England AI

Don't ally England. Pretend those Isles don't even exist. Your gaming experience will be much better once you do that.

Transport units are quite a bottleneck for AI England, and you can't depend on them to peace out. :/
Advice (if desired): You may need to buy a ton of mercenaries (even if it means taking unholy amounts of loan money), fight defensively, and pray that you can win enough battles (and maybe siege provinces) to manage a white peace. Or, if possible, a peace for some of your gold + annulment of all treaties with England.

England can be a good ally. I like allying them.
But it is true: A few times they have called me to war without sending troops themselves but that's rare.

I started a similar thread about the navy ai in general, I also think that the inability of some major naval powers like England, Denmark, Castille really hampers the game:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?792394-Navy-Budget-Priority-AI

It seems like England lost its transports in a naval fight and for some reason they are really reluctant to rebuild transports. I think the developers should rework the transport budget priority, it worked actually really well in 1.5, might be the new AI budget routines that are somehow wonky...

It's not only the naval powers but the Colonial nations that need to do it as well, especially the ones in the Caribbean.

I've also noticed the problem of the AI just not rebuilding their navy. England has been quite the sad sack for the last few patches, not even taking Scotland in most of my games. A good way to handle this may be to encourage the AI to take loans during peacetime to rebuild its navy to a proper status. And maybe even add a mission similar to "Protect Against X" but with navies instead.

DKinator said:

"Protect Against X" but with navies instead.

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I've asked for ages for this. England's Protect against [Enter Continental European Power here]" If they have no Continental Holdings left should be all about their Navy.

Golden_Bear10 said:

It's not only the naval powers but the Colonial nations that need to do it as well, especially the ones in the Caribbean.

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Caribbean CN doesn't build transports ever, for some reason. All the other CNs build transports, but the Caribbean just doesn't. I'm not sure if it's intentional or a bug.

DKinator said:

I've also noticed the problem of the AI just not rebuilding their navy. England has been quite the sad sack for the last few patches, not even taking Scotland in most of my games. A good way to handle this may be to encourage the AI to take loans during peacetime to rebuild its navy to a proper status. And maybe even add a mission similar to "Protect Against X" but with navies instead.

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Burgundy, Portugal, Spain, Scandinavia, and the Ottomans have all rebuilt their navies that they have lost a portion or all of in my game (with me as GB/Fr).

Freudia said:

Caribbean CN doesn't build transports ever, for some reason. All the other CNs build transports, but the Caribbean just doesn't. I'm not sure if it's intentional or a bug.

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Considering all the separate islands should be considered independent colonies and not be united as any of the others were, it's pretty bad. If they are going to be unified, they need to be properly defending themselves, and for islands that means transports.

In my current game (current year: 1515), England lost the HYW but has been steadily gaining ground in France since then: they currently own a belt of territory stretching from Normandy to Luxembourg, as well as 3 provinces in the southwest of France. They've also annexed Scotland (England managed to fight a two-front war against Scotland and France, beating both of them convincingly). Then again, I don't know if the English navy has ever faced any serious losses (they are allied to Castile-Aragon, and France has given up on ships completely).

I've also had some frustrating experiences with the Caribbean CN. They are too slow at moving troops around by sea. If you (or the CN) conquer islands off other powers, you end up having to babysit them, or your CN's AI will just let them revolt back to their original owner.

Golden_Bear10 said:

Burgundy, Portugal, Spain, Scandinavia, and the Ottomans have all rebuilt their navies that they have lost a portion or all of in my game (with me as GB/Fr).

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Let me clarify: they don't rebuild their navies to a level that can compete with a player in any way. This is compounded by the fact that one naval battle is enough to sink an entire enemy fleet. Depending on ship type and count, this could be over 1000g worth of ships lost in one go. So, arguably, the problem with navies goes deeper than them just not rebuilding, but rather that they have to rebuild from scratch every time.

On another note, the AI is worthless at extracting the most out of trade. They just don't build enough light ships to truly funnel money into their home node.

@Dkinator: I agree with this assessment, they build the entire trade system around the idea that navies should ne much more important in this game. Frankly, I liked this change, but they somehow haven't kept up the basic idea of the naval system with the changes made in the recent patches.

In my opinion, the naval system in general worked very good in Patch 1.5. However, in these days money was far too plentiful - this maybe the reason why the AI maintained such large navies and often sufficiently rebuild them as well. Then they made the big budget changes in 1.6 and the army maintenance changes in 1.7, which leaves many nations struggling for a budget, especially in the early years up until the 1600s...

I like all these changes, even the really pricey army maintenance and reinforcement changes in 1.7, but they somehow completely forgot about naval balance with these changes - they seriously need to rework that. I think the best way would be to ged rid of the always decisive battles and let at least half of the enemy navy flee most of the time - this would offset the rebuilding of the entire navy all the time.

And they need to give some kind of priority to building transports - the player can do with 5 to seven transports, because he's quick to get troops over the channel or the strait of gibraltar. But AI nations like England, Castille or France or Denmark constantly just trickle some 5-7 regiments over, which usually get instantly destroyed...

This is not good for balances sake!

Gorton said:

No, please open the link: AI England isn't building any transports at all.
They're starting wars against a country they literally CANNOT FIGHT because they have no transports. Doesn't anyone find that broken?

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How well is the English economy doing? Maybe they can't afford transports? It's really weird to see AI England with 0 transports.

delpiero1234 said:

How well is the English economy doing? Maybe they can't afford transports? It's really weird to see AI England with 0 transports.

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Nah, it's not an economy thing. They just don't build them, no matter how well they're doing. Once their initial transports are wrecked, they go North Korea mode. While they still declare war or threaten other nations, they can't do crap about it.