Fix AI debt spiral / alliance issues. It's been broken for weeks, and it's gamebreaking.

[MagnusDux]

1) They build regiments, costing them money and manpower.
2) They lose money because they're hell-bent on drilling.
3) They disband some troops.
4) Now they make money again...
5) See 1)

Or at least that's what it looks like to me. Hope I'm wrong here

It can't be just that. It's the ottomans, they should be able to afford to have full maintenance. I noticed now that they have an 11 regiment merc army, the "Armatoles". It beats me why they would see the need to recruit 11 mercs when they already have a 40k army and are at peace...

Spoiler

 

[Fiestinian]

I really think you should read the OP of this thread cause every single one of your arguments ignores the fact that every AI goes into like 2k 3k debts before 1500. This makes essentialy every single major not usable for alliances since they neither defend for you nor attack and serve no purpose except taking up a diplomacy slot. Do you want asshole allies wich betray you? Play MP then but if I play a game I actually wanna be able to play small nations and without big allies this is impossible for most of them.

Then you are having a different experience with allies to me. In this patch as HRE emperor bohemia, up to 1580, I used the ottomans to carve up hungry in two wars, Milan to defeat northern italy, spain and england to carve up france in seperate wars, austria to chew on poland and burgandy to tear apart austria. Just before I got vassal swarm, the mamluks provided enough distraction for my armies to walk round the crimea to siege the eastern side of turkey so I could free cores in the balkans. (not each war was in the stated order and I was deliberately not taking land to turn hussite once I got religious peace)

In a seperate game, as bengal, I used bahmanis against Vijayanagar and kept delhi allied for over 50years to smack the timurids and jhanphur over and over. Although ming suffered the debt spiral and only managed 4 lvl1 forts so once I managed a carpet siege they never recovered.

 

[Isaios]

It's the ottomans, they should be able to afford to have full maintenance.

Do you have a comparable save that's not Ironman? Would be interesting to swap over to them and poking around their budgets...

 

[MagnusDux]

Then you are having a different experience with allies to me. In this patch as HRE emperor bohemia, up to 1580, I used the ottomans to carve up hungry in two wars, Milan to defeat northern italy, spain and england to carve up france in seperate wars, austria to chew on poland and burgandy to tear apart austria. Just before I got vassal swarm, the mamluks provided enough distraction for my armies to walk round the crimea to siege the eastern side of turkey so I could free cores in the balkans. (not each war was in the stated order and I was deliberately not taking land to turn hussite once I got religious peace)

In a seperate game, as bengal, I used bahmanis against Vijayanagar and kept delhi allied for over 50years to smack the timurids and jhanphur over and over. Although ming suffered the debt spiral and only managed 4 lvl1 forts so once I managed a carpet siege they never recovered.

This is my 3rd game in 1.30 and in until now i didn't see the Ottomans expand properly. I haven's yet seen them conquer the Mamluks.

Do you have a comparable save that's not Ironman? Would be interesting to swap over to them and poking around their budgets...

Unfortunatelly not, i always play on Ironman :s But i'll leave my save here if anyone knows how to de-ironman it and wants to poke around.

 

[MarshalK]

It can't be just that. It's the ottomans, they should be able to afford to have full maintenance. I noticed now that they have an 11 regiment merc army, the "Armatoles". It beats me why they would see the need to recruit 11 mercs when they already have a 40k army and are at peace...

According to some people in the forum, and supported by my own observations, it seems that the mercs themselves are the problem. Apparently the AI can't disband them even when it wants to. They hire troops to replace the companies, but disband these instead of the mercs, costing them money and manpower.

Happened to a client state of mine: despite a force limit of ~250, they kept only around 100 regiments at peace. Whenever I went to war they ramped up recruitment and filled up, and disbanded their regular forces as soon peace came. But never the mercs.

 

[Isaios]

Unfortunatelly not, i always play on Ironman :s But i'll leave my save here if anyone knows how to de-ironman it and wants to poke around.

Used to be a way to do this, but I can't seem to find the date-stamp one needed to change in the file.

it seems that the mercs themselves are the problem.

