• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
It also doesn't work when you are at peace with the natives but they aren't with your colonies.
Do I understand you correctly that you are saying that it is impossible to use the enforce peace action if a country attacks your CN with whom you have a truce? This is wrong. A truce does not prevent you from enforcing peace on a country which is attacking your CN.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Do I understand you correctly that you are saying that it is impossible to use the enforce peace action if a country attacks your CN with whom you have a truce? This is wrong. A truce does not prevent you from enforcing peace on a country which is attacking your CN.
I wonder if the AI knows that? It enforces so rarely at baseline that I'm not sure how you'd even test it, though.
 
People, i know its easy for human players to conquer NA. What I wanna know is why the AI are not succeding
Are they?
Might be good to get some statistics, e.g. for a given ingame year (say 1750) and in the absence of direct player intervention, what is the cross-game average percentage of NA provinces held by AI colonial nations? (for me, 75% mean or median at 1750 would seem low)

AI management of naval logistics is not sufficient to beat another AI of same skill that does not have to manage naval logistics, even if it would otherwise have a large advantage.
The times I saw Ottomans lose wars of conquest against Malta because they apparently can't get on the island (despite having naval supremacy in the Med!) were amusing but also kinda painful.
(It came as a surprise when they did manage to conquer Sicily once)

If navies could project power in colonial land holdings more effectively that would help, since the AI can actually move their warships around at least. A point made in this suggestion thread (can't link directly because anti-spam): /forum/threads/give-navy-ability-to-siege-and-occupy-provinces.1518594
 
Last edited:
Do I understand you correctly that you are saying that it is impossible to use the enforce peace action if a country attacks your CN with whom you have a truce? This is wrong. A truce does not prevent you from enforcing peace on a country which is attacking your CN.
The Enforce peace feature is the only way to stop the ai from attacking your colonies and it bugs me. I decided to play Portugal after trying out the colonial game after getting bored of the Byzantium -> Elysia mod since you can't fight colonies without fighting their overlord, and the AI was too aggressive. I couldn't be at peace or have a stable army without Potiguara attacking Brazil for 5 minutes and each time I annexed them they moved to another province, wash rinse repeat.
 
Conquest of paradise also adds mechanics for tribal nations such as migration, federations, and reform tribal government.

Most of the tribal mechanics require the DLC, without it they are very basic nations who would ally each other for defense but won't otherwise quickly form large tribal federations.
Good. Unfortunate that disabling the DLC doesn't remove them from the game entirely.
 
Yeah, they moved the extra colonist over to Expansion. I think the idea is that the early colonizers (i.e., Castile, Portugal, and England) had too much of an advantage. They have an expel minorities cost modifier in Exploration, which is 100% useless. There is never a reason to use expel minorities.

I'm honestly pretty disappointed. Paradox basically shat out this patch with completely broken colonization (and combat AI, btw) and is already off to selling their next DLC.
It gives you free money with the gov reform and saves 2 ducats a month
 
AI management of naval logistics is not sufficient to beat another AI of same skill that does not have to manage naval logistics, even if it would otherwise have a large advantage.

The AI also has poor understanding of colony management.

Also, right now there are bugs with federations stealing land w/o war + bug with truces, and the AI can't/doesn't know how play around those bugs. That these should be fixed is uncontroversial, I hope.
I agree that AI has poor understanding of colonial management, but there were a time when it was rare a colonial empire get beaten by a native coalition. I hope this performance is a combination of what you said about the bugs + the "non intervention policy" (i'll call it that way, when colonies get attacked and the metropolis doesnt intervene). And i hope this change.
Probably not, they've tried on and off for many patches. It's improved somewhat, but still nowhere near comparable to its ability to march on land.

This is similar to the reason Portugal never makes serious headway against Kilwa, and that Europeans can't press an objectively large advantage against Indian nations even during the windows in the game where those are most meaningful.
Geeee, kilwa/zimbabwe and all african nations from this region are upsetting me. They now conquer south africa from european powers by 1600. Its just so frustranting to see how hard is for the european colonial powers to establish international and distante trade routes.
This preference has been stated many times over the years on EU 4 forums, but it has yet to be backed by reasons that make said preference coherent.

