Less Total War

[Pitt The Elder]

Perhaps my biggest complaint about the way the game behaves right now is the way the AI throws everything it has into every war it ends up in. For example, France will often sensibly ally with Hungary, to check Austria, but then winds up deploying all of it's armed forces against all of Hungary's other enemies, like Poland or the Ottomans, powers which France probably isn't too concerned about.

The same behavior can be exploited pretty ruthlessly by the player. In obtaining the Albania or Iberia achievement, the game became trivial after managing to ally with France. To take down major powers like Spain or the Ottomans, all I had to do was declare, and watch as France overran the enemy, occupied their provinces, and turned all of them over to me (admittedly that was a few patches ago, but the behavior has not fundamentally changed).

No shortage of other examples, you don't have to spend too long on various forums before you start seeing massive invasions of Russian Siberia by the Iberian powers, the Emperor and all of his friends crushing the Ottomans in defense of Genoan islands, or a hundred thousand assorted European soldiers deployed to India.

 

[Danfish77]

I think it will be harder to get an AI that thoughtfully commits forces right than it is to get an AI to commit wholeheartedly and make smart wartime decisions. While I'm fine with Paradox working on such a system in the background, I don't want to see it in the main game until it works reliably well.

 

[dog player]

Actually, I've seen a lot of games where I or someone allies France (let's say Hungary) and France send half their army, and keeps the other one unmoved at home.

Anyhow, regardless if that's what happens now or not or if it's designed that way, maybe you can set some house rules for yourself to not ally France or not have a big guy to do the job for you. It all depends on what you want to do and what you enjoy in the end.

But as Danfish says, it is really tricky to implement some AI Smartness in all this.

 

[Buladelu]

I feel AI is OK at not participating in wars he doesn't need. I sometimes see, say, England joining Portugal's war with Morocco but now doing much about it - though sometimes they do commit. The problem there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. AI either doesn't care about the war or it's total war. Would be nice and realistic if, say, France sends some army to conquer some Asian state, the army gets destroyed and France decides that it's not really worth it and asks for white peace.

 

[Kljunas]

This isn't really an AI issue imo. The problem is that there's often no incentive not to commit your entire army to a conflict.

 

[t6.28]

This isn't really an AI issue imo. The problem is that there's often no incentive not to commit your entire army to a conflict.

Exactly. You could maybe make fights far more expensive (higher war exhaustion from battles and extra maintenance cost on armies that participate in fights). You could also force keeping some of the troops back by giving increased unrest for not having and army in your own land (representing fear of invasions and opportunistic rebels).

To keep fights smaller, you might also allow joining wars as backup, meaning you will not get called into the war unless it turns very bad (lets say at<-35% warscore).