Fix AI debt spiral / alliance issues. It's been broken for weeks, and it's gamebreaking.

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Lawyers :D
I remember HOI3 being an utter shiteshow over 10 years ago too. People threatening legal action.
So funny.
The best way of dealing with PDX is to moan like hell until they get sick of hearing it. Its always been like that.

Which is why this thread should be kept right at the top.

Either that or don't buy their products on a mass scale, but that's not going to happen.

There was a long period in EU 4 where the website advertised cross platform MP, which worked until 1.5 and stopped working years after that. This was acknowledged in tech support but not fixed for like half the game's existence at least. I don't know Swedish law but in US that's non-ambiguously false advertising. You could not last more than 1-2 days in game without desyncing when doing cross-platform.
 
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I had a lot of fun with EU4, played hundreds of hours, even bought pretty much every DLC. But I stopped buying them at some point (i think Rule Britannia) because of:
  • Longtime, well documented bugs not getting fixed
  • I got the feeling that each expansion introduces at least as many new bugs as it fixes
  • AI not getting improved
  • AI actually getting worse because it can't handle the changes with the patches and new functionalities.
I was actually looking forward to 1.30 Emperor expansion, because they announced that they would fix a lot of "technical debt", and wanted to take their time doing so. To me that meant bugs and AI issues. But even many new 1.30 features were totally broken upon release, and clearly the AI is more broken than ever as documented in this thread.

Paradox, if you want my money again, then you need to fix bugs, improve AI and invest in QA to deliver patches which don't break totally obvious issues.
 
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I had a lot of fun with EU4, played hundreds of hours, even bought pretty much every DLC. But I stopped buying them at some point (i think Rule Britannia) because of:
  • Longtime, well documented bugs not getting fixed
  • I got the feeling that each expansion introduces at least as many new bugs as it fixes
  • AI not getting improved
  • AI actually getting worse because it can't handle the changes with the patches and new functionalities.
I was actually looking forward to 1.30 Emperor expansion, because they announced that they would fix a lot of "technical debt", and wanted to take their time doing so. To me that meant bugs and AI issues. But even many new 1.30 features were totally broken upon release, and clearly the AI is more broken than ever as documented in this thread.

Paradox, if you want my money again, then you need to fix bugs, improve AI and invest in QA to deliver patches which don't break totally obvious issues.
This x1000. There are bugs that have been in the game for half a decade now with endless bug reports that simply go unfixed. To be honest, I wasn't really all that excited about many Emperor features. I was interested in the fixing of bugs and technical debt and governing capacity. I would buy the Emperor DLC if I felt like patch 1.30 fixed a lot of issues in the game. Instead, it just made almost everything actively worse. It's infuriating.

The last time a DLC came out where I felt as if I was getting my money's worth was... Rights of Man? CoC and Dharma were fine too. IMO, all of the expansion packs are disasters.
 
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I just bought the DLC two months after release to be sure its playable , being EU4 player since release so i kinda know what to expect from them...
Turns out its still not very playable, those issues are immediately obvious , and should not pass any serious QA. Allies dont follow you in wars but drag you in their endless ones, and of course coalitions against you still works.You wont enjoy playing minors for sure now.The new merc system is not even worth using either, armies composition are so off you need to micro attach to your regular , disband etc.

Last time i said there was no alternative to paradox, even slitherine softwares, but now i am not so sure anymore.
Let me see i paid 19.99 for the DLC , 5 euro for the content pack, the whole price of a a full indie game. For that price i got shadow empires , an extraordinary game rivalling even alpha centauri, a very very complex game . After days of playing i found a gamebreaking bug, i email the guy (one lone dev) with my save, 1 day later he answers me and the bug is fixed in a patch few days later.
Here two months later, radio silence, and a game breaking bug is still not fixed .
 
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For that price i got shadow empires , an extraordinary game rivalling even alpha centauri, a very very complex game .
Is that VR Designs' Shadow Empire (published by Slitherine / Matrix Games) you're talking about?

If so, that's not a competitor for Paradox's gamelines; that's a competitor for Civilization, Dominions, and Master of Orion.

Because the experiential difference between turn-based and RTwP matters, and for strategy games I'm firmly on the RTwP side of the line (whereas for tactics games I tend to be on the turn-based side).
 
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Is that VR Designs' Shadow Empire (published by Slitherine / Matrix Games) you're talking about?

If so, that's not a competitor for Paradox's gamelines; that's a competitor for Civilization, Dominions, and Master of Orion.

Because the experiential difference between turn-based and RTwP matters, and for strategy games I'm firmly on the RTwP side of the line (whereas for tactics games I tend to be on the turn-based side).
Yes i am speaking of that game . It's a life sucking 4X like paradox games so in my opinion in direct competion.
 