But the mercenaries aren't so expensive that having them hired would explain the problem? Nor would it explain the Manpower issue.

That Client State of yours, did it end up having several mercenary companies just idling around?

 

[AngelRay]

I fully agree that this bug is almost at the "peace deal money bug" breaking level.

 

[FantasticFwoosh]

Most people commenting in this thread have quite a bit of DLC under their belt, recurrently with CoC drilling & disbanding as a point of discussion, i don't usually see a lot of debt in my lowish DLC games, though i have never seen the AI go bankrupt since the new economy AI behaviour went live. Probably becuase bankrupted AI's being forced into truces with those around them isn't very fun at all.

Also ill add, in the cases where they do accrue debt, countries like France (a particular example) will refuse to pay loans unless immediately joining a war based mostly on trust and diplorep when i've gifted them the amount directly (yes i know you can remotely pay credit with RoM) which is a annoying block to them joining a war whimsically. And they often simply buy their entire manpower tool, this works up until they suffer one or two bad losses which hurts their army composition significantly.

Considering psychology, maybe they should re-tool the AI personalities system especially since it is a crutch of what they're doing and its had no polish since forever, and restrict the super aggressive infrastructure building to a 'economist' personality ruler, since diplomat seems to be well rounded, while militarist and balanced technically do what are asked of them.

Administrator is supposed to be what ive just suggested, but it never lives up to the hype and should probably be refocused somewhere else like a AI type that actively seeks to assert control over its own territories so will more than likely hit autonomy buttons & liberty desire reductions in order to maintain on top of the situation rather than delegate this entirely to economy.

 

[algame]

Is Paradox on holidays now? Considering the complete radio silence on the AI economy issues I get the feeling this is gonna be a problem for a long time...

 

[pdcj25]

I've been playing this game for over 6 years and was playing for several hours every day before Emperor came out. The amount of AI debt has sucked the fun out of the game for me and I have barely played it since just after release.

This needs an urgent fix.

 

[Olterin]

Strangely, I've been running into this issue in some of my campaigns but not others. In my current France game, Austria is never in debt, neither are the Ottomans, or at least neither is ever in enough debt to not join a defensive CtA. Meanwhile Russia recently declined Austria's CtA against the Ottomans because of ... 30k debt. Yes, 30k, I checked their other allies. They didn't bankrupt themselves yet either (as far as I can tell). This is a Russia that spans the continent, ate into Finland and a good chunk of what used to be Lithuania's east. And one that happily keeps declaring on Denmark.

Unfortunately, I always play on ironman, so I'm not sure my save would be any good - do ping me if you want to have it, though

 

[Snake_Squeezins]

Broken AI debt and alliances are the two lingering bugs from 1.30 that are keeping me from playing EU4. These were flagged by many people within the first day or two of release, and I had hoped that these would be fixed quickly. Alas, three weeks have passed, and to my knowledge PDX has not even acknowledged that these are issues, or said that they are working on a fix. My last hope is that they quietly worked on a patch they plan to roll out before taking their month-long summer holiday. If not, it looks like EU4 will stay on the shelf until August or so.

 

[StefanFan]

Broken AI debt and alliances are the two lingering bugs from 1.30 that are keeping me from playing EU4.

The diplomats macro not working for AE coalitions is way worse than these. I can handle the AI debt because I can juggle my targets somehow, but fighting in HRE and having to manually pick countries with high AE to improve relations is way too annoying. In my first game in 1.30 I already fought 3 coalition wars just because the auto diplo thing is bugged as hell.

Before 1.30 I was fighting a coalition once every 5-10 games because I could plan everything with diplo macro and truces.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Here's a good example of the problem. A few years ago i checked and the Ottomans were not in debt, and since then they where not involved in a single war. Yet they somehow found themselves 1.7k in debt... Wth is the ai doing with their money?

Spoiler

View attachment 594963

Clearly this is not just a problem of the ai building to many shipyards and regimental camps and not enough workshops and manufactories. The ai is doing something stupid with their money while they are at peace.

They also have no manpower (again, they've been at peace for decades!). Where can you even spend your manpower when at peace?

