A thought on the AI waking up

[unmerged(37774)]

I ran across the info "cheat" recently in some thread here - bascially you type info [country tag] in the cheat window and it tells you what the country is doing, buying troops, spending on tech, building a manufactury, etc.

It occurs to me that this info is not saved with the save game. So if a country is saving money to build a manufactury and you save and reload, suddenly it has alot of cash on hand with no particular plan on how to use it...

Which then leads to the AI sending out colonists, merchants, and DOWing.

This seems to meet the expected behaviour, and for all I know this might even be a well know fact.

 

[unmerged(46785)]

Nice reasoning.

 

[unmerged(5822)]

I ran across the info "cheat" recently in some thread here - bascially you type info [country tag] in the cheat window and it tells you what the country is doing, buying troops, spending on tech, building a manufactury, etc.

It occurs to me that this info is not saved with the save game. So if a country is saving money to build a manufactury and you save and reload, suddenly it has alot of cash on hand with no particular plan on how to use it...

Which then leads to the AI sending out colonists, merchants, and DOWing.

This seems to meet the expected behaviour, and for all I know this might even be a well know fact.

I can confirm this behaviour; when the AI is given loads of money (for instance, by firing a gold-giving event for the AI country), it starts doing things again. In my experience, at least.

 

[Mork]

Still doesn't explain the behavior.
The AI should wage wars on a regular basis, and you can easily negate wars if you keep the game running.
The AI should use it's merchants, as that will generate gold, so no reason not to use those.

Edit: Oh, BTW the sleeping is a know problem that Paradox has acknowledged.

 

[unmerged(37774)]

Still doesn't explain the behavior.
The AI should wage wars on a regular basis, and you can easily negate wars if you keep the game running.
The AI should use it's merchants, as that will generate gold, so no reason not to use those.

Edit: Oh, BTW the sleeping is a know problem that Paradox has acknowledged.

I'm not sure that I see how your two observations show that the issue isn't one of the AI socking away cash until save/reload and then splurging.

There certainly are wars, merchants, etc with the game running...just far fewer, so you can't really negate wars per se.

 

[Mork]

If it's for stacking up money, why aren't the AI sending merchants? If you let the game run, the AI will stop sending merchants, completely.

And if you let the game run for ages, there will be no more wars, except those driven by events and the player.

 

[unmerged(37774)]

If it's for stacking up money, why aren't the AI sending merchants?

Again, this is a supposition, but because it is reserving the money for other things, most likely manufacturies. Note that when looking at the info command it seems to say exactly that...

For example, if an AI country earn 40 in census tax and mints 5 a month it will still take 6-8 years of spending on nothing else to build its first manufactury. It would appear to be sleeping while doing this, no?

If you let the game run, the AI will stop sending merchants, completely.

And if you let the game run for ages, there will be no more wars, except those driven by events and the player.

Hmm, I've never seen that.

The number of merchants and wars is indeed much lower if you don't save and reload every now and then, the point of this thread after all, but I've played 12 hour sessions, and there are still some wars and my merchants getting competed out even at the end of the session.

 

[Mork]

It doesn't really matter how much time you spend, it's how much in-game time that have gone by.
This issue has been here for as long as EUII has, and it's been discussed nearly as long. Trust me, the AI does fall "asleep".

 

[unmerged(5822)]

It doesn't really matter how much time you spend, it's how much in-game time that have gone by.
This issue has been here for as long as EUII has, and it's been discussed nearly as long. Trust me, the AI does fall "asleep".

More like "comatose".
Anyway, it would seem quite possible to me that the AI falls asleep because of the "additional data" it builds up during the course of a game - that's the only thing that changes about it.

When I have triggered money events for the AI, it always became a lot more active - and I do recall a manufactury being among the first things to be built. When the AI falls asleep next time for you, try triggering a few money-giving events for it and see what happens.

 

[DSYoungEsq]

Run the game long enough and wars stop, merchants stay unsent, and the game gets awfully boring.

Folks, the plain fact of the matter is that the game isn't intended to be played in single-player mode. That's just an add-on to allow you to do something with the game during those (hopefully!) brief lulls between MP sessions.

So the AI does weird things. In MP, it doesn't matter too much, because the AI is just waiting until the humans conquer it anyway.

 

[th3freakie]

I must say I never notied this falling asleep as a permenent thing either - there are some very peacefull years, but then sudently 4 or 5 wars apear in 1 year, and if you're a neigbour or allied with the BwB... then you'll be fighting wars every 5 years for sure.

 

[unmerged(5822)]

Are smaller countries more prone to fall asleep than big ones?

 

[Duke of Wellington]

Is it a problem with the random number generator getting 'stuck' or locked in a cycle? This is commonly noted as a cause but is there justification behind this?

 

[unmerged(14102)]

Is it a problem with the random number generator getting 'stuck' or locked in a cycle? This is commonly noted as a cause but is there justification behind this?

I truly doubt something so simple, and it is in all the EU based games. Vicky, CK, HOI, all have the same problem. I'm sure Johan and his team have looked for this, but to date it hasn't been found. As Mork says, it is both known but not yet fixed. And it really appears to be in the fundamental AI code, so the fix may be tricky.

My personal opinion is that it is billy-ware based. I suspect that Paradox is calling a windows routine/function and that call fails periodically with no error flag. Unfortunately, not an uncommon issue with windows. My support of this allegation is that I know someone who runs EU2 on a Unix-based system using a windows emulator that he wrote. He claims that he has no AI sleep problem. If anyone here can do that experiment and send results to Johan, he might be appreiciative.

Anyway, for SP EU2, I set the auto-save to 10 years and re-load every auto save. That seems to be the happy point for me. Not too often to be annoying, often enough so that the AI is mostly 'awake'.