Hey Paradox & General Forum-ers,
I'd first off like to say that this is not a rage post. This is a genuine inquiry on design. A few questions:
1) Are the AI supposed to opt out of the war goals I send them? My colonial nations won't go to the provinces I want them to capture (they rarely leave the New World), and the AI allies tend to either ignore my wargoals or focus on areas completely separate from the ones I've pointed out.
2) Do the AI tend to fan out in general in terms of troops? In a recent war of mine my allies spread themselves very thin as France stack swiped them with death stacks, which didn't need to happen because my Allies had more than enough troops together to battle France. Is there a way to set their behavior, like I can with my vassals/marches/colonial nations?
3) Are you guys working on making the military strength/quality mechanics more transparent? I often have a hard time judging the relative quality of my military against another nation. I know generally what affects it (discipline, military tactics, morale, combat ability, generals, etc.) but it's hard to get an overall sense of quality. Perhaps there could be some overall score based on the summation of these traits that I could use to cross-compare nations?
For a little context I'm playing through a Portugal Game in AoW and recently France went from being a great ally to a bitter rival. That's fine, tends to happen all the time. I know France is hard to beat, if not impossible, so I look around and try to get some allies.
I ended up with Myself, my March Galicia (we split Iberia half and half), my Colonial nations (I pretty much own all of South America & MesoAmerica) and surprisingly beefed up Brandenburg, Austria, and Venice to tackle France. We have more than double their forces on land and water, and brandenburg has one of the highest quality troops in the game, from what I can tell, which led me to believe I could *potentially* defeat France. It was a gamble, but I thought a reasonable one given what information I had going in.
We ended up getting trounced. Partially because my allies ignored the goals I gave them and spread themselves very thin. They didn't support one another from France's stacks, which also had overwhelming quality to them. I realize from a design perspective France is supposed to be powerful, so I'm not going to squabble with that, and I'm actually okay with losing since that makes the game interesting, but from a transparency point of view it would be nice to have some sort of way of gauging my alliance's strength relative to someone else other than sheer troop #'s or the %'s given on the "choose rivals" screen.
I'd first off like to say that this is not a rage post. This is a genuine inquiry on design. A few questions:
1) Are the AI supposed to opt out of the war goals I send them? My colonial nations won't go to the provinces I want them to capture (they rarely leave the New World), and the AI allies tend to either ignore my wargoals or focus on areas completely separate from the ones I've pointed out.
2) Do the AI tend to fan out in general in terms of troops? In a recent war of mine my allies spread themselves very thin as France stack swiped them with death stacks, which didn't need to happen because my Allies had more than enough troops together to battle France. Is there a way to set their behavior, like I can with my vassals/marches/colonial nations?
3) Are you guys working on making the military strength/quality mechanics more transparent? I often have a hard time judging the relative quality of my military against another nation. I know generally what affects it (discipline, military tactics, morale, combat ability, generals, etc.) but it's hard to get an overall sense of quality. Perhaps there could be some overall score based on the summation of these traits that I could use to cross-compare nations?
For a little context I'm playing through a Portugal Game in AoW and recently France went from being a great ally to a bitter rival. That's fine, tends to happen all the time. I know France is hard to beat, if not impossible, so I look around and try to get some allies.
I ended up with Myself, my March Galicia (we split Iberia half and half), my Colonial nations (I pretty much own all of South America & MesoAmerica) and surprisingly beefed up Brandenburg, Austria, and Venice to tackle France. We have more than double their forces on land and water, and brandenburg has one of the highest quality troops in the game, from what I can tell, which led me to believe I could *potentially* defeat France. It was a gamble, but I thought a reasonable one given what information I had going in.
We ended up getting trounced. Partially because my allies ignored the goals I gave them and spread themselves very thin. They didn't support one another from France's stacks, which also had overwhelming quality to them. I realize from a design perspective France is supposed to be powerful, so I'm not going to squabble with that, and I'm actually okay with losing since that makes the game interesting, but from a transparency point of view it would be nice to have some sort of way of gauging my alliance's strength relative to someone else other than sheer troop #'s or the %'s given on the "choose rivals" screen.
In a War over Orkney