THIS. I've had four utterly broken games/abortions since the release of Emperor. To just sod off and leave customers to it is so bad. I have very little faith left in PDX and this has left a very sour taste in my mouth.
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Fix AI debt spiral / alliance issues. It's been broken for weeks, and it's gamebreaking.
- Thread starter Jadelith
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THIS. I've had four utterly broken games/abortions since the release of Emperor. To just sod off and leave customers to it is so bad. I have very little faith left in PDX and this has left a very sour taste in my mouth.
From what I have seen the AI keeps mercenary troops around way too long. It seems to do it when it has low manpower and keeps them even when at peace for years. All it does is increase debt. Then the AI doesn't know how to get out of debt. Utterly ruins the game.
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I'm on vacation right now.
I haven't looked at my work email since I shut down my work laptop on the evening of Friday the 10th, and I won't look at it until I start up my work laptop on Monday the 20th.
Because reading my work email is work, and the whole point of being on vacation is that I don't have to do any work.
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While European nations have dealt with covid better than the Americans, we must remain vigilant. The virus could easily return if we do not maintain social distancing and continue to wear our masks.
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Sorry, but a corporation doesn't have the right to release a product a few weeks before everyone goes on holiday and then expect the employees to cancel their holiday to fix the inevitable bugs. The fault here lies entirely with Paradox for scheduling a release so close to the time when everyone goes on holiday, not with the employees for not giving up their holidays to fix the bugs.
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Note that they did in fact schedule several weeks for post-release bugfixing. It's just that the Emperor release was of such poor quality that it took two rounds of hotfixes before it was even in shape to reveal major gameplay bugs like this. That's a different problem.
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it's winter when it will be deadly with the return of the flu. everyone will be having symptoms, locking down and it will be a tough winter. The phrase Winter is Coming fits very well.
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yeah.. Did another game with Wallachia, but debt is a nightmare.. First Poland was in debt, now Muscovy.. I give up, it's a disgrace
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1 Thing I have learned is,
you are better off with minor nations to ally than Great Powers.
Great Powers seem to just be on a inevitable Debt Spiral, but generally small countries seem less affected.
Now this is hard to do for nations who border a major power and aren't in the HRE, but I often felt it was the only way to progress.
Recently I played Florence, and formed Italy, then paid off the debts of France by going into debt myself, I had to roughly pay 4000 ducats to pay off his debt of 2000.
That's another problem, the AI doesn't pay off Debt first, they are thinking of first building new buildings.
So I had to pay pretty much double in gifts to balance the budget of France after which I could finally use them in a war and their economy sort off recovered.
you are better off with minor nations to ally than Great Powers.
Great Powers seem to just be on a inevitable Debt Spiral, but generally small countries seem less affected.
Now this is hard to do for nations who border a major power and aren't in the HRE, but I often felt it was the only way to progress.
Recently I played Florence, and formed Italy, then paid off the debts of France by going into debt myself, I had to roughly pay 4000 ducats to pay off his debt of 2000.
That's another problem, the AI doesn't pay off Debt first, they are thinking of first building new buildings.
So I had to pay pretty much double in gifts to balance the budget of France after which I could finally use them in a war and their economy sort off recovered.
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Two weeks of post release fixes to address obvious glaring issues with bandaids and not truly fix anything. The issues they did fix were so obvious that their mere existence to begin with is worrisome.
If ONLY indebt AI was the biggest issue I wouldn't even be complaining. What a mess of a patch.
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Well, in debt AI criples all game's strategy of alliances.. of course there are other issues.. I declared Serbia/Bosnia, Serbia had half an army relative to force limit, and Bosnia had 1k (maybe because of debt?), their combined forces should be superior to mine (Wallachia). Serbia was stack wiped in two battles and the war was over.
On the other hand, I'm facing a very powerful Ottomans (3 out of 4 of my runs, had very strong Ottomans). But my allies are deep in debt..
