Clearly Hacking AI

[TtheHF]

Forts are still very confusing. Take this example. I have no idea what's going on here.

I stumbled on this out in the wilds while trying to find answers for my situation - I was going to suggest that merging troops can sometimes block movement (change return path) when behind or in ZoC, and that mercs raised next to forts can only move onto those forts, so perhaps if you merge between two forts you can't move to either? Realize on reviewing ur vid that there's only one fort but maybe the same or a related broken mechanism?

 

[TtheHF]

AFAIK AI does cheat with ZoC. They can ignore any ZoC, if there would be another available route they could take, even if this means they would travel around the whole mediterranean or what not.
Is this not the case anymore? I'm quiet sure that happened in a recent game of mine...

Despite all the disags people have given you here, nether, this would actually perfectly explain my Denmark video [edit: lost at the bottom of page 1] as the thumbnail shows no ZoC behind the fort next to where they attacked in Rhzev, meaning they could have moved there using a VERY circuitous path if they wanted and as Odoyev, in fact, already had. It's utterly insane programming and makes individual forts quite useless in most circumstances if true, but would explain it perfectly.

 

[netherlink]

Well, in the latest dev diary, @Gnivom said that this was a bug, which was fixed some patches ago.
So, this should not be the reason why AI sometimes seems to ignore ZoC.
It's quiet hard for me to believe, since I'm very sure that i a) understand the ZoC rules and b) have seen strange AI movements that should not be allowed.
Anyway, I can see in the future, and i see a lot of disagrees incoming, so this was my last post to this thread, everyone who says there is something odd is obviosly a liar, so i shut up now...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Watch Reman's video on topic of forts on youtube, it really helped me understand the mechanics behind forts.

As for miltech check French ruler stats, if he's 6 in mil that would explain as sometimes I am buying miltech even with 80% penalty. But the miltech advantage does not provide any interference with forts.

That video is spectacular for helping players game the system (and just to know the rules, hiding rules is a black eye for strategy games). However, seeing these interactions helps to demonstrate just how broken forts are in terms of implementation.

Once you know how to ignore all forts in a sea zone using one cog, it still doesn't change the fact that you can ignore all forts in that sea zone using one cog, nor does understanding the reason why controlling a fort can trap you make that outcome any less nonsense :/.

 

[Sfan]

You're still free to propose a system that always gives the wanted result.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You're still free to propose a system that always gives the wanted result.

My priorities are very obviously different from Pdox priorities. I want a mechanic to work first, then be implemented. You know, instead of having things like scutage not giving extra money for many patches, false advertising for most of the game's existence, or patching problems with DLC cures...though forts are equal opportunity broken for everyone.

It just so happens that there was an implementation of forts that worked consistently with player expectations and did not rely on YouTube to explain its rules. It was also the implementation around which the AI was originally built. Many people disagree with me though, despite that by objective standards pre 1.12 forts functioned more clearly and had less bugs.

You could also scrap the entire force field nonsense and make it a province specific setup. Make forts less expensive to build and maintain, and set a rule that you can't move fort --> fort. No other move restrictions. Even that, despite its limitations, would function better than

- "I unloaded this unit off a cog and moved stuff into that army so now the whole army can go anywhere"
- "I took a fort so I can't move back the way I came any more"
- "Land movement blocked by hostile fort with no fort in a 10 province radius, stack wipe on the spot"
- "Two armies on the same province sieging the same fort and capable of fighting in the same battle on the same terrain can not go to the same locations from that province"
- ^ "Unless they belong to the same nation and merge a certain way, then they can do so after all"

...the kind of stuff that should have been a red flag years ago in the beta that introduce them. Not that bugs like what you can take/core or offensive coalition wars, also present in 1.12b, have been acknowledged/fixed since then either.