Why "should" most of them fall to colonizers? I have yet to hear an answer that does not have bizarre implications on EU 4's rules as a whole and imply forced/shoehorned outcomes generally.
It "should" because thats whats happened. As i said earlier, we need to find a middle ground. Nor the situation prior to now was good, neither is now. I really dont know how to change this. But right now the changes made are having "bizarre implications on EU 4's rule as role" since the colonial powers are not becoming... colonial powers.
The fact of the matter is that if the Europeans were actually the inept imbeciles that the AI is consistently in EU 4 when it comes to intercontinental logistics, then the western hemisphere would never have been held, same for India and East Indies. While the methods the Spanish used to conquer Mexico/Peru were awful, they were also not something the game could replicate, or even model. A human might ally one Indian nation and get it to betray others to make conquest easier. The AI though?
I agree. History is just to rich and to specific to replicate in a game. As i read what u wrote im starting to think the AI were smarter before all those changes, because it was common to see france, spain and, mostly, uk conquering at least the coastal areas of southeastern Asia. By now, im not saying its impossible, but im not seeing it happening in my last games.
You can say that all you like but without something like machine learning AI (which would outplay you with sufficient training and make the game unwinnable) it's probably not feasible. You'd have to alter the game's rule structure from the ground up, to the point of making a new game.

You'd also have to come up with a way for Asian countries to progress/succeed in a way they did not historically, that still makes sense in the game model. If you can't, you wind up exchanging one set of ahistorical rules for another (because for example the game allows Bharat to hold Spain and culture drift to Spanish, after which their tech restriction just for being "Asian" would be...awkward).
I think some things needs to be clarified. The game is not able to perform the wole tech differences that existed. I do not hope it does. However, all the institutions are overtuned. Feudalism might be the only one that is working in a decent way since its spawn is defined by default. Renassaince is reaching the whole ottoman domains in just 30 years. There were games that the ottos were "renassainced" even before the german principalities. And when the ottos get the full institution, oh geez this sucks, because theyre blobbing again, and almost the whole middle east gets the institution and then africans and asians rapidly get the institution too. Global trade, Manufactories, Enlightment and Industrialization are all spawing in whole world in less than 50 years each. Ottos are getting Printing Press and Colonialism in less than 50 years after its first spawn.
I didnt like the westernization mechanism, and as you said, its not historical and not interesting to the game to restrict so much the tech advances that human players can achieve when playing these nations. But we need to moderate. Global trade, for example, should spawn only in nations with 4 or more merchants or accordingly with its trande range (but never in all provinces that is spawing now). Industrialization should spawn first only in the most industrialized nations, not in every industrialized province. Englightment should spawn only in the most tech advanced nations and at a very slow pace in every province (the ones that are not in the domains of the most tech advanced nations) that have a university.
Renassaince, Colonialism and Printing Press (at least the press associated with the religious movements) are all unique european institutions and should not be spawning so fast as it is.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
I agree that AI has poor understanding of colonial management, but there were a time when it was rare a colonial empire get beaten by a native coalition. I hope this performance is a combination of what you said about the bugs
I would not underestimate this bug, since it can happen multiple times over and swap a lot of land in doing so (especially if a unified federation does another one). The natives aren't just getting some land...they're getting "cores" that are instantly full value wrt autonomy plus both buildings and access to whatever institutions were present in that land, all without marching a step. It's a nasty interaction and any evaluation of the balance of the game state should come *after* this obviously egregious bug/interaction gets patched out.

Geeee, kilwa/zimbabwe and all african nations from this region are upsetting me. They now conquer south africa from european powers by 1600. Its just so frustranting to see how hard is for the european colonial powers to establish international and distante trade routes.

It was pretty hard IRL, which is why Europeans accomplishing it was considered a feat in the first place. The same reason they don't do it in the game also applies to historic conquests by nations like Aq Qoyunlu, Qing or Mughals in the timeframes they could do it in reality. Game mechanics interfere, but so does the simple fact that both sides of the war have literally identical strategic and tactical capabilities (AI logic).

It "should" because thats whats happened.

Whatever standard you want to use, this one isn't functional. It's like asking France to always conquer up to Moscow late-game, HRE to always be dissolved before 1821, Ottomans to always annex many 100s% OE vs Mamluks every game, India to always be mostly conquered by Mughals (then lose it). Some of these things were highly improbable, historically. But they are "what happened".

Same deal for Britain conquering India. That was only possible due to a long chain of things happening in sequence prior, conditions EU 4 practically never allows to happen.

I would like to see institutions get reworked such that their spread criteria varies by region, and that you have to work to meet the conditions (but can do so anywhere, if successful enough). Feels like a pipe dream now, but it'd be nice.
 
Yeah I just started playing again recently and I have to say that colonizing kinda is a bad experience , I’ve routinely seen the natives form powerful federation blocks before the Europeans even have a chance to get started there…

Even if the Europeans get a foothold then they swiftly get kicked out of the americas

I’ve played around 5 longish games so far and have only seen a “strong” British Canada and they barely held on against the federations
 
  • 2
Reactions:
I was watching this youtuber play eu4 after a break and he was very frustrated with the tribes destroying his colonies. He attempted it multiple times but all it did was create two big federations that crushed north america
 
  • 1
Reactions: