AI Still Sleeping

[Dinsdale]

One of the longest lasting, and probably most important of all bugs appears to be still active; ai sleep.

I haven't played a full game with 1.07 yet, but my 1.06 game is still showing all the signs of sleeping.

One example; Bohemia declared independence from Poland, so I threw some money their way, brought them into my alliance, and declared war on Poland. Spent about a year running away from large Polish armies and engaging in siege/counter siege, hoping that Bohemia would be able to liberate Moravia, or another province and get peace. Well, Bohemia did not raise a single soldier during the course of the war. So I decided to take a peek at the save file and looked with awe at their >400 unspent ducats and 0 armies.

Decided to reload from the beginning of the war, lo and behold, Bohemia builds a nice army, then goes on the march to take Moravia. Countering this though were significantly more Polish armies who wiped me out and I had to make a humiliating peace, and in my abscence Bohemia was re-annexed.

All of the new changes and bug fixes would appear to be only cosmetic features when compared with the enormity of this issue. In that one small example a war I was fighting with ease became a walkover for the AI. Perhaps all the changes and increased difficulty would be unnecessary if the AI would simply not stop dead in it's tracks, and continue to play the game.

This issue has also been reported in HOI, it has also been reported since EU1. I understand that it might be difficult, that replication might be hard, but the severity of this one dwarfs anything else in the game.

 

[unmerged(6147)]

From a programmers point of view this does not appear to be too difficult to understand.

There appears to be only two possible reasons

1. At the start of play some parts of the code is entered which is not entered later on during play. Solution: make sure that this part of the code is entered more often, e.g. the 1st of each month. This may be tiresome to solve in practise if the code that indeed must be executed only at the start of the game is knitted closely with code that we thus want to execute more often.

2. It is the same code that is executed in both of these situations (at the start and later on) but there are some variables that during play have their values changed, and these variables are used as switches/parameters etc in the relevant part of the code. Cannot be that hard to find and the solution must be ad hoc based, it is difficult to say anything in general about the best strategy to solve it.

A third possible reason is that we cannot execute this start of program code too often because it woul ddecrease the speed of the game too much. However, I have never seen this argment presented and if it was true I think we would have heard it.

Probably Johan has good view of this problem and knows in what direction the solution lies.

 

[Dinsdale]

Well I am underwhelmed that this issue drew such little response. Considering that the average discussion of Poland or Hungary runs 30 pages I can see that a little issue such as the AI dropping out of the game is obviously not worth mentioning.

Did some hunting, and having plowed through 17 pages of a search, these are the only threads I could find on the issue;

http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35503&highlight=SLEEP
(An allusion to the problem being worked on for 1.06, obviously that has not happened yet)

http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33111&highlight=SLEEP
(nice long thread, but no official comment)

http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33304&highlight=SLEEP
(another bug report)

I really, for the life of me do not understand the persistance of this problem, nor the apathy shown toward it. Experimented a bit this evening, save/reloading every 10 minutes. EU becomes a different game, and I must admit to being slaughtered in some wars with the AI relentlessly building and using it's troops.

Save/reloading is too much of a pain to be a practical long term solution, but having glimpsed the true EU underneath, I'd like to be able to play it permenently.

 

[wryun]

Well, what is there to say? I'd guess most people here have experienced the AI sleep problems, but saying 'yes, me too' is a bit pointless, when one would assume that the developers are well aware of this by now... and seem to have chucked it in the too hard basket.

(but yes, me too)

 

[Rio]

The sleep issue is mentioned in a number of threads that may involve other topics, but clearly shows up in some of the "bug" forum threads. It has been mentioned by some who regularly comment on this phenomenon "without commenting" it seems, as they casually mention the need to reload every twenty years to rewake the ai...

When mentioning this however, ( I rarely do) folks are usually commmenting on some other aspect of the game! BTW, 20 years DOES seem to be about the right length of time to assure fairly regular activity by the ai, but it IS odd that there seems little programmer activity on this issue despite the many hours clearly spent on other problems. This being said, I think the time spent on MP was more important than the ai sleep issue, and a few of the innovative solutions to long-standing game balance or technique issues were at least equally valuable. That ghaving been said, and with Johan STILL pumping out constant betas with further improvements, perhaps someone could lend a hand to divide up a "coalition of the willing" to find the programming lines or variables that could solve this issue. I'm no programmer, so I don't really know what to look for, but I can read, and I'm willing.

