AI really doesn't like to build transports

[aitaituo]

it's never as simple as 'throw in more manpower and everything is better'.

This is what happens when you change building bonuses. It used to be that you could get more manpower AND cheaper employee costs by using the military chain up to level 3. Sounds like you guys kinda shot yourself in the foot there.

 

[Cossack8559]

French AI rulez in naval invasion:

EXACT same thing in my last two games playing German minors. France has invaded and occupied all of England. Love to know what the English navy is doing.

 

[Captain Gars]

It would be so much simpler if transports were taken out as a unit from the game. Back in CK1, troops basically walked on water for a fee. The longer the distance, and the more troops, the more expensive it got. AI handled that just fine. Other strategy games have dispensed with Transport AI as well, because it is not simple (and not critical) I suppose.

It's a lazy solution. Naval invasions are like every other aspect of the AI: hard to do - but far from impossible. What often ruins AI is not the lack of sophisticated systems - but a small, simple mistake hiding in the sophisticated code.

If Wiz is the only one AI programmer at Paradox, what he has done so far is amazing.

He's the only dedicated AI programmer, but there are still other programmers doing some work on the AI, often implementing some of the basics for new features.

 

[saegoto]

The problem with naval AI is that I didn't have time to completely rewrite it before the release of the game, so while I've spent plenty of time on it between release and now, it's always been subject to a lot of bugs and tendencies for fixes to create more problems just by virtue of being very old code. This also leads to it having a lower priority simply because some tweaking here and there isn't ever going to make it great, and I rarely have the kind of consecutive free time on EU4 (I work on several other projects as well) that would be needed for a total rewrite + testing + inevitable bugfixes for the new system.

hire more people ;p