By an agree/disagree response, would players support removing the ability to buy institutions (for humans and AI) if it was proven to fix AI debt?
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What do you mean by "buy institutions"?
Do you mean the ability to gain institution progress in a province by developing the province? That may or may not produce better game-mechanical outcomes overall, but I would be very surprised if it did anything to fix the debt problem.
Or do you mean the ability to adopt an institution before it is at 100% progress in 100% of your provinces by paying the "embrace" fee? I can see how that might address some debt issues, but it brings some exciting issues of its own relating to how institution spread works if you aren't a monolithic blob.
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That's not the source of the debt. There are a multitude of reasons why the AI accrues debt (the way gold is demanded in peace deals, building priority, being unable to manage their budget, them not knowing how to handle states, the new merc system, etc.) AI taking loans to embrace institutions is just a part of the problem and it wouldn't be solved by just stopping them from using loans to embrace institutions.
When a CN accrues thousands in debt because they don't know how to spend less so they can make money in order to repay their debts, something is very wrong with the AI.
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Are you certain? I’ve seen other sources in this forum that suggests that buying institutions is the main source of debt followed by mercenaries. Anecdotally I have seen this in practice too with large powers debt spiking around institution embracement.
I am certain. The debt spiral began when they changed peace money deals, military AI and how much money there is in the game. Again, I don't doubt that loaning to embrace institution is part of the problem but I doubt that it is the main culprit.
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I guess every problem has been mentioned already. Weird building priorities, mercenary issues, troop build-disband cycles, bad handling of crownland and states etc.) but one reason is definitely that the priority for repaying debts got lowered.
One of the main annoying things is that you can not gift your allies ducats anymore which they fully use for repaying debts so they are willing to join your war. From my experience they now generally use about half of the gift to repay debts, not all of it as they did for as long as I can remember. Just bumping up the general desire to repay debts to their old pre-1.30 levels still leaves some bugs and a lot of non-optimal behaviour, but I guess it would already make the problem less noticeable and not that much worse than in the last patches, at least on the surface.
One of the main annoying things is that you can not gift your allies ducats anymore which they fully use for repaying debts so they are willing to join your war. From my experience they now generally use about half of the gift to repay debts, not all of it as they did for as long as I can remember. Just bumping up the general desire to repay debts to their old pre-1.30 levels still leaves some bugs and a lot of non-optimal behaviour, but I guess it would already make the problem less noticeable and not that much worse than in the last patches, at least on the surface.
I have seen debt spirals with Uzbek prior to any embracement.
At most embracement is a one-off cost. The AI should be able to handle me consoling them into 3000 debt and then working it off. Sure they might lose a war or fail to grow out some colonies. But the AI should be able to pay down debt as time goes on. That does not happen. AIs routinely have debts that just continue to grow.
Maybe you might argue that the AI can function just fine at those debt levels. Then diplomacy should not get tanked. If you are in enough debt to betray your allies, you need to pay it down. If you do not need to pay it down, then you do not need to betray allies.
Something has changed where the AIs, which had been prone to building up big debts in the late game, now build them up sooner and much faster.
But at the end of the day the AI should know how to budget and manage to either pay off debts or declare bankruptcy and reboot (possibly having lost some territory and such in the process).
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Not forgettan an bug in the price calculation of supporting rebells ..
It shows (as example) 80 gold cost ...
You have 100 gold ...
On pressing o.k. you loos 300 gold ! Even this should NOT possible, as you have only 100 available - so it sould impossible to support rebells for 3 times the money you have atm ...
Imagine this happen 2 times to the AI ... an goodstart for an debt spirale ...
It shows (as example) 80 gold cost ...
You have 100 gold ...
On pressing o.k. you loos 300 gold ! Even this should NOT possible, as you have only 100 available - so it sould impossible to support rebells for 3 times the money you have atm ...
Imagine this happen 2 times to the AI ... an goodstart for an debt spirale ...
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