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

[Zaddy]

Sweden isn't the US, companies can't just set unrealistic schedules, fail to test their product properly and then demand that employees cancel their holidays to deal with the mess.

Isn't this literally what happened, except they got to go on holiday? There either wasn't enough time to QA test to find all the extremely obvious bugs, or not enough time to fix them, ergo the patch was rushed out at a set deadline so the team could have it out before their holiday. I'm glad their country has a much more healthy work culture than the US, but let's not glorify them here.

Anyways, I personally won't buy Emperor until they get the game into a better shape. Pretty much the only thing I can do to encourage them to focus on fixing everything.

What was most disappointing about this patch is that we were promised lots of bugfixing and paying back of technical debt. That may have been true, but I'm pretty sure after they did all that bugfixing, they implemented all the new Emperor and 1.30 features, which the AI doesn't understand, essentially leaving us in a WORSE position then we were before.

 

[Atomcreator]

Anyways, I personally won't buy Emperor until they get the game into a better shape. Pretty much the only thing I can do to encourage them to focus on fixing everything.

I wish I hadn't bought it either. When will I ever learn.

 

[KubiG37]

Glad this thread is not being buried down.

I've tried reverting to version 1.25 (Rule Britannia), and the AI is economically vastly superior, like a different AI honestly. I have seen maybe just 1 bankrupt major AI during the entire eu4 timespan. Almost no one has any debts, and they somehow have even more money than me as a player quite often, while still fighting among themselves!

I don't understand what did they do so wrong to break it so badly (and it ISN'T just the Emperor, it was broken the same way in 1.29).

If you want some good old EU4 experience, before they fix it (could take a year), I highly recommend it

 

[Mike1984]

Isn't this literally what happened, except they got to go on holiday? There either wasn't enough time to QA test to find all the extremely obvious bugs, or not enough time to fix them, ergo the patch was rushed out at a set deadline so the team could have it out before their holiday. I'm glad their country has a much more healthy work culture than the US, but let's not glorify them here.

Oh, yes, absolutely. I'm not letting Paradox off the hook in any way. I'm just saying that it's not the fault of the devs and they shouldn't be blamed for it.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Glad this thread is not being buried down.

I've tried reverting to version 1.25 (Rule Britannia), and the AI is economically vastly superior, like a different AI honestly. I have seen maybe just 1 bankrupt major AI during the entire eu4 timespan. Almost no one has any debts, and they somehow have even more money than me as a player quite often, while still fighting among themselves!

I don't understand what did they do so wrong to break it so badly (and it ISN'T just the Emperor, it was broken the same way in 1.29).

If you want some good old EU4 experience, before they fix it (could take a year), I highly recommend it

I thought the AI problems went all the way back to 1.25 . Wasn't that when they changed how much money you could get in peace deals, adm/dip tech money increase? If that isn't the patch that killed the economic AI, than 1.26 did it.

By the way, as you are running 1.25, could you observe your colonies and see if they run monthly deficits or if they are smart enough to manage their finances? I noticed that in 1.30 they will gladly run deficits and never address this problem, which culminates in them getting thousands of debt.

Oh, yes, absolutely. I'm not letting Paradox off the hook in any way. I'm just saying that it's not the fault of the devs and they shouldn't be blamed for it.

Honestly, I read this entire thread and I don't understand this argument that it isn't the devs fault. There is argument that it isn't their fault or that it is their fault. For all that we know, someone from the team set the deadline and thought they could deliver it in time before realising that his prediction was wrong, or those working in design wasted time/resources which ultimately led to a worse product, or even those working with code and bug fixing didn't do their job well.

We just don't know and won't ever know. I'm if the opinion that everyone is deserving of blame for a bad product. Far too often the blame is passed to the higher ups when the costumers don't know what happened in the development process.

The AI does not jell well with mercs? Maybe the new merc system should have been done with AI in mind or whoever was responsible for AI coding didn't do a good job. The same is true for balancing and Quality Assurance.

 

[KubiG37]

I thought the AI problems went all the way back to 1.25 . Wasn't that when they changed how much money you could get in peace deals, adm/dip tech money increase? If that isn't the patch that killed the economic AI, than 1.26 did it.

By the way, as you are running 1.25, could you observe your colonies and see if they run monthly deficits or if they are smart enough to manage their finances? I noticed that in 1.30 they will gladly run deficits and never address this problem, which culminates in them getting thousands of debt.

I don't remember that.
The colonies run fine. They do get a debt, but only when still relatively small and poor (not much trade/developement yet), the maximum I've seen in my colonies was few hundred ducats. They were however trying to reduce it, turned off the forts, army at no maintenance, not willing to declare war on natives...

I think it's their thinking of "If I waste a lot of money on production and manufactories now, in XX years I'll be rich, and it pretty much works. I tried to improve my colonies by building, but there wasn't really much left to be built.
They do have a problem when they annex lot of foreign land and get a lot of revolts, they're then afraid of attacking the rebel stacks if they're too big.

