Does the "A.I. Aggressiveness" game option impact AI troop movement or just diplomacy?

[GeneralUrist]

The Darkest Hour manual describes the AI Aggressiveness game option thusly: "This adjusts how the A.I. reacts to the player’s actions during the game, ranging from “coward” to “furious”. At furious level, the AI will tend to declare war at the slightest provocation and will be considerably more actively militaristic, while at coward level the AI will tend to be more conservative and generally defensive. "

Emphasis mine. Does this mean that at lower aggressiveness the AI will be less likely to make offensive moves at war?

I'm considering turning the option down from the default middle option for my longer games, so that the AI doesn't start unplanned wars, and wars happen only by events or the player DOWing. But at the same time I want wars to be a challenge when they do break out, and I don't want the AI to just do a passive and predictable defense.

So, does anyone know if changing the A.I. aggressiveness option impacts how the AI behaves at war, or if it just impacts tendency to start wars?

 

[Stahl-Opa]

Afaik this only affects diplomacy. But I can't tell it for sure.
There is an AI option inside the AI files, which controls the overall behavior of the AI, called recklessnes. If this is set to 3, the AI will charge alot, set to 0, the AI is mostly defensive. Something like that...

 

[Templier]

With AI Aggressiveness set to Furious in DH Full vanilla:

I played as Germany from 1933 to 1941. Then I switched to neutral Uruguay after Pearl Harbor and ran the game hands off. The Allies were much more active launching amphibious assaults, especially the USA. They cleared out North Africa and attacked through Netherlands, Greece, Indochina and Dutch East Indies. China even kicked out Japan from the mainland. I don’t often see this happen in normal AI Aggressiveness setting or if it does it takes years to occur.

If you play Axis a lot and are tired of a passive USA or want a more interesting vanilla game, increasing the AI Aggressiveness might help. Just keep in mind the attacks may be a bit more reckless and you will see more counter attacks than usual.

Now, if there was an option to set AI Aggressiveness by country rather than to all nations that would be great. I would set the USA and UK AI to Furious by default.

 

[Crispin]

Great find and very interesting. I definitely would want an more active Usa and Uk. Is it possible to set individual ai aggressiveness anyone know ?

 

[mccarty.geoff]

I think those results were due to the game running handsoff opposed to pausing and causing the AI planning to be scrapped every so often. AI aggressiveness was supposed to increase the rate of DoW checks in EU2 but, broke a long time ago like EU2 ~1.05. I don't believe it does anything in Vic1 or Hoi1/2 whatsoever.
Within the AI file there is a 'war' parameter which was 0-100 % chance of DoWing the highest rated 'combat' nation. The threshold was messed with in DH so that anything over 10 seems to automatically cause a DoW on it's targets if the AI isn't blocked by democracy, belligerence, or relations value.