 

[unmerged(4444)]

Originally posted by Dinsdale
...
I really, for the life of me do not understand the persistance of this problem, nor the apathy shown toward it.
...

Indeed. All these nice tweaks and new features are all well and good (don't get me wrong, I appreciate Johan's dedication), but that such a basic and longstanding issue (and one that has such a huge effect on the game experience) seems to be being ignored is mystifying to me.

Phil

 

[unmerged(6816)]

Maybe it is just really hard to fix.

 

[unmerged(15337)]

I have very little experience with the game but I, too, have noticed the "sleep" phenomenon. What I would like to ask of the experts is if there is a consensus as to how frequently one should "wake up" the AI in order to have a "correct" game -- neither too fierce nor too meek. 5 years? 10? 15?

 

[unmerged(15394)]

It would be nice to know if this issue is in anyway beyond the area of code for the game that Johan works on.

A general comment from Paradox would be nice to know if it is even on their radar.

(and it does not generate many posts because there is not much to discuss. Unless someone develops an arguement that it does not need to be fixed.)

 

[SJG]

I think everyone is aware of the issue, but I doubt it is a simple fix.

 

[unmerged(6788)]

Does the HoI AI also sleeps?

 

[Porcius]

Originally posted by Aranha
Does the HoI AI also sleeps?

Does the HoI AI ever wake?

If it just takes a reload every 15-20 years to prevent AI sleeping, why can't the program just "refresh" every 15 years? Most people autosave every year or so, so just have the refresh be a longer autosave. This can't be too difficult programming wise, can it?

 

[Vynd]

Personally I save and reload at least every 10 years. I'll also do it if I notice the AI doing something flaky, or if I am about to embark on a war.

I don't think there is a time period that you are safe from AI sleepiness in. The AI countries can forget to do stuff starting pretty much as soon as the post-loading bout of activity is over, in my experience. Or it can be fine for years.

 

[Slargos]

Re: patches to Eu2.

Most, if not all (?) of the work Johan does on EU2 now is done on his spare time. Focus lately has been on the MP aspect, and it is sorely needed.

The AI sleep is an old and known problem and there has been lots of speculation during these past few years..

Just thought I'd chuck those little tidbits out there for your enlightenment.

 

[Dinsdale]

Originally posted by Slargos
Re: patches to Eu2.

Most, if not all (?) of the work Johan does on EU2 now is done on his spare time. Focus lately has been on the MP aspect, and it is sorely needed.

The AI sleep is an old and known problem and there has been lots of speculation during these past few years..

Just thought I'd chuck those little tidbits out there for your enlightenment.

Well, I do think that fixing an issue which infects both multi and single player would have had priority over MP loophole closures.


I don't suppose there are many 100+ player mp games, so the AI has a significant role in that arena too.


As for it being hard, while I do have sympathy for tracking down hard to replicate bugs, I doubt there is any application which maintains bug lists based solely on fixability.

The whole 1.06++ patches and improvements have made already impressive support for this product truly legendary. However, before closing off support, keeping the AI alive should be an absolute priority for repair.

 

[Tim O]

Just restart every ten years or so, it's obviously to hard to fix or they would have done it by now.

 

[DGuller]

This has to be tracked down anyway. This seems to be a chronic problem in all Paradox games, therefore fixing it in EUII would make sure that the problem doesn't occur in the future games. I do thing that Paradox isn't addressing this problem, I have yet to see someone commenting about it.

 

[Dinsdale]

Originally posted by Timothy Ortiz
Just restart every ten years or so, it's obviously to hard to fix or they would have done it by now.

How many games require the user to save/reload in order to get the AI to function? It's not a question of hard, it is of importance.

Perhaps dozens of other player crippling tweaks would be unnecessary if the AI remained awake.

 

[swilhelm73]

Originally posted by Dinsdale
How many games require the user to save/reload in order to get the AI to function? It's not a question of hard, it is of importance.

Perhaps dozens of other player crippling tweaks would be unnecessary if the AI remained awake.

I tend to reload every year if I am not at war - because of that troops counting bug - which keeps the AI *very* active.

OTOH, seeing 72K troops in a one province Iraq is quite a sight...good thing for my armies the AI doesn't understand attrition very well I suppose.

 

[wryun]

The troop counting bug is supposed to be fixed:

- Total unitcounts should no longer be miscalculated in a reload if units are being built.

(1.07 changes list)