Blobfest 2.0

[Earl Uhtred]

The AI appears to be playing better. The game rewards aggressive play and offensive conquest and the AI now does so regularly. If the AI conquering up a storm and trying to blob is a problem, why is it not a problem when any human can do so? Single player maps are starting to look a little bit closer to multiplayer, and that's great for having a bit of longevity on the difficulty side but obviously troubling if you're into some kind of historical realism roleplay.

They could probably "fix" it by adding a third difficulty option to set AI aggressiveness. Maybe a passive, cautious, normal, and warmonger level. What would be really unfortunate is if they change the AI's aggression without altering any of the underlying motivations that reward it, which would effectively be an AI nerf. If you don't want the AI to be constantly conquering and warmongering, then you either want a game that has harsher drawbacks for it in general or you just want a game with weak AI.

It's a shame this basic issue, how to motivate the player NOT to expand as fast as he can - is about as far from being resolved as ever, despite three sequels, countless new features and the sheer volume of water under the bridge.

 

[yerm]

It's a shame this basic issue, how to motivate the player NOT to expand as fast as he can - is about as far from being resolved as ever, despite three sequels, countless new features and the sheer volume of water under the bridge.

Mind you, I totally agree. It's just that there's a couple sides to the issue. If you want to discourage blobbing, you need to not only add longer-term repercussions to rapid expansion to prevent warmongering from being guaranteed optimal play, but you also must add non-warmongering gameplay elements to compensate or you end up with a stale and boring game!

CK2 is built such that this could easily be done even if blobbing is currently optimal by ramping up the drawbacks and punishing empire stability, the system is there, but EU4 has no such system in place. OE is a short term malice, and rebels are a proportionate threat, while peace time mechanics in this game are borderline nonexistent - even an elective monarchy establishing colonies will get lame very fast without wars. My conclusion is that it's something that'd be great for eu5, but for now, I'll just accept my ahistorically aggressive AI as they're just behaving more optimally than before. If people don't think like me and want AI to be calmer, I disagree but understand, but would like if you could toggle between them if that reversion is considered.

 

[Chaos_TLW]

PLC? i just trashed them as golden horde... ottos were my allies, but they barely even fought a single battle... just ran around in circles, attacked small stacks, but never the large ones before they began to blob...

PLC has always been trash, although they are forming before 1550, which is odd...

let me see, PLC army at 42k? ;o that's pathetically low. i'm at 120k + 60k from vassals... 180k = 4x PLC army size... twice ottos.

they have half the army that ottos does...

and none of them have quantity ideas yet either... or ever... fail nations... ;p

Seriously, none of that is relevant at all. All you've posted in this thread so far is either annoying anedoctal evidence or barely concealed attempts at bragging. The PLC has been unreasonably strong in the last few patches, often beating back Ottomans, Muscovy and the HREmperor for complete dominance in Central/Eastern Europe. At least in this patch Otto and Russia will occasionally ally with each other to check down on Poland's expansion.


@topic: I definitely think the AI feels more aggressive in 1.14. I agree with the above suggestion that a new setting for AI agressiveness, analogue to difficulty, would be nice.

 

[Susanna]

The Austrias I've seen lately make me nostalgic for EU2 and the BWB.