If a (human) player knows the basics of the game, a match might go like this: they decide which path of which country to play as, map out a plan of the important focuses and advisors to pick, and off they go. Maybe they mess up at same point and start over or the plan goes to fruition.*
An AI can't function like that. Whatever original intent an AI country has, it *must* operate under the expectation that there is at least one country in the world that messes up other's plans big time. The simple fact of the matter is most countries will not be able to realize their original strategy and have to adapt accordingly. Most often, that will be AI countries.
Yet when it comes to national focuses, the devs decided to walk back the small amount of dynamic decision making the AI had and they literally just work off a single list of focuses from the start up until what is usually the end of the game (1942/43).
Even setting aside responding dynamically to what other countries are doing, some strategies are just much more risky than others for the AI. Sure, South Africa has a path for turning all of Africa into a union of socialist states. Should the AI try to do this in 25% of games, given what it knows about it's own capabilities? I'd argue no.
* I'm not saying everyone always plays like that, but this seems to be what AI strategy plans are modeled on
An AI can't function like that. Whatever original intent an AI country has, it *must* operate under the expectation that there is at least one country in the world that messes up other's plans big time. The simple fact of the matter is most countries will not be able to realize their original strategy and have to adapt accordingly. Most often, that will be AI countries.
Yet when it comes to national focuses, the devs decided to walk back the small amount of dynamic decision making the AI had and they literally just work off a single list of focuses from the start up until what is usually the end of the game (1942/43).
Even setting aside responding dynamically to what other countries are doing, some strategies are just much more risky than others for the AI. Sure, South Africa has a path for turning all of Africa into a union of socialist states. Should the AI try to do this in 25% of games, given what it knows about it's own capabilities? I'd argue no.
* I'm not saying everyone always plays like that, but this seems to be what AI strategy plans are modeled on
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