Spoiler

View attachment 594964

Would be great if we could get a fix before the summer.

The AI runs monthly deficits without knowing how to manage their finances. For example, I've seen a ton of CNs making -2, -4 monthly ducats while paying for colonies and having 3 lvl 2 advisors. They end up racking thousands of debt as they aren't able to make even the tiniest adjustment in order to run a profit. I've also seen Spain with -50 ducats, 20 ducats from interest alone.

In regards to low Manpower, just the other day Question started a thread discussing the possible reasons for that.

 

[damnt512]

Ive already fixed the AI going into debt, the problem is that it makes significant changes to gameplay (which people may not like). It mainly forces the AI to spam manufactories/temples/workshops.

The main thing is that you need the AI to spam manufactories, because if they dont, there is a very high chance of the AI running into economy issues, but this prevents them from using the new manufactory alternatives, so i made them take up regular building slots instead and there are potential balancing issues there.

How did you do that ?

 

[Vince75]

I've been playing this game for over 6 years and was playing for several hours every day before Emperor came out. The amount of AI debt has sucked the fun out of the game for me and I have barely played it since just after release.

This needs an urgent fix.

The last two hotfixes were on Tuesday. We can hope for tomorrow but it definitely lacks of communication...

 

[Meglok]

The last two hotfixes were on Tuesday. We can hope for tomorrow but it definitely lacks of communication...

We can only hope @Groogy and company will at least address the ai debt issue (and the ai burning unlimited Diplo on war exhaustion issue) tomorrow. While these are not game breaking, they are a huge incentive to quit playing until fixed. A novice player probably won't recognize the problems, but anyone with a few hundred hours in will notice the ai being braindead. The game is not fun to play right now.

 

[otaats]

Russia didn't want to join war against Austria, "Too much debt, and too far away" they said from their border in Ruthenia.

Called me against Oirat *facepalm*

So much this.

Like, there's no variable in those diplomatic interactions at all. Those kinds of scenarios (don't want to join war + calling you up while you're basically in war already, or absolutely not in position to help) are game breaking in many instances, and are probably the single worst annoyance in EU4 diplomacy, for me at least.

Declining wars is not cool, but it has some repercussions if i betray my allies. But i don't have that option. I am locked out of calling my allies to arms when they don't feel like joining my wars. Why do i care if my ally is 5k in debt. When i am in debt or without manpower, the ally doesn't f*cking care, like at all.

Lucky for me, i stopped making allies a long time ago.

 

[Hootieleece]

The AI runs monthly deficits without knowing how to manage their finances. For example, I've seen a ton of CNs making -2, -4 monthly ducats while paying for colonies and having 3 lvl 2 advisors. They end up racking thousands of debt as they aren't able to make even the tiniest adjustment in order to run a profit. I've also seen Spain with -50 ducats, 20 ducats from interest alone.

In regards to low Manpower, just the other day Question started a thread discussing the possible reasons for that.

Isn't that Spain just recreating history....because in the 16th and 17th Century Spain went Bankrupt numerous times.


But from a gameplay perspective it is bad for single player play because all of the AI's do it and it leads to an unplayable game.

Unfortunately this probably won't be fixed until after the Summer Holiday if at all....

 

[EarlKonrad]

So much this.

Like, there's no variable in those diplomatic interactions at all. Those kinds of scenarios (don't want to join war + calling you up while you're basically in war already, or absolutely not in position to help) are game breaking in many instances, and are probably the single worst annoyance in EU4 diplomacy, for me at least.

Declining wars is not cool, but it has some repercussions if i betray my allies. But i don't have that option. I am locked out of calling my allies to arms when they don't feel like joining my wars. Why do i care if my ally is 5k in debt. When i am in debt or without manpower, the ally doesn't f*cking care, like at all.

Lucky for me, i stopped making allies a long time ago.

The use the same formula for the player joining wars. Meaning that the AI generally won't call you into distance wars or if you have too much debt. Unfortunately we can't see the AI calculation for calling us into a war like we can see theirs when we are about to declare war.