AI 'handicap' on border forts goes too far.

[Gigawot]

If you're looking for a "minimum exploit-preventing cheat" I'd personally go for retroactive morale. When the AI receives a war declaration, let it move its maintenance up immediately and bump up (or even max out) its morale immediately instead of waiting for the month tick.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that it's hard to program an AI to spot ambushes, so putting in some ambush-proofing is fair. Free forts forever seems a little extreme.

If we do get that then AI allies should be obliged to let us know when they are about to go to war and call us in. otherwise we could be exposed to the full morale on a low morale stack exploit from the AI esspecially if an OPM with no chance to escape it. It might actually make more historic sense since if you are being attacked wouldnt you want to fight back more as you see in unjust or just to protect yourself and your country but it would give the defender a huge advantage over the attackers until several months into the war.

 

[jrk264]

If we do get that then AI allies should be obliged to let us know when they are about to go to war and call us in. otherwise we could be exposed to the full morale on a low morale stack exploit from the AI esspecially if an OPM with no chance to escape it. It might actually make more historic sense since if you are being attacked wouldnt you want to fight back more as you see in unjust or just to protect yourself and your country but it would give the defender a huge advantage over the attackers until several months into the war.

Yeah, I'd actually be in favor of auto-maxing the morale of everybody who didn't declare the war. Having a lightning bolt wreck a country out of nowhere is no fun for anybody. The maintenance slider would still have a big role in rebel management.

 

[pikaemperor]

Free forts are too much of an exaggeration in my opinion. If the AI deleted excessive forts and mothballed forts had a minimum garrison would be a better fix(low garrison forts fall faster so it's still fair). In my three mountains the ottomans kept getting bankrupt because they refused to delete all those overseas forts that couldn't even delay a invasion.
Also 1.15 removed the religion shenanigans, so I'm going to stick to 1.14.4 till some fix to those OP forts(that the player has to pay when occupying, big impact on what wars are feasible) is made because the older patch is much more enjoyable.

 

[Zander]

Really this is indicative of the fact that fort maintenance costs are too high. It's not like "decide whether to maintain your forts" is an interesting minigame for the human player. They just set fort costs above what they should be because they can, and then made them free for the AI because they're too expensive.

 

[Lord Lambert]

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

This to me, sums up the changes they have made to the AI fort maintenance mechanics, so perhaps I could posit another, equally simple, but imo, far less wrong solution.

Right now, when you unmothball a fort, it has 0 defenders, and is captured in 1 tick regardless of how many men besiege it. Instead of this, make it so that when you or the AI (no difference, players HATE cheating AI, they HATE when AI has an unfair advantage over them) unmothballs a fort, either automatically through entering a war or manually, instead of the fort still havíng 0 men defending it, make it so that 100 men defend. That would prevent 1 tick sieges, sure... but it would mean that any assault via breached walls would be almost certain to succeed.

IMO, this simple change is far superior to the cheating AI system that they currently have in place.

 

[Frederick_Will]

This to me, sums up the changes they have made to the AI fort maintenance mechanics, so perhaps I could posit another, equally simple, but imo, far less wrong solution.

Right now, when you unmothball a fort, it has 0 defenders, and is captured in 1 tick regardless of how many men besiege it. Instead of this, make it so that when you or the AI (no difference, players HATE cheating AI, they HATE when AI has an unfair advantage over them) unmothballs a fort, either automatically through entering a war or manually, instead of the fort still havíng 0 men defending it, make it so that 100 men defend. That would prevent 1 tick sieges, sure... but it would mean that any assault via breached walls would be almost certain to succeed.

IMO, this simple change is far superior to the cheating AI system that they currently have in place.

It would take 2 succesful siege ticks in the example you gave to take a fort. If memory servers, any garrison below 100 automatically surrenders after a successful siege tick. So 1 to get below 100 and another to capture it. It could theoretically give you a few months to get up to speed and maybe save the fort depending on the conditions.

anyways i will say i don't like the AI cheating, especially when it is with level 8 forts. kind of a shame that they couldn't get the AI to handle forts financially on top of the military problems. Feels like the fort system just causes so many issues for the devs and players alike.

 

[Lord Lambert]

It would take 2 succesful siege ticks in the example you gave to take a fort. If memory servers, any garrison below 100 automatically surrenders after a successful siege tick. So 1 to get below 100 and another to capture it. It could theoretically give you a few months to get up to speed and maybe save the fort depending on the conditions.

anyways i will say i don't like the AI cheating, especially when it is with level 8 forts. kind of a shame that they couldn't get the AI to handle forts financially on top of the military problems. Feels like the fort system just causes so many issues for the devs and players alike.

well then instead of a flat 100, maybe just one tick of reinforcement? That's what? 240 men for a lvl 1 fort?

 

[Edmon]

How about this:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/design-fort-rebalance-and-improvement.900550/

Then the AI would not need to cheat

 

[grommile]

I am afraid that revanchism (etc) did not work as the devs expected because I´ve heard of people that conquered all blobs along with everyone else in less than 150 years (apparently without cheating).

Revanchism can't work, as far as I can tell; in approximately all cases either you don't need it (because your loss is survivable without it) or it won't save you (because you've been ruined).

