keeps saying not to build heavy ships because they're slow. I feel like he's all wrong about this -- even my huge swarms of light ships, including an admiral and a +morale flagship, eventually lose their fights to other countries with large mixed fleets. My navy is shattered instead of sunk but still, it's no way to run a worldwide empire. I get that light ships are good for fast interceptor fleets but I can't really see the argument for getting rid of heavies altogether. I still keep a reserve stack of them in Europe and I've been using them to escort large transport fleets, which anyway move at the same slow speed as heavies. Have any of you tried going without heavy ships?
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Jan 31, 2019 23:42
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So uh, with espionage + economic ideas you get a 200% rebel support rating (leinster gets another 20% too!). Supporting a group of rebels has roughly a 90% chance of generating a rebellion with those. So when I had to give up some land, I gave isolated/coastal provinces, and when they eventually win their independence I come back in with re-conquest CB and scoop my land back up.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:50
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doingitwrong posted:I'm playing with a mod called The Idea Variation right now and one of its features is an evolving difficulty setting. As the game goes longer the AI gets more bonuses (and you can set it to give you more maluses). This helps deal with the challenge by helping them keep up with your snowballing power trip. I think it's a great idea and would love to see Paradox mess with a difficulty mode that intensified with each passing Age. Bleeeeh I am super anti stuff like TIV. They always end up loving up the AI and have to remedy it with stuff like that.
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Feb 1, 2019 00:32
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Oh yeah, there's lots about The Idea Variation that's not well balanced. (For example, there's an idea group that lets you build your own advisor who comes at a 67% discount, which make gaining Monarch points bananas cheap and fast.) But it's got a few ideas that—in Paradox's hands—could be great. The first is the difficulty growing over time, to help the AI stay caught up so that you keep that fun edge of your seat feeling for longer before you have to abandon a campaign because it's become boring. The second that I like is that because idea groups are unlocked much faster, you have more options about where to spend your ADM/DIP/MIL adding more interesting decisions to the game. In Vanilla, I generally find that there comes a point pretty quickly where I'm full up on ideas and well ahead on tech, so the only thing to do with an idea is choose a group and then from time to time unlock the next sntry. Where in The Idea Variation, you're torn between a number of options. If they were more reasonably balanced, it could be cool. Meanwhile, as if to hammer home the AI conversation, I'm fighting for some spice islands from a bunch of locals who allied with the Ottomans. The Ottomans are still a beast, so I was kind of nervous about starting the fight but hoped my forts would hold up long enough for me to drag things out to white peace the Ottomans. Instead, despite their very large force limit, I kept facing only about half of them on the field. Which meant my armies could sweep through their territory and conduct sieges with impunity. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It finally did when, years into the war, 43k Ottomans walked out of the Fog of War in Malacca. As far as I can tell, they WALKED from Anatolia to Siam. I control the strait, so they're going to stand there like fools while I finish sieging the spice islands. I currently hold Constantinople. I wish the game was better about navies. In this time period, travel by sea was terribly dangerous but it was much, much safer and faster than long distance travel by land. In the game, it makes more sense to path around the Mediterranean than boat across it most of the time, which is not how this stuff worked at all back then.
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Feb 1, 2019 03:36
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has anyone ever seen this bug? All my autosaves say they're seven years in the past and in may, and i can't load any saved games past 1946. All the 1646 saves work, but none of the 1647 saves work, trying to load them just crashes to desktop. All the autosaves say may 2, 1640 the beginning of the autosave file says date=1647.1.1 save_game="Spain1646_11_09.eu4" if that matters. It only affects this spanish game apparently, i started a new game to test and the autosave and loading saves worked fine. Is my save just hosed?
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Feb 1, 2019 04:47
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doingitwrong posted:I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It finally did when, years into the war, 43k Ottomans walked out of the Fog of War in Malacca. As far as I can tell, they WALKED from Anatolia to Siam. I control the strait, so they're going to stand there like fools while I finish sieging the spice islands. Update: While Ottomans were marching across Asia, Brunei marched 15k troops to India to siege a trade post and Malacca marched 30k troops to Zambia to siege another.
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Feb 1, 2019 16:46
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doingitwrong posted:Update: While Ottomans were marching across Asia, Brunei marched 15k troops to India to siege a trade post and Malacca marched 30k troops to Zambia to siege another. 
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Feb 1, 2019 17:07
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In a recent Dev diary, they detailed changes they were making to help alleviate some of this and gave modding hooks to mess with the values if you’re so inclined. I wonder if anyone’s taken them up on it. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/eu4-development-diary-16th-of-october-2018.1124066/
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Feb 2, 2019 01:06
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EwokEntourage posted:i can't load any saved games past 1946. same
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Feb 2, 2019 06:51
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Wafflecopper posted:same Have you tried loading them in HoI4 instead?
