Greeting friends!
This will be the last of these before the release of Together for Victory, and unless I am to write one about a hotfix, the last one for the year.
This weeks tale from the trenches will actually be about one of the points in the changelog. Sorry about cheating like this for the last diary, but it was too good to leave out:
- Scary fix makes AI actually consider all target areas of enemy, in stead of one at a time. Should set pacific area ablaze when the time comes, and keep the invasions rolling.
This restriction was lifted, and the scary part of this was letting the AI be potentially a lot more active. It has turned out that the invasion craft limits and tweaks to the front balancing balances this out really well.
This is a good example of how fixes to earlier problems can cause new ones further down the line as development progresses. This happens a lot in AI, and not rarely will the same symptom pop up over and over but due to new reasons under the hood.
So, moving on with more boaty stuff:
- Added a "pacific continent" to aid in AI prio.
- Added contininent prioritization for the AI with high scores to Europe and the Pacific, but low to Africa.
- AI sets up a couple of fleets to be used for special missions.
- Made sure that AI does not completely block itself when having multiple invasion orders against the same area but being unable to cover the regions for all of them at the same time.
- Made AI better at supporting naval invasions by focusing on the next one to complete preparation.
* This one might seem either cryptic or obvious. Before the AI would just pick the top invasion on a list to focus on first, now it picks the one that is next in line to be done preparing.
- Tweaked naval invasion priority to make them more inclined to take islands (particularly with air bases) and home region.
- Made AI invasions scriptably more unpredictable.
- Stabilized AI invasion prio scores. Should result in invasions not swapping units around as much and randomly getting canceled.
That was more or less all the work that has been done to the naval AI. The changelog had more AI points in it, some really heavy and important stuff related to AI division design among other things. I really hope you will enjoy the DLC, and even if you don't get it, I hope all these fixes will increase your enjoyment of the game. And either way, I look forward to keep improving the HoI4 AI, and you can all look forward to more improvements being done.
This will be the last of these before the release of Together for Victory, and unless I am to write one about a hotfix, the last one for the year.
This weeks tale from the trenches will actually be about one of the points in the changelog. Sorry about cheating like this for the last diary, but it was too good to leave out:
- Scary fix makes AI actually consider all target areas of enemy, in stead of one at a time. Should set pacific area ablaze when the time comes, and keep the invasions rolling.
- Wow...so...way back in development before the invasion craft tech limited the number of divisions you could use for invasions, the AI sometimes had a tendency to set up A LOT of them. As a fix for this, that did do the trick in the general case, the AI would consider ONE area per enemy for invasion at a time, before doing another one. When I say area here, it is any enemy territory with land connection to all parts of itself...shitty description, so a couple of examples: Ostpreussen is a separate area from main Germany, which is its own area, so Germany initially consists of two areas. When/if they annex Austria, it becomes part of the main German area. Similarly, every single island is its own area.
This restriction was lifted, and the scary part of this was letting the AI be potentially a lot more active. It has turned out that the invasion craft limits and tweaks to the front balancing balances this out really well.
This is a good example of how fixes to earlier problems can cause new ones further down the line as development progresses. This happens a lot in AI, and not rarely will the same symptom pop up over and over but due to new reasons under the hood.
So, moving on with more boaty stuff:
- Added a "pacific continent" to aid in AI prio.
- Added contininent prioritization for the AI with high scores to Europe and the Pacific, but low to Africa.
- Calculating the value of a larger area is expensive, and the value of locations like the pacific islands depends less on what they contain in terms of buildings and resources and more about where they are located. By introducing scriptable priority for areas, which can be modified through script on a per country bases, it is possible to tweak where countries should focus and even base this on triggers. So, merry christmas, modders
- AI sets up a couple of fleets to be used for special missions.
- The AI tries to prioritize naval regions based on a ton of variables, and in the end may miss out on covering some important stuff. By ear marking a couple of fleets for specialized missions, such as covering invasions, the AI is now better at not getting stuck waiting for fleets that may never come before being able to invade. It also steps up its general naval game a bit.
- Made sure that AI does not completely block itself when having multiple invasion orders against the same area but being unable to cover the regions for all of them at the same time.
- The naval invasion AI tries to coordinate invasions against the same area, but forcing it to do this would make it never invade if it was unable to cover all necessary regions for all the invasions at the same time. This restriction was softened, so the AI will be more capable at getting stuff done. This one was hitting Japan hard when they wanted to navally invade south.
- Made AI better at supporting naval invasions by focusing on the next one to complete preparation.
* This one might seem either cryptic or obvious. Before the AI would just pick the top invasion on a list to focus on first, now it picks the one that is next in line to be done preparing.
- Tweaked naval invasion priority to make them more inclined to take islands (particularly with air bases) and home region.
- Pretty much speaks for itself, particularly in the context of the Pacific theater.
- Made AI invasions scriptably more unpredictable.
- While only a define for now, it should make life more interesting in singleplayer, with less hammering of invasions in the same location over and over. Also gives modders another thing to play with
- Stabilized AI invasion prio scores. Should result in invasions not swapping units around as much and randomly getting canceled.
- Under the hood the AI has a priority score for every orders. The invasion score was allowed to depend on variables that shifted from day to day, such as preparation level. This would cause different numbers of units to be assigned to them over time, causing some really bad behaviour. Stabilizing this score has made the invasion AI a lot more stable and reliable.
That was more or less all the work that has been done to the naval AI. The changelog had more AI points in it, some really heavy and important stuff related to AI division design among other things. I really hope you will enjoy the DLC, and even if you don't get it, I hope all these fixes will increase your enjoyment of the game. And either way, I look forward to keep improving the HoI4 AI, and you can all look forward to more improvements being done.
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