 

[Lord Lambert]

How about this:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/design-fort-rebalance-and-improvement.900550/

Then the AI would not need to cheat

I love this. Great idea. Hope they implement it over the horrible system they have atm

 

[Florryworry__]

I really, really like the fort forcelimit idea. It will probably result in alot more forts on OPM's tho which thats gonna turn the HRE into just.. well.. a fort. So maybe not completly free but certainly like half or even a quartre of the current maintenance cost. Relocating fortifications might be a bit weird. Like would you be able to do it in the middle of a war? If not then you get situations where you have forts 200 miles away from the nearest enemy that you wont be able to move because 'invisible wall' invisible walls are bad imo. So you'd have to allow them to be moved during war provided a reasonable distance between you and enemy troops and then you might just be able to trap armies inside your land and procede to stackwipe them.
Which you know that would allow 'the plays' to be made in multiplayer but eh feels a bit exploitative.
Then again in order to prevent yourself from getting stuck in enemy territory like this you'd only need to siege down everything from your insertion point to where you are right now and thats good! Might be a fun trade off between just charging straight for the capital if there are no forts blocking your path or slowly working your way through the land.
The only way to really know how moveable fortifications would play like would be to play with them I suppose. I feel like being allowed to move them during war to try and maybe 'surround' enemy armies if they charge too headstrong into your land would be super cool and also stop the enemies from running all willy nilly through your land if they break through the border. Well I mean they still could but run the risk of getting obliterated.

 

[Lord Lambert]

I actually hate the idea of relocating forts... a lot.

 

[Florryworry__]

Free forts are too much of an exaggeration in my opinion. If the AI deleted excessive forts and mothballed forts had a minimum garrison would be a better fix(low garrison forts fall faster so it's still fair). In my three mountains the ottomans kept getting bankrupt because they refused to delete all those overseas forts that couldn't even delay a invasion.
Also 1.15 removed the religion shenanigans, so I'm going to stick to 1.14.4 till some fix to those OP forts(that the player has to pay when occupying, big impact on what wars are feasible) is made because the older patch is much more enjoyable.

that has already been removed you dont pay for forts whilst occulying them anymore

 

[Phibs]

that has already been removed you dont pay for forts whilst occulying them anymore

What? Since when? I thought that was only true if the occupier mothballed them?

 

[Arumba]

I actually hate the idea of relocating forts... a lot.

The idea behind it would be longer term planning, not cheese. It would be a 1-2 year project, and only allow you to move a fort one province over via adjacency. So if you conquer some land and suddenly have extra forts with competing zones of control, the solution isn't to just delete one/all, but to relocate one to a more suitable position.

 

[Lord Lambert]

The idea behind it would be longer term planning, not cheese. It would be a 1-2 year project, and only allow you to move a fort one province over via adjacency. So if you conquer some land and suddenly have extra forts with competing zones of control, the solution isn't to just delete one/all, but to relocate one to a more suitable position.

It feels very gamey though. I know how you said that forts are not really supposed to represent actual fort structures, but I would say for the vast majority of players, that is exactly what they represent. And one cannot just pick up a castle and lug it along on log rollers.

 

[Thrake]

And one cannot just pick up a castle and lug it along on log rollers.

Spoiler

Yeah, moving castles feel gamey. Even if it's more than one fort, how would you move it around?

Expanding or not castles to my border as I conquer is part of planing; sometimes I put them right on the border thinking they will protect one layer of provinces I'll conquer and sometimes I just leave part of the frontier undefended with only a layer of forts deeper in my country because I find it too expensive to expand forts for just a few provinces.

I think that the idea to actually immediately add a smal garnison to AI mothballed forts right after declaration of war is the best compromise.

 

[Florryworry__]

The idea behind it would be longer term planning, not cheese. It would be a 1-2 year project, and only allow you to move a fort one province over via adjacency. So if you conquer some land and suddenly have extra forts with competing zones of control, the solution isn't to just delete one/all, but to relocate one to a more suitable position.

Ah that would work I suppose, still tho we'd need new names for the buildings because right now it still says things like 'star fort' Granted alot of those werent made of stone but just heaps of earth in a star shape, that said MOVING it would be just as expensive as building a new one.

Or maybe what we need is like a distinction between a light-fort and a heavy-fort. Heavy fort being a trace italliene and a light fort being a rapidly dug/earth starfort or something that you can build super fast and don't cost a whole lot. Both would count towards fort-forcelimit. Heavy forts costing alot of money to build and maintain and light forts being cheaper and faster to build but fall faster.
You would unlock new light and heavy forts in tech much like you unlock heavy and light ships.
This way you don't need to be able to 'move' forts, just build light forts in places where you expect the border to fluctuate soon and build heavy forts next to arch enemies that you are not going to expand into anytime soon.
This would also still allow you to maybe trap armies hue still think that would be so cool

 

[Ratanka]

no at BORDER would be fine, but its
no at water no at wasteland ... ottomans has 30 free ones ...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The AI cheating does not bother me so much as seeing games loose depth as a workaround for the lack of good AI. TL;DR So yeah I would love a clever AI but since that is not going to happen, letting the AI cheat is the lesser of two evils I guess.

Even so, giving it stuff that strengthens it (and scripting it to use that stuff) should be preferable to giving the ability to stall, when choosing between the two.

The AI could have been given half its army free instead of forts. It would be difficult to make a case that such wouldn't make the game harder than the forts change. In that light, I'm inclined to agree with Arumba that this isn't really a situation where the developers are tuning difficulty, but rather an issue arising from another attempt to "close exploits". If that results in more difficulty, I can accept it. When that results in more waiting...not so much.

Revanchism can't work, as far as I can tell; in approximately all cases either you don't need it (because your loss is survivable without it) or it won't save you (because you've been ruined).

The design of revanchism is that of a rubber band mechanic that only applies to positions that are winning. It's like first place constantly getting a blue shell in Mario Kart, only less extreme.

Apparently, that's a difficult mechanic to justify. So, they didn't justify it .