 

[Splax77]

The AI can definitely cheat fort ZOC, but it's quite rare and 95% of supposed cheating cases are just not understanding the rules. Here's a good example from my current game:

My ally Gujarat is able to go through the fort in Sukhothai straight to Nan, but if I tried to make the same move I would have to go above and around Sukhothai. No boats were involved, he walked over from his territory. As far as I understand, the rule is that if there is any valid path to a location, the AI is allowed to take the shortest path even if that means ignoring ZOC. The AI tries its best not to abuse this most of the time, but it can be annoying in some situations.

 

[indika_tates]

Sometimes military access from foreign countries completely changes the way you can pass through forts. It's specially a mess inside the HRE where you can go forward with an army but after you pass that fort you can't go back. What I do and it usually works is to have two adjacent forts in a place you don't want the AI go through.

I don't understand why forts ZOC's are so problematic. It should block any kind of movement in adjacent provinces and that's it. And military access shouldn't be a thing to cheese the mechanic. Is there an enemy fort on an adjacent province? You can't pass.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Sometimes military access from foreign countries completely changes the way you can pass through forts. It's specially a mess inside the HRE where you can go forward with an army but after you pass that fort you can't go back. What I do and it usually works is to have two adjacent forts in a place you don't want the AI go through.

I don't understand why forts ZOC's are so problematic. It should block any kind of movement in adjacent provinces and that's it. And military access shouldn't be a thing to cheese the mechanic. Is there an enemy fort on an adjacent province? You can't pass.

So long as you have province buildings impacting other provinces, you're going to run into trouble with overlaps and "origin province" computations and right back to the issue of "two merge-able/combat armies on the same spot can't go to the same places". It sounds simple until you start getting into some of the examples.

That's exactly why I made the fort --> fort block suggestion with ZoC removal. In such a scenario one look at the map would allow you to instantly discern where any army is allowed to go. You'd be able to bypass a single row of forts though and people wouldn't like that. I'd be a pure arcade-like mechanic, but a functional one. The one we have now is barely less arcade-like anyway.

 

[TtheHF]

gnivom says:

The AI doesn’t cheat with Fort Zone of Control. Nor was it ever meant to, although there has been at least one bug in the past where it could in rare cases.

Other than the Fort Zone of Control, the AI/Player cheats currently mentioned on the wiki are correct (to my best knowledge).


wiki says:

• There appear to be obscure Zone of Control bugs with the fort system that causes AI to be able to go through forts in some cases where humans couldn't have, classifying and debugging them is work in progress.

https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Artificial_intelligence#Cheats


So this answers it. The AI does cheat but it's considered a bug, not intentional as some keep trying to say. Fair enough EU4, I still love ya <3

 

[Zohtun]

The problem I have with these cases here is that I've seen circumstances similar.

Here's a note a few people forget: ZoC works on "You stay on the side you started". I had a war with Jaunpur where my army (since I actually eclipsed them so badly that I was on BOTH sides east and west) was basically split in half. I'd used a pincer formation to ensure they couldn't get into my territory (and thus carpet me), but until I took all their main forts to the north I was unable to unite my armies. All efforts to do so just resulted in my army routing around. My vassals followed these same rules as well, with each only able to aid the armies it had paired with.

So oftentimes when I see this "LOOK THERE'S A FORT HERE AND THE AI WENT THROUGH IT SUCH HAX" I end up wanting to see the full context. Did the AI -come- from the direction it's now headed? Because if it did then it's actually following the rules and the player saying "GO THE OTHER WAY" is literally illegal for it. Basically, there's not enough information from the screenshot to explain what happened and to make a call as to if the AI is cheating or if the player is just looking for confirmation bias in a complicated system.

 

[Sfan]

The wiki is out of date, this bug has been fixed in a recent patch, they sait it in the relate dev diary. 1.19 or 1.20, one of these two. Which is why we have a lot less complaints on the forum (that and Reman explaining very simply and clearly how it has always worked).

