Does the ai get smarter the closer it is to the player?

[Wizzington]

Yes, but only if your webcamera is on and directed at your head.

 

[Wizzington]

Agreed.

I played with Japan and several manchurian factions to get the achievements, and Ming has always been stronger then a stone-made pillars.

Instead, while playing with any European nation, most of the time I can see Ming provinces they are rebel-controlled.

You may call it confirmation bias as much as you want, but it's something I experienced directly in Ironman everytime.

Let's apply occam's razor here and ask ourselves what's more likely:

1) Out of your small sample size of games near Ming you experienced an unlikely but hardly impossible set out of outcomes (something like say, a coin coming up heads five times in a row).

OR

2) The AI grows more intelligent by feeding off the brain-waves of nearby human nations.

Clearly it must be option 2.

 

[Wizzington]

Actually, the option 2 seems quite flawed to me, like science-fiction.

More likely could be:
2) As soon the AI's mechanics (like Choosing Rival, no name one of the most signigicant in my experience) start to have a human on the receiving end, the AI focuses on survival at any cost, becoming less effective in aggressions but more cohesive while defending and preserving its own borders.

It might be interesting to test an Ironman game with the 3 different Manchurian tribes, like I did by chance.
You choose Haixi, and Jurchin gets allied with Ming and Korea and rivals you.
You choose Jurchin instead, thinking to have outsmarted the AI to get a good starting position, and you find Haixi allied with Ming, and Korea rivaling you.

This is not confirmation bias, anyone can verify that by starting an Ironman game and playing for 2 months.

It's surely WAD, but it does not mean it treats the human like just another AI.
As long as AI is scripted to rival humans, it will have less opportunities to wage war against AIs since rivals are targeted first.

Simple as that, no need to use science-fiction.

Or how about the AI programmer (me) just tells you that you're wrong and experiencing confirmation bias.

 

[Dnote]

To be fair, the player will impact every nation around them, even if they aren't directly getting involved with them. By the sheer nature of you controlling a country and not the AI, you are having an impact.

I've played a lot in Asia and Ming will implode most times whether I get involved with them or not, the reason the implosion can be later than normal or really early is usually because I'm affecting the other nations in the area and that is having a knock on effect on Mind, either to stablise them further or the destablise them.

 

[Wizzington]

Yes because you're playing differently so the mechanics that are applied equally to you and the AI will mean your going to be targeted/feared more, not because it's programed to target you as the human play.

AI targets and fears humans more if playing on Hard, not otherwise.

 

[Wizzington]

I stand corrected.

You were entirely correct for Normal difficulty.

 

[Wizzington]

So on normal the AI will react to human actions the same way it would if an AI carried out those actions? Obviously Lucky Nations alters this somewhat if you're playing as one, but beyond that it acts the same way on normal to say player controlled [nation X] as to AI controlled [nation X]?

Right.