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Feb 2, 2019 10:57
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EwokEntourage posted:has anyone ever seen this bug? All my autosaves say they're seven years in the past and in may, and i can't load any saved games past 1946. I assumed it was mods but since last night I have a saved game that consistently crashes when it reaches April 1646. Continuing AI chat, I found this Dev diary interesting. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/eu4-development-diary-27th-of-february-2018.1071398/ doingitwrong fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Feb 2, 2019 |
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Feb 2, 2019 14:31
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Arumba keeps saying not to build heavy ships because they're slow. I feel like he's all wrong about this -- even my huge swarms of light ships, including an admiral and a +morale flagship, eventually lose their fights to other countries with large mixed fleets. My navy is shattered instead of sunk but still, it's no way to run a worldwide empire. I tried and it hasn't worked for me for similar reasons. If you have decent trade ideas, light ships pay for themselves well past the force limit during peace time, which is nice because it means your navy can dominate lesser maritime powers come war time. But I've found that once the fighting starts, a heavy ship's durability and 3 combat width makes it monstrous,. especially as the game goes on. You're right about using them for transport escorts. Mostly what I do is have a fleet of heavy ships that spend most of their time docked and mothballed. I name the fleet "Kraken" and when war comes, I awaken it. During the fighting, the fleet operates independently or as a companion to an unattached interceptor fleet. The fast ships start the fight and the heavy ships catch up to finish it. Incidentally, the flagship ability that gives all ships in a fleet +1 trade power is really great for this, because now all your warships can contribute to protecting trade in peacetime, defraying the cost of going way over force limit quite nicely.
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Feb 2, 2019 16:41
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doingitwrong posted:I tried and it hasn't worked for me for similar reasons. If you have decent trade ideas, light ships pay for themselves well past the force limit during peace time, which is nice because it means your navy can dominate lesser maritime powers come war time. But I've found that once the fighting starts, a heavy ship's durability and 3 combat width makes it monstrous,. especially as the game goes on. You're right about using them for transport escorts. Yeah, I think after this Portugal campaign I'm actually getting ok at managing all my fleets in a useful way. Like you say, heavies are where it's at for winning battles. What really bugs me now is reassigning fleets after war, because everything has to go back into peacetime mode - mothballed, protecting trade, or hunting pirates. Next up maybe I'll try a pirate republic and see how that side of things works.
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Feb 2, 2019 18:00
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You don’t actually need to win naval battles in order to win wars. Swarms of lights are just sacrificial lambs to tie up enemy fleets while your transports land troops. I’m not saying this is the only correct way to play, just that it’s a valid and workable strategy.
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Feb 2, 2019 18:25
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I exclusively play as island nations so that I don't have to bother with being invaded
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Feb 2, 2019 18:27
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ok, so I'm doing my Aragon game. Should I push the button and form Spain? They're sitting at 36 provinces right now and as long as they keep colonising the Americas that's alright but if they start going to Africa they'll be above the 40. There's a still a bunch of Aragon missions I have yet to do. Mainly the conquering Italy and Balkans ones.
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Feb 2, 2019 19:15
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Speed run conquering Italy.
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Feb 2, 2019 19:17
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MrBling posted:ok, so I'm doing my Aragon game. Should I push the button and form Spain? They're sitting at 36 provinces right now and as long as they keep colonising the Americas that's alright but if they start going to Africa they'll be above the 40. I tried forming Spain as Aragon the other day, and can confirm that this does not change your missions, you just keep the Aragon ones. So just go ahead if you want. You will get Spanish national ideas though. Alternately, you can conquer enough clay to form Italy instead, manually integrate Castile and so on.
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Feb 2, 2019 19:48
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MrBling posted:ok, so I'm doing my Aragon game. Should I push the button and form Spain? They're sitting at 36 provinces right now and as long as they keep colonising the Americas that's alright but if they start going to Africa they'll be above the 40. Just feed them France and eat the diplo cost once you have influence plus the influence+admin policy. The Aragonese missions are super good, so you really don't want to leave them unfinished to form Spain. Most of the spain missions are just "colonize this" and "conquer american tribes" which you don't need missions to do, whereas the claims Aragon get are a pain to replicate as Spain. Edit: You get new missions if you accept new missions and ideas. You should. The spanish ideas are noice.
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Feb 2, 2019 19:49
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If you start as Aragon, you keep Aragon missions when flipping to Spain.
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Feb 2, 2019 22:15
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I got Spain missions after forming Spain militarily as Aragon.
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Feb 2, 2019 22:21
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Might be a difference then, I formed diplomatically and kept Aragon missions.
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Feb 2, 2019 22:23
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In the Dev diary, they say that Aragon keeps its missions when it forms Spain but you can switch to Spanish National Ideas if you want. That's how it's worked for me.
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Feb 3, 2019 05:00
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Just wondering is Aragon really better than Castille? I understand all the medditerranean claims, but Castille gets a bunch of Italian claims, as well as PU over GB/England and Austria. That's like, 2 of the three other major european powers just given to you. And from my understanding you should still be able to do the whole no-CB take Byzantium start. The claims Aragon gets are in general worth more than the colonial ones that Castille does but...free PU over GB and Austria! As an aside, if you win the war over GB you can force convert them to Catholic which is humorous.
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Feb 3, 2019 05:39
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Minor UI suggestion: can we get a "you can embrace an institution but you don't have enough money for it" alert?
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Feb 3, 2019 20:50
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