Well, I have been waiting for them to fix the AI for 1.5 years now. Had a nice dev diary in between telling us about a great improvement to the economy-AI. Now that 1.30 released (and didn't deliver), I'm waiting again....
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Fix AI debt spiral / alliance issues. It's been broken for weeks, and it's gamebreaking.
- Thread starter Jadelith
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Why not just play 1.29? It is still just as fun as a couple of months ago.
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Losing one war costs five loans on top of any loans taken to fight the war.
Peacetime recruit-disband loops due to mishandling of mercenaries add up to big piles of loans.
In contrast, embracing an institution costs about two loans, once every 50 years.
I believe embracement cost is moddable, so you could test this by writing a mod that sets the ducat cost of embracement to 0 (or gives all AI countries a -200% embracement cost static modifier).
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Whatever you use to replace it will ultimately have the same problem. Human players are just better at budgeting than the AI is. Changing game mechanics to work around the incompetence of the AI is s terrible idea.
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If they wanted to do that then they should make the AI actually dev properly rather than sit around with 999/999/999 mana for decades.
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EU4 - Development Diary - 7th of July 2020
Good afternoon! I am once again eschewing the traditional Swedish summer vacation, this time because I’d prefer to wait until I can safely travel rather than taking a dull staycation in my Stockholm apartment. What that means for you lovely...
It's this week that the chance of a patch finally being released becomes non-zero. Add another week and that chance might actually become significant.
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Not going to let this thread die until they at least acknowledge the problems.
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I can see the concern and completely agree that losing mercs mid war would be unworkable considering how the game makes loans automatic and it can be necessary to take on a large amount of debt to even have a chance of expanding depending on the circumstances.
However, the idea behind the mercs disbanding based on debt could still be considered and refined to suit EU4. For example, not triggering the disbanding/events until peace occurs with a MTTH dependent on the number of loans you have. That way the AI won't passively keep mercs on hand for decades for the debt cycle to become unmanageable and players can game the system to chain wars to retain their mercs.
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That would just be aggravating for human players, and in some cases would make debt worse, since you'd have to re-hire the mercs. I would detest a system that disbands part of your army for you based on random chance. And the absolute last thing the game needs is more arbitrary mechanics for the player to find ways to work around.
It's also completely unnecessary, because the AI can simply be programmed to act like that. If it's not in a war, planning to be in one or expecting to be declared on imminently, it shouldn't have mercs hired.
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Is there an upper bound on debt? At some point the "credit worthiness" of a heavily indebted nation should come into account. Even Ancien Regime France, a tremendous land and colonial power, eventually ran out of creditors willing to extend them a loan.
Would lowering that limit/creating it in the first place and forcing a bankruptcy be a good idea? The limit could change based on Age or Admin tech or something.
Would lowering that limit/creating it in the first place and forcing a bankruptcy be a good idea? The limit could change based on Age or Admin tech or something.
Yeah, you can't take more loans once the amount of interest you're paying exceeds your current income. Of course, in practice you're effectively bankrupt well before that point, since you need to pay your armies etc.
So these screenshots we're seeing of the Ottomans and Russia being thousands of ducats in debt, they're not tripping the bankruptcy limit because (in theory), they're making enough that the debt could be paid off?
But the AI just... Isn't.
All the while denying calls to arms, but dragging the player into their own wars.
Great stuff PDX.
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Debt had two limiting factors. 1) number of loans you can have; 2) how much interest you are paying.
I don't know how the amount of loans you can take is calculated, but basically both loan size and the maximum amounts of loans you can take are dictated by your development. You can take loans as long as you are within you loan capacity. Once you reach it, you cannot take more loans.
Additionally, if your interest is greater than your income (the amount you make before expenses being taken into account), you can't take more loans.
A single loan for a nation the size of Russia or Ottomans can easily be 1K ducats. Monthly interest per loan is usually around 1 ducat. These nations easily make 140+ ducats by the mid game and most often hit 200+ ducats. Lastly, they both have the Lucky nation modifier, which decreases by 1%/0.5% (either one or the other. Don't recall which is the correct amount between these two modifiers) the interest rate.
As you can see, they can easily accumulate 20K debt and still be able to take out loans.
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That tells me that the debt limit is too high. If it's so crippling they have no army, dishonor defensive calls, etc. Then they should have stopped a long time ago and just gone bankrupt and taken the hit.
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Well, it's possible to take voluntary bankruptcy, but I suspect that the AI would be extremely bad at knowing when to do that, so it probably doesn't do it at all.
The problem is really twofold. Firstly, it's possible to be deep in debt and still functional, so the AI does exactly that. Secondly, the AI treats debt as a significant factor in deciding whether to accept a call, even if it could easily afford to fight the war. Meaning that you can end up with a perfectly viable country making a small profit which nevertheless will consistently reject calls, yet will also happily start its own wars and drag you into them.
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It is a shame because I think the intended changes are pretty great where they work, but the number of bugs/iffy design in such a range of things, including things like mission requirements which seem like they should be fairly robust to other changes that are being made(?) makes you wonder how so much got broken...
That said most are pretty minor on their own. The AI debt is for me by far the most serious. Of course it may also not be straightforward to just fire in a fix for this (AI problems are not new to this update and the problem is likely in a few systems that you might not want to just fiddle around with quickly). So I don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect people to delay their holiday until the AI gets up to scratch!!! I do hope that when the AI fix comes it is not just a simple bug fix but a pretty wide reaching tuneup.
That said most are pretty minor on their own. The AI debt is for me by far the most serious. Of course it may also not be straightforward to just fire in a fix for this (AI problems are not new to this update and the problem is likely in a few systems that you might not want to just fiddle around with quickly). So I don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect people to delay their holiday until the AI gets up to scratch!!! I do hope that when the AI fix comes it is not just a simple bug fix but a pretty wide reaching tuneup.
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The AI do go bankrupt. You can check for yourself by enabling bankruptcy pop ups. What I don't know is if they can declare bankruptcy or only go bankrupt when they are forced to by the game systems.
Used to be the case that AI would declare bankruptcy on more reasonable conditions but as is the case with most everything AI related this day, it got changed and now isn't working as well as it used to.
They decided it was declaring voluntary bankruptcy too often.
(Which, to be fair, it was.)
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So, they solved AI bankrupting by making forced bankruptcy limit way too high and increased player difficulty by making AI never respond a call to war. At the same time, they forced player to respond to call even if in another war.
What a great way to improve the AI - hide the problems under other problems...
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