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

[SVKblitz]

I had only around 20% warscore at the beggining. Then my warscore dropped to -10 and I had to occupy whole anatolia and destroy all mercenaries to get 40% warscore. I lost lot of warscore due to lost naval battle (my trade fleet with 2 ships destroyed lol).

I agree with that ottomans should fight to the death because I invade their homeland but its absurd they can field 35k mercenaries at once, get 1000s of loans, get around 100k rebels and they still fight me.

 

[Searry]

Ottomans always go bakrupt nowadays. I don't think this is out of the ordinary.

 

[fred.erick]

Human player goes heavily in debt, wins the war and then makes his enemies pay his debt.

Ever had an AI with spare 10K gold lying around to pay your debt?
Those 10% war reparations don't really do much for me.

 

[Canute VII]

Ever had an AI with spare 10K gold lying around to pay your debt?
Those 10% war reparations don't really do much for me.

Peacing out alliance members individually, taking the 10% and all available ducats, stacks up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

To put it into perspective, I once bankrupt all but one of the top ten military powers (I was the one non-bankrupt power) in a single war by merely triggering a coalition war and then not attacking the end result was the total destruction of at least three of the major powers

Why would not attacking make a difference? Could they not get to you? Countries in a coalition generally border their opponent.

 

[War_lord]

Why would not attacking make a difference? Could they not get to you? Countries in a coalition generally border their opponent.

I assume he just kept killing the armies they sent, which drained their manpower, which caused them to hire more and more Mercs to try and keep their forcelimit up, which led to enormous upkeep costs, which led to debts, that led to loans, that led to repeated bankruptancies, the modifiers from that would have then put the country in a death spiral. The AI is really bad at realizing they're losing a war if it's not actually being sieged.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I assume he just kept killing the armies they sent, which drained their manpower, which caused them to hire more and more Mercs to try and keep their forcelimit up, which led to enormous upkeep costs, which led to debts, that led to loans, that led to repeated bankruptancies, the modifiers from that would have then put the country in a death spiral. The AI is really bad at realizing they're losing a war if it's not actually being sieged.

If they started a coalition war at least in their opinion they had more strength. Why would they lose when sending in the armies?

 

[somanite]

If they started a coalition war at least in their opinion they had more strength. Why would they lose when sending in the armies?

AI coalitions (and allies in general) have the cooperative ability of a very small child, so whatever small advantage in numbers the AI thought it could muster to win the war was likely undone by their habitual feeding away of uncoordinated invasion attempts and inferior idea/policy choices.

 

[grommile]

If they started a coalition war at least in their opinion they had more strength. Why would they lose when sending in the armies?

The same reason France won the War of the First Coalition: defeat in detail.

 

[jebates]

This started becoming a problem when the merc pool was expanded. Disabling the merc pool once a certain debt level is reached would fix much of the issue.

 

[sterrius]

The debt/interesting/loan mechanic really need a rework in a way that the AI can work with it.

My idea.

1-> Maximum 10 loans. No matter if your country is small or big. Big countrys have the advantage of having 20+ debts and thats is just a trap to get new players and AI. 10 is a very good number already. Some ideas that reduce interest can increase the amount of loans.

2-> Once you get the debt you don´t have to pay interest each month. You still have to pay the insterest to repay the loan, if you asked for 100g you still have to pay 120-130g at the end of 5 years.

3-> Failure to pay the debt will extend the loan and the interest. So after 5 years it goes up from 120-130g to 140-150g and so on. And this goes on until it hit 15 years. (3 extensions).

4-> From 15 to 25 years you have a chance of getting bad events. Most of them create ways to pay off the debt at a huge cost. Stability, legitimacy, monarchy points, revolt risk, inflation. You name it. it will not be badly as the bankruptcy event but will be bad enough so you will not think about using this to pay off your debts. No one wishes to pay a loan with tons of adm/dip/mil points for example.

Also choosing not to pay the debt this way will also impact your country, not as bad as choosing to pay it, but will also be a negative event. (Most of the time).

5-> If you reach at 25 years and have not paid the oldest debt. Bankruptcy event can fire (its not immediate, but will happen before year 30), it will clean your debts but we all know how nasty that event is.

6-> Of course you can pay a debt with another loan, usually this will need 2 loans because of the new interest mechanic. So you can easily reach the 10 cap if you don´t start saving money.

this creates some interesting scenarios.