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I just bought the DLC two months after release to be sure its playable , being EU4 player since release so i kinda know what to expect from them...
Turns out its still not very playable, those issues are immediately obvious , and should not pass any serious QA. Allies dont follow you in wars but drag you in their endless ones, and of course coalitions against you still works.You wont enjoy playing minors for sure now.The new merc system is not even worth using either, armies composition are so off you need to micro attach to your regular , disband etc.

Last time i said there was no alternative to paradox, even slitherine softwares, but now i am not so sure anymore.
Let me see i paid 19.99 for the DLC , 5 euro for the content pack, the whole price of a a full indie game. For that price i got shadow empires , an extraordinary game rivalling even alpha centauri, a very very complex game . After days of playing i found a gamebreaking bug, i email the guy (one lone dev) with my save, 1 day later he answers me and the bug is fixed in a patch few days later.
Here two months later, radio silence, and a game breaking bug is still not fixed .

I hope Shadow Empire becomes a hit. That game looks really interesting.

For the price of Emperor I could buy one or two full priced games, but their combined play time would most likely be less than if I had bought Emperor and played more EU 4. However, I don't think it is fair to evaluate the value proposition of a product by how many hours you sank into it -- this mentality leads to most of AAA games being a choir of a grind and taunting how much value per hour they offer. I'd just like to point out that equating time played with value is one that paradox champions (you can hear about it on the GDC talk regarding DLCs).
 
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Yes i am speaking of that game . It's a life sucking 4X like paradox games so in my opinion in direct competion.
We shall have to agree to differ, then.

I have recently promised myself I will never buy any turn-based 4X from any studio ever again, because every turn-based 4X I have ever bought has ultimately disappointed me in exactly the same way, which is a way that Paradox Design Studio's RTwP grand strategy games have never disappointed me.

(I can't quite articulate what the problem is, but it is intimately connected to their turn-based nature.)
 
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You didn't like XCOM either?
The first two games of the original series and both games of the reboot series have an RTwP strategy phase and a turn-based tactics phase.

I love turn-based tactics phases.
 
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The first two games of the original series and both games of the reboot series have an RTwP strategy phase and a turn-based tactics phase.

I love turn-based tactics phases.

If you want to, we can surely also get some good recommendations for turn-based tactics games in here.
What i mean is, i can see a clear overlap between those kind of genres, and i assume a lot of people in here also sank countless hours into turn-based tactics games.
(And i am totally not trying to bump up the thread more often for visibility purposes.)

My clear favourite is Divinity: Original Sin 2, from Larian Games (who are making Baldurs Gate III right now). The Combat system is probably the best i've ever played myself, and the open worlds are full of things to explore. I also dig the very weird conversations you can have with animals in that game. 10/10 would talk to the cows in the middle of a small apocalypse again.
 
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Saw Spain with 20k debt yesterday. It just grew and grew and grew due to the inflation and interest. They had never lost a single war prior to this. They were never heavily contested by France or GB. They were the number 1 GP ever since their first colonial nation until this ridiculous debt. Sending them 40k just so they pay if off and accept CTA really hurt without autoclicker.
 
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Saw Spain with 20k debt yesterday. It just grew and grew and grew due to the inflation and interest. They had never lost a single war prior to this. They were never heavily contested by France or GB. They were the number 1 GP ever since their first colonial nation until this ridiculous debt. Sending them 40k just so they pay if off and accept CTA really hurt without autoclicker.

For whatever reason the AI don't try to balance their economy when they are bleeding money. I've watched many subjects go from -1 ducats to -10 ducats a month and never try address this.
 
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We shall have to agree to differ, then.

I have recently promised myself I will never buy any turn-based 4X from any studio ever again, because every turn-based 4X I have ever bought has ultimately disappointed me in exactly the same way, which is a way that Paradox Design Studio's RTwP grand strategy games have never disappointed me.

(I can't quite articulate what the problem is, but it is intimately connected to their turn-based nature.)
We can still agree on something its lame the game is still in such state 2 months after the dlc release.
 
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The Steam Workshop mod "Difficulty and AI changes" by Spirit Baker has greatly improved the gameplay enjoyment in this patch for me when I play on Hard. AI is more aggressive and much better handle their economies. I would also suggest to change in the defines.lua file so that max & minimum amount of mercenaries that you as a player & AI countries can hire are 0. Otherwise countries sometimes randomly buys a lot of mercenaries during peacetime from what I've seen in my bigger vassals.
 
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Ive been using BetterAI by Blablaax. It works. Take note 'professional' coders of PDX.
 
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Has Paradox just been ignoring this issue? I can't find a single post of them acknowledging this problem. Yet it's so blatantly obvious, and while mods are great and all, some people (like me) are fixated on trying to get achievements, and thus using mods is only an option sometimes. I would like to be able to play the game without my big allies getting into hundreds of thousands of ducats in debt without ever going into bankruptcy (although I'd rather they not go into debt at all)
 
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