AI War Goals

[Mierin]

I am curious, when an AI country declares war upon another country does it do it with any specific goals at mind? I understand that their are certain conditions that make a country more likely to declare war, but once that process has been decided does it actually seek to accomplish anything specific beyond 'kill everything and burn every city'? IE if a country goes to war because it has a core in another country, is the goal of the war actually to capture and regain that province? Or alternatively if a country has a budget shortfall does it see other weak but rich countries as a chance to make a quick buck? Or perhaps a rich, imperialistic nation should spurn all cash settlements knowing that it desires the eventual annexation of the state?

The reason I ask is that alot of the AI behavior when it comes to wartime planning and especially peace settlements doesnt make much sense.

Consider this scenario, I as the Knights invaded Oman, I manage to capture a couple provinces from them and get a peace deal ceding them to me. Fast forward 10 years, my forces in the region are relatively weak with little chance of reinforcement- Oman declares war and proceeds to recapture its provinces with a massive army (which is stronger then my entire armed forces scattered across the globe) aided by some new allies. So I send a peace settlement in which I give them 150 gold and they accept. Now me being an incredibly rich nation with low manpower (think 20,000 gold in the treasury but only about 5000 max manpower) the 150 gold was literally less then a single months income, yet to Oman that money represented 1/4 of their former nation. Why in the heck would they possibly accept such a peace settlement if their obvious goal (and successful campaign) was designed to take back their lost territory?

[Pode]

If the money you offer is more than five years income from those provinces, why shouldn't they stop the current war, wait five years and then attack you again?

[Marvek]

Originally Posted by Pode

If the money you offer is more than five years income from those provinces, why shouldn't they stop the current war, wait five years and then attack you again?

Because those lands belong to Oman! The people there are suffering under Mierin's rule! Have you no sense of justice?

Honestly, I don't think the AI has any goals. If it did, then the peace settlements might be more meaningful. It would be great if, prior to DOW, every nation (both AI and player controlled) had to list out stated objectives. It could be a version of the peace talks screen, where you pick out your goals and sort of send them as demands, as a diplomatic action. Then, you had to wait for the diplomat to arrive before you could follow up with the actual DOW, and in the meanwhile the enemy would state their own goals.

In that kind of scenario, then warscore could be based on the achievement of those stated objectives, rather than the general-purpose all-out-war concept now in use. Thus, if your only goal was to capture Province A, and you succesfully beseiged and took it, you'd get a rather high war score and the enemy would be more inclined to offer it in the peace deal. Of course, if the enemy had wanted Province B and had also achieved their objective, then the war score would drop back by a lot; taking provinces beyond the ones claimed in the goals phase would contribute much less to the war score (though maybe capitals could still contribute a lot in any case).

Of course, getting the AI to declare reasonable goals may be a programming challenge well beyond the scope of this game. Maybe it could happen in EU4, running on a quad-core minimum system requirement...