1-> While not paying the debt brings you no immediate problems, it also makes sure you can´t use loans to escape from another war. So while you can loan without a immediate risk you're closing yourself a future escape door.

2-> Loans can get hard to pay up if you ignore them for too long. as you don´t pay interest each month anymore it can really become quite hard to deal with them. The good news is that the AI knows how to hold money to pay off debts. As long it makes a profit the AI will deal with the problem eventually.

3-> If you hit the loan cap and is still on a negative. you government start to shut down with colonys, advisors, etc being fired. And mercenarys disbanding. Army and ships will be the last to be touched but they can until you start to make a profit again. Again, this will be very hard to happen as the country is not paying interest anymore.

4-> Bankruptcy still exist, it will hurt like hell but will not paralyse a country for 100 years. Most countrys will still be totally functional until they start hitting the debt cap. Once there they will work at minimun until the events fire up or he pay up everything.

5-> No more 40k debt scenarios, unless the country controls half the world.

 

[bos]

This is just another symptom of the excessive AI mercenary spam. Raising these huge mercenary armies again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

 

[Canute VII]

This started becoming a problem when the merc pool was expanded. Disabling the merc pool once a certain debt level is reached would fix much of the issue.

Or adding a modifier to the merc pool so that it would diminish with growing indebtedness.

 

[pedrito_elcabra]

I've always wondered why countries can take so many loans?

Sometimes reaching bankruptcy doesn't happen until 50+ loans in...

In a few scenarios where I was losing badly against the AI I just went berserk taking loans and recruiting mercs over my forcelimit... and thinking at the same time: who is borrowing me money at this point? My inflation is rampant, my army destroyed, I'm heavily indebted, and the enemy army at the city gates is about to end my infamous reign. Who in god's name would be willing to cough up the hard cash for another 20 loans? Bury it, throw it out of the window, give it to the poor... but don't give it to that madman that's running this country!!!

 

[Dovahkiin MasterHoe]

Though not specifically on the topic of AI debt this does have to do with loans and the current debt system.

The "offer loan" button I've never actually seen used even in Multiplayer games. This feature would be great if they expand upon it allowing for longer periods than 5 years and allowed a 0 interest loan. This way a loan could actually be offered between players for periods of like 20 years with 0 interest and still be required to be payed back. Another feature I think should be added is the ability to take over loans from other nations. Say my AI Russia is in massive debt and i want them to be useful and join my wars, if we were allowed to take over those loans for that nation and pay them back then it could say earn favors or trust and have an opinion buff.

 

[Metz]

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.

Bring back minting to counter vast debt with vast inflation, which is more reasonable to have.

 

[kentun]

In my games, Otto & Russia always end up having huge debt without my intervention. I even seen Revolutionary OPM Ottoman.

 

[sterrius]

The loan button made sense in a way of emulating the burghers of your country.

Today with factions it really start to make less sense. Paradox can improve the burghers to work around this, even more as they are the faction with least options to get loyalty and influence as they don´t want a % of provinces.

Also it makes no sense to be able to have 10+ loans. Loans already increase as your annual budget increase. Its a noob and AI trap and if limited even with current rules it would already work wonders to fix the problem.

ideas of events that can pay of debts. (just 1)

Decrease production of 1 gold mine (If available). For 10 years. (they receive the debt getting the profit from the gold mine)
-50% trade power for 10 years. (they get money from your trade, used a lot as kings could sell the rights for people to use ports and other infrastructure for a time to receive payment).
1% +0.10 inflation/month for 10 years. (Minting money to pay the debt)
Burguers get 3 random Provinces for 10 years. (With all malus this can bring, as it can tip them above 80%).
100 of each monarchy point. (emulating a reformation of government and this is equal to almost 3 years worth of a 0-0-0 monarch)
-50 legitimacy. (Selling titles to pay of a debt, used a lot by the portuguese crown and some other royals for example ).
2-5 temples are destroyed plus papal relations and influence drop. (Sacking of guilds/religious buildings to get the money, france did this with the templars ).
-2 stability (Increase in taxes to pay the debt).

 

[Ilightmaster]

Could Ai sell colonies to allies to repay its debts ?

 

[War_lord]

Maybe have loans come from actual lenders, such as the estates and foreign banks, who calculate if you can actually pay them back before granting a loan? In actual banking you don't give a zero security loan to an entity that has no way of paying you back.