 

[TtheHF]

Feel like I need to show the situation that has led me down this rabbit hole as, despite my having posted it already, it ended up in dead air at the bottom of page 1 and it proves my point without leaving room for any confusion or conjecture. There is no excuse for this movement that I can conceive of, using reman's superb info, beyond that direct movement bug still being here [edit] which reman doesn't mention or address[/edit].

 

[Sharples88]

Sometimes military access from foreign countries completely changes the way you can pass through forts. It's specially a mess inside the HRE where you can go forward with an army but after you pass that fort you can't go back. What I do and it usually works is to have two adjacent forts in a place you don't want the AI go through.

I don't understand why forts ZOC's are so problematic. It should block any kind of movement in adjacent provinces and that's it. And military access shouldn't be a thing to cheese the mechanic. Is there an enemy fort on an adjacent province? You can't pass.

Yeah. I totally agree with this. The sea province rule for forts is quite ridiculous. As Reman explained in his video with the Aegean sea, you can walk all over that area instead of needing to return to the boat to put your troops on the desired province to go to. I've also had situations where I'm France and I have two units in the exact same location, but if one of them took a sea province to get there, the ZOC rules are completely different for them, allowing them to pass right through ZOC as long as it's within that sea zone, while my other unit has to siege down the fort first before it can get there.

The fact that you need a video to explain forts just shows how convoluted and confusing the mechanic is. All these special rules really make it frustrating for someone who just assumes that forts can block their path forward yet see the AI/human players go straight past it.

I'm not saying we should return to a pre-patch where every fort was a -2 and you could carpet siege the AI/human players immediately, because that was in a desperate needed update. What we need to do is modify the special rule nonsense that the current fort system has to offer.

I refuse to believe that this fort system isn't broken. I have had situations where if there are two forts in the same ZOC, and I combine two units together, once I siege one of those provinces, the new one now overrides what last one I was into, meaning the game doesn't let me go back. I have had situations where I am permanently stuck in a fort because of this. (until I siege it down, I can't move to any other province) And let me just say, it's one of the most frustrating things I've ever come across in this game.

Mothballed forts don't give ZOC. So you can walk right through them. There are two problems with this.

1. You can go right through the fort if you already made your movement before they re-enabled the fort. It will never stop in it's tracks unless an enemy forces you to retreat.
2. A fort can exert ZOC if there are no people in the fort if you get to it within a month of it being re-enabled.

I have to agree with TheMeInTeam, forts should ZOC provinces around them and nothing else. None of these special rules, they make the game stressful and unfun.

 

[Badesumofu]

But which rules do you consider to be 'special'? The current system would not be workable without return provinces, and that seems to be where most of the confusion comes from.

If you had a simplified system that just says: you can't move from a ZoC province to another ZoC province, then you'd have *more* situations where armies can just waltz past forts because you'd need a two zone thick ZoC in order to actually keep an army out of an area. Keep in mind as well that the fort province itself cannot be considered to be ZoC under such a system as that would make it impossible to ever actually get to a fort province since it would be surrounded by its own ZoC.

So you have to have a return province. And since that leads to a variety of different possible circumstances you have to have rules to cover them all. Some of those rules will seem to be special because they end up producing some counter-intuitive results and/or are rarely relevant. There are probably some cases where the rules could be tidied up, and the game should absolutely do a better job of making its own rules clear. But short of making an entire new system (which has been tried and may be tried again if someone figures one out) there are no simple solutions here.

 

[Drachenfels]

I don't understand why forts ZOC's are so problematic. It should block any kind of movement in adjacent provinces and that's it. And military access shouldn't be a thing to cheese the mechanic. Is there an enemy fort on an adjacent province? You can't pass.

My thought exactly. I do not understand why the hell forts are cancelling each other. I believe it would simplify interaction by order of magnitude.

 

[FrogCrusher]

I take the opportunity of this thread to remind my ideas on a simple fort system: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ruined-this-game.1040196/page-3#post-23200966