How good is the vanilla AI at building fleets?

[Question]

I was trying out expert AI and noticed that the AI seems to mainly spam early era ships and destroyers :

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/209384257016037376/808843552758693898/unknown.png

This is a 1949 England with 700+ factories and 38 dockyards, and that fleet is almost entirely comprised of early era trash ships. 2 early era carriers, 3 early era BCs and 7 early era BBs. Almost all the remaining ships are early era ones as well. A small fleet of modern 1940 ships would easily sink them while taking almost no casaulties.

As far as i can tell, the AI looked at the ships, saw that it had X ships of a certain class, and stopped thinking at that point...the idea of replacing them with upgraded versions never entered its mind.

Does the vanilla AI do the same thing? Its just dissapointing when you get into naval battles in 1944 and the AI is only throwing early era trash at you, and you take zero losses while sinking all those expensive capital ships....

 

[el nora]

The AI is trash. And specifically trash at designing fleets and producing ships, especially capitals.

 

[TalyonUngol]

The AI is terrible at building ships or any type. But then again, most players dont build fleets either. Lmao.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

1.) Once built, the AI can't distinguish between two ships of the same type. A destroyer with no depth charges will be eagerly dumped into convoy escort, and a 22-knot dreadnought and 30-knot fast battleship will be equally-rated for their role in a battlefleet. They also don't seem to be aware of stacking penalties for carriers, as I have seen more than 10 carriers dumped into a single fleet more than a few times (and kept there even after several carriers lose their entire airwings, making them useless except for penalizing sortie efficiency).

2.) The production AI focuses mostly on having enough ships to meet requirements, which is the main reason it rarely builds capital ships. This means that 6 destroyers and 2 light cruisers are needed per every convoy escort mission, plus a further force of screens (possibly at a similar ratio, but I'm not sure) for fleet escort. Since most navies start with a lot of capital ships already, getting screen numbers up usually eats all of a navy's production requirements (especially when huge numbers of light cruisers are sailing casually around peaceful theatres like the Caribbean or South Atlantic). I'm pretty sure that the numbers for the value of capital ships are massively in favor of heavy cruisers over battleships or battlecruisers as well, as with Man the Guns I've only seen France (and rarely Germany, usually just the 2 Scharnhorsts) build battleships. The US and Japan, with carrier doctrine, will also build carriers (see above for problematic employment of them), and Germany (with trade interdiction doctrine) seems to be the only power to build meaningful numbers of submarines (although I could be missing some, since I usually focus on European powers).

3.) The AI's designs for ships seem to take a very generic balance of firepower versus cost when designing ships. Qualitative improvement means very little to the AI, so factors like speed, armor, depth charges, torpedoes (for surface ships), etc. basically don't factor into ship design as opposed to having ships with high light or heavy attack. They also prefer cheap ships, so while sometimes they will build better-armed ships, they will never build ships as heavily-armed as player ones (where you might see players maxing the number of light guns on a cruiser or capital ship). Occasionally it will also build hardcoded ships, like an awkward version of an anti-aircraft cruiser using DP primary guns for Britain (which is a terribly-ineffective design given the poor value of DP primaries).

 

[uberjedi]

In a current game as the US, I just parked a 4 CV fleet on patrol in the Guam sea zone.
The japanese AI seems to love keep sending fleets drop wise no matter what they run into.
Everything they send is instantly killed. The AI doesnt have to build ships because there is no real naval war.

 

[winkelmander]

There is also a bug in MtG. So every time you start a game or load a game the AI drops the hole ship production queue. With the result that espacily no capital ships gets finished in production

 

[uberjedi]

There is also a bug in MtG. So every time you start a game or load a game the AI drops the hole ship production queue. With the result that espacily no capital ships gets finished in production

Oh, didnt know that. That bug is just horrible!

 

[mikwarleo]

The AI is trash. And specifically trash at designing fleets and producing ships, especially capitals.

I kindly suggest everyone upvotes the bug report, hopefully PDX will pay attention and finally fix this game-breaking bug, apparently this has been reported since 1.6

 

[Silverhood]

PDX should just give us a pangea map so we can skip the entire naval warfare aspect of Hoi4.

 

[Gefallener_Held]

Op mentions using Expert AI. Has anyone brought that to this creator's attention?

 

[Had a dad]

The AI is trash. And specifically trash at designing fleets and producing ships, especially capitals.

this isn't the AI. builds are based on production %'s and is scriptable. This is why "expert AI" mod is incorrectly named as it doesn't change any AI, it just changes what the AI has to use.

 

[brainiac1530]

You know, I had a lot of things to say here, but as I was gathering screenshots for this, I noticed something. I couldn't find any AI ship production lines over 50% complete, and in fact most were much less than 50%. I'm pretty sure the AI is in my game was experiencing this bug. I suppose it doesn't really matter what the AI designs or queues up if none of them actually finish.

 

[Had a dad]

You know, I had a lot of things to say here, but as I was gathering screenshots for this, I noticed something. I couldn't find any AI ship production lines over 50% complete, and in fact most were much less than 50%. I'm pretty sure the AI is in my game was experiencing this bug. I suppose it doesn't really matter what the AI designs or queues up if none of them actually finish.

thought that bug had been fixed. I'll ask a friend

 

[TheMoe]

I kindly suggest everyone upvotes the bug report, hopefully PDX will pay attention and finally fix this game-breaking bug, apparently this has been reported since 1.6

I am a newer player, though in the current patch, I was able to destroy the majority of the US's fleet and all of the UK's fleet using Germany's starter ships upgraded to 1936 guns and radar. I was unbelievably disappointed, having made it all the way to nearly 1943 before I started on the naval side of conflict. I had tons of ships being built, but my spies kept telling me all either nation had (or Japan too for that fact) were junky old tech 1 builds, with maybe a tech 2 destroyer or cruiser thrown in. I may have lost one ship while destroying both country's navies. How could the devs allow such a game-breaking bug to persist?

 

[.Raptor.]

I haven't seen them produce anything that's NOT outdated honestly.

 

[Question]

Op mentions using Expert AI. Has anyone brought that to this creator's attention?

I remember posting on his forum about it a year ago. I made another post about it recently.

 

[mikwarleo]

thought that bug had been fixed. I'll ask a friend

If you fire up a new 1936 game, tag England, go to observe mode, you can see the AI cancel masses of near-complete ships when you unpause.

1 min test as described in the bug report in my sig. There are other things that it does described in that report but that is a quick proof.