Is it just me or are Governor policies just utterly broken. They constantly switch, when you switch governors which is already stupid but to make matters worse, the policies the governors choose instead make no sense whatsoever.
For example the governor of Magna Graecia (the southern part of Italy) ALWAYS (at least as long as provincial loyalty isn't a problem) seems to chose the UTTERLY useless "Borderland" policy, just because his provinces are coastal, I presume? I mean apart from the fact, that the policy is utterly useless even IF he would be ruling over a borderland province, why is the algorithm so broken, that it thinks coastal = border? Pretty much ANY other policy would be more useful, so if the AI is not able to choose a semi-decent one, for all that is holy make the players choices permanent for that province. It would also take away a lot of tedious work having to go through all provinces after a governor change just to set the policies right again (something you can't reall afford right now anyway).
I disagree strongly with the idea that Governor Policies are "utterly broken". The mechanic is a good one. There are, however, two serious problems with it.
Firstly, it is clear from this thread that players do not understand how governors are choosing policies. This is a documentation/UI problem.
Secondly, the AI's choices are primarily driven by role-playing considerations and only to a limited extent by optimization. My guess is that this is a deliberate choice (because AI characters acting according to their personality traits is supposed to be a major part of the game), but the pragmatic fact that it's quicker and easier to script than optimize may have appealed to the devs too, given their limited time.
That [The fact that Governor policies are chosen based on certain factors] is indeed interesting, but you pretty much have to look it up in the Wiki...
I think that depends heavily on play style.
If (like me) you are mainly a role-player, you are paying attention to your governor's personality traits and the choices are somewhat intuitive (e.g. miserly governors choosing Bleed Them Dry). And you don't mind too much if they choose policies that are sub-optimal for the state as a whole, because in real life people often make choices that are good for them, not for everybody. Weighing up whether it's worth spending political influence to change things is exactly the kind of decision I want to make.
For other play styles (e.g. minmaxers trying to get achievements ASAP or multiplayers who need to click quickly and move on) the approach that the devs have chosen does not work so well. If you are rushing to get your armies into position for such a reason and your governor's policies are fueling a rebellion elsewhere, it may seem that the game is just making bad choices and imposing them on you. Several players in this thread have said that they want the AI to optimize much more than it does now
Different players will lie at different places on the spectrum between personality-based choices and optimization-based choices, but it's a trade-off. If
Imperator had CK-style Game Rules, then it would be possible to accommodate both groups that way, but we have no reason for thinking that is a possibility in the near future.
The usual Paradox solution to varying preferences is "make a mod". But the problem is that the
status quo is more personality-based and I suspect that the players who want more optimization are often those collecting Achievements, so they
cannot mod this problem away. If the base game was better optimized, it would be much easier for players like me to mod in personality-based policies (especially since we could just cut-and-paste from the current script).
It seems to me that there are two problems with how policies are chosen. One is that governors don't change their policies based on changing conditions. The other is that some of those weights are poorly balanced. Borderlands seems to be the worst offender, +10 for having any territory with 15 freemen is far too much. A governor with both zealous and pious would not choose religious assimilation over borderlands unless he also had at least 5 zeal. A governor will only choose cultural assimilation over borderlands if he has 21 finesse! The only policy that can really compete with borderlands is encourage trade which gets +10 for having a governor from the boni or traditionalist parties. I think both those modifiers should be reduced to +6 at the very least. Borderlands should probably also be affected by whether the province is a borderland.
These examples are very helpful because they show that the existing mechanic works and the policy choices could be optimized far better than they currently are. Which leads us to the conclusion that:
it doesn't need to be
perfect, but can and should be
good enough.
Users have
many ideas how to do it (
@Vexurius here or
@Herennius in an
own thread.)
I agree that there is a role for forum users doing some thinking and testing to work out how the AI's choices could be optimized better. But I think at the end of the day we are going to have to try to persuade the devs to allocate some of their time to revisiting the current AI modifiers. Making a mod to improve things might even be counterproductive, because PDX teams are usually very reluctant to just copy script from mods (even though they have every legal and moral right to) and no mod will help the players who want it most.
However, one point I would emphasize to the devs is that this is 'AI' work that Content Designers can do. It may that the process of optimization reveals that some new modifiers or other scripting tools are needed, but I think 90% of the work would just be editing
common/governor_policies/00_default.txt and then seeing what happens in-game. It doesn't require any more knowledge of C++ than writing an event. In fact, Content Designers' knowledge of historical choices and the game map probably means that they could do this better than the coders.
imperator.paradoxwikis.com
