How can ai nation be 40 000 in debt???

[Chaingun]

Humans do this by firing advisors, keeping a large standing army but at 0 maintenance, mothballing their heavy fleet (if they have one), mothballing their forts and making alliances for protection, I can't say what the AI does but its not very good at clearing debt.

The primary problem is the AI can't sufficiently assess how far in the chicken race of not keeping an army/navy/forts it could go. A human can assume his alliance will reliably protect him, that he will grow enough to pay a greater debt than he could repay at current income, or that he will simply be lucky to avoid a war (should he be incorrect, he can probably restart the game). Another fairly big problem is that the AI absolutely will keep spending troops (potentially going over force limit to fight a losing war, again it boils down to incredibly complex evaluations that humans learn by experience but that can't be hand coded into computer logic in any reasonable amount of time.

I worked specifically on its repayment logic and it's way better than in 1.14 (in my subjective opinion) where lots of AI countries would be completely disabled by debt. You can always dig up *some* case during a campaign where an AI country dies due to debt, but that's not a bad thing (in fact the opposite for flavor reasons) as long as it's sufficiently rare. Where I should still attempt to tweak further is how AI spends its money during wars and how much to avoid racking up debt for poor reasons, as there is better use of time than repaying debt for lost wars. However, it's extremely easy to get it wrong and there are already frequent enough "AI gave up too easily/without a fight" complaints.

 

[Chaingun]

I clear debt by going to the ledger, seeing who has the most money, and going to war.

That works for a human but again, AI doesn't automatically reason about such relationships. If the programmer didn't hand code it in, the AI won't see it. Before you say "add it", please think about the possible responses I might make. I will certainly consider it, but it's nothing that I could make a promise about.

Would be nice for AI to send as much of it's forces as proportional to what it wants from the war and make favors paid for aid in wars scale with the amount of aid you ask for.

The AI does not have much of an intent with wars. It's more like "how much do I want this war; is it above some threshold, and is it the most wanted war?" It does not aim to achieve a specific result when starting it (with few exceptions). It categorizes wars into two types: "we are comfortably winning" or "we need to put everything into winning!" based on military strength, the latter is probably what players are complaining about.

 

[Chaingun]

You would struggle to find any post where I advocate improving the AI because...skynet.

Haha true, if it didn't have these deficiencies we would certainly be its slaves already.

Would it be possible to allow the AI to limit it's involvement though?

It might be possible to come up with some rules to further prevent it from going into all out spending mode when not needed. (Or even be more flexible than two modes, but that's more involved.)