 

[EarlKonrad]

I don't remember that.
The colonies run fine. They do get a debt, but only when still relatively small and poor (not much trade/developement yet), the maximum I've seen in my colonies was few hundred ducats. They were however trying to reduce it, turned off the forts, army at no maintenance, not willing to declare war on natives...

I think it's their thinking of "If I waste a lot of money on production and manufactories now, in XX years I'll be rich, and it pretty much works. I tried to improve my colonies by building, but there wasn't really much left to be built.
They do have a problem when they annex lot of foreign land and get a lot of revolts, they're then afraid of attacking the rebel stacks if they're too big.

There is something wrong with the economic AI in 1.30. I've seen colonies, independent of their size, run negative monthly balances of -1 ducats and accruing thousands of debt because they won't not build new colonies, fire high level advisors or, when the old one dies, hire lower level advisors. It isn't them investing their money, but rather them mismanaging their balance. I wonder if the same happens in previous patches (never payed much attention to it before).

For example, a quile back @Question run some tests and discovered that the AI would always debase currency if it had low corruption (0, I think). I'm pretty sure this is a new occurrence that did not used to happen on prior versions of the game.

 

[Cyhort]

People shouldn't break their game then go on a month long vacation. Just saying.

 

[Atomcreator]

Still waiting for some feedback on this from the developers.

 

[grommile]

People shouldn't break their game then go on a month long vacation. Just saying.

Specifically, management at a company producing non-mission-critical software (EU4 is not mission critical for its customers) in a country where whole teams going on a month-long vacation in July is a widely accepted practice shouldn't schedule a major update and paid expansion release for the 9th of June.

 

[neheri]

If developers respected us, they would at least give us estimated day when we can expect the patch and what kind of patch it's going to be (minor or major).

But they obviously don't.

 

[CommissarDixon]

Specifically, management at a company producing non-mission-critical software (EU4 is not mission critical for its customers)

EU4 is not "mission critical" to the world, or international relations or banking. Sure.
But the software being a luxury product doesn't mean QA should be allowed to suffer. It's still a product, that we paid for, and received in a bug riddled unusable state.

 

[Atomcreator]

I was eagerly anticipating CK3. But after Imperator and the recent development of EU4 and HOI4 I'm just not so sure anymore.

 

[Don Fluffles]

I was eagerly anticipating CK3. But after Imperator and the recent development of EU4 and HOI4 I'm just not so sure anymore.

To be fair, there's still different teams working on those projects.

Still, before buying anything i would wait for reviews and the like. Maybe go to the forums and look at the feedback and bug reports. Do things that can give you an idea how "playable" the game already is, how the devs are reacting to it, etc.

 

[Atomcreator]

To be fair, there's still different teams working on those projects.

Still, before buying anything i would wait for reviews and the like. Maybe go to the forums and look at the feedback and bug reports. Do things that can give you an idea how "playable" the game already is, how the devs are reacting to it, etc.

Its PDX in general, at the moment.

 

[The Tsar]

if u do have the cossacks DLC u can tell them u dont want to join their offensive wars

 

[CursedEinherjar]

Has there been any mention of them working on a fix for this at all? Have they even acknowledged it? I was super hyped for Emperor from the minute I first heard about it, but it has been a massive disappointment. Paradox has lost a massive amount of my respect for the way they have handled this game breaking issue, I don't think I'll be buying CK3 on launch if this is the way the company is heading.

 

[TheDeadeye]

Has there been any mention of them working on a fix for this at all? Have they even acknowledged it? I was super hyped for Emperor from the minute I first heard about it, but it has been a massive disappointment. Paradox has lost a massive amount of my respect for the way they have handled this game breaking issue, I don't think I'll be buying CK3 on launch if this is the way the company is heading.

if you are asking whether the devs acknowledged the myriad issues with silence and aloofness, then yes, the sound is truly deafening but if you are asking whether key individuals made any statement to date then no, nothing. Only thing they keep doing is showing us “future map changes”. Don’t worry, PDX will do their selective and carefully crafted responding (which means ignoring 90% of this thread content) and somehow manage to hype the fixes as a prelude and set up for the next DLC...of course, again in weekly chunks after they left us hanging but they got your money already so, no pressure

 

[Gamergeo]

Has there been any mention of them working on a fix for this at all? Have they even acknowledged it? I was super hyped for Emperor from the minute I first heard about it, but it has been a massive disappointment. Paradox has lost a massive amount of my respect for the way they have handled this game breaking issue, I don't think I'll be buying CK3 on launch if this is the way the company is heading.

They don't and still banning if you ask that question on dev diary. The only thing we had is a single tweet. Same for me, I think I will wait for CK3. As for any new products from Paradox now. For me, they are going too far, and when thinking, its not the first time

 

[grommile]

Only thing they keep doing is showing us “future map changes”.

Because neondt, the EU4 Content Designer, didn't fancy using his annual leave on a staycation in his apartment so has been working all month.

Which bugs will get fixed, how, and when is certainly an interesting question, but it's not one the Content Designer can provide answers to, so there genuinely is no value in allowing discussion of the bugs in neondt's dev diary threads instead of in ordinary user-initiated threads.