AI splitting up nations

[grumphie]

according to the patchnotes, the AI should be less prone to bordergore by splitting up nations. while splitting up nations is the ocrrect choice at times, i think most people would agree less splitting up by the AI is a good thing.

in my expierience however, the AI now seems to go out of it's way instead in splitting up nations, in situations it never did befor and makes no sense to do so. poland splitting up the teutonic order and not even taking all the provinces for their mission. bohemia taking berlin and greifswald splitting up drandenburg. genoa taking parts of crimea splitting them up in mutlipel peices. savoy/austria splitting up switserland. it often looks silly, and whiel there certainly are situations the AI should do it if they get the chance(i.e. burgundy losing barrois) i feel like the AI is doing so an excessive amoutn this patch.

am i just seeing things because they got mentioned in the patchnotes, suffering from comfirmation bias or do other people see this trend as well?

 

[Maykievic]

yeah, they also seem to go ham and conquer everything they can like an aggressive human player

 

[Freudia]

I don't see anything wrong with splitting enemy nations in half with their conquests. That's smart play.

I will say that the only time I've seen it though is after France got dogpiled and forced to release several nations, splitting their remaining territory into three chunks with a ton of French minors between them. I had no problem with that, either, as that seemed very smart for the AI to do.

 

[Incompetent]

The AI hates to have its own country split in half, for good reason. (Sometimes the AI even gets too carried away in its urge to connect, e.g. Austria proper <-> Austrian Netherlands.) It should also probably have a mild preference towards consolidating its own land in terms of cultures, trade regions and fort ZOCs, rather than developing a connected but not very compact spider web across Europe. But I don't see why it should be averse to making other countries look ugly. It's not the AI's job to create a map full of clean and tidy borders.

 

[Chaingun]

There was a thread about this some time ago (after the release); maybe someone can link it.

A factor in the AI's evaluation of peace offers has been added against the number of additional created fragments, and if you would have studied e.g. Novgorod splits before and after the change it would have shown to have shifted the probability distribution somewhat towards less created fragments. At the same time, I can't make this factor too important because it would lead to the AI preferring pretty borders over provinces that are actually more useful for it in game terms. Not saying the algorithm is perfect - it makes pretty inane choices still and will be tweaked further.

In retrospect I should simply not have put this in a patch note since people have shown to interpret it in a black and white manner. As for OP, beware of confirmation bias.

 

[Freudia]

There was a thread about this some time ago (after the release); maybe someone can link it.

A factor has been added against the number of additional created fragments in a peace, and if you studied e.g. Novgorod splits before and after the change it would have shown to have shifted the probability distribution somewhat towards less created fragments. At the same time, I can't make this factor too important because it would lead to the AI preferring pretty borders over provinces that are actually more useful for it in game terms. Not saying the algorithm is perfect - it makes pretty inane choices still and will be tweaked further.

In retrospect I should simply not have put this in a patch note since people have shown to interpret it in a black and white manner.

I will say that regardless of what your interpretation of people's responses is, I appreciate everything being changed being put in a patch note just so that if something behaves differently, I can reference the patch notes before deciding if I need to report it as a bug or not. That's something Paradox has gotten better at over the course of EU4's development cycle, but I do know some things still get omitted from the notes that I wish weren't.