OMG stop and siege something.

[lonkeW]

AI armies just run around like a chicken with their heads cut off. OMG just siege something. Enter battle even if you gonna lose just stop. moving.

 

[Rod Alexander]

AI armies just run around like a chicken with their heads cut off. OMG just siege something. Enter battle even if you gonna lose just stop. moving.

Literally when I'm gonna move in to help my ally with a siege they're close to completing, when they see me they immediately start leaving.

When I'm gonna enter a battle and my enemy has an army nearby to help them out, their ally starts coming to their aid. I also have an allied army nearby that could help. ........But they leave me to die.

 

[Rifal]

At some point we will just have to stop giving Paradox money until they sort out a basic, functional AI.

 

[jmpnjkrbbt]

At some point we will just have to stop giving Paradox money until they sort out a basic, functional AI.

But sir have you not heard? For a mere 29.99usd, you will be able to press a button and get not 1, not 2, but 3 less than impactful events in between watching the AI aimlessly wander around or stand uselessly in a empty barony whilst there is a perfectly siegable castle right next door.

 

[Subcomandante]

Nope, it's the opposite. It is your own erratic behaviour that confuses the AI.

You need to communicate your intentions to the ai, and you do this by your own army movement orders. If you do that, it is very good. The key is to meet up with them for mutual support, then tell them what you want to do. They will either follow you, cover you, or, in absence of orders, find something to kill.

The ai will judge where it is needed most. If you move to attack an enemy army, they will come to your help unless the enemy is hopelessly outmatched, then they will do something else. The problem here is that you need to constantly update your intention. If the enemy moves out of the holding, you need to again right-click attack it again, or the allied ai might change its own target. If it sees that it will not reach you in time to help, it will not help you. If it judges the battle to be clearly lost even with its assistance, it might not help.

If the AI is the war leader, you need to do the same in reverse. Stay close and cover them.

Reduce your game speed. The situation can change quickly when an enemy stack appears out of the fog. Watch the map like a hawk, don't be distracted.

I wished pdox would communicate better how the ai works in ck3. Its creators have achieved maybe the best ai behaviour their games ever had, but they seem to not have told their community management about it. The pdox people who stream ck3 don't comment on it either.

 

[lonkeW]

Nope, it's the opposite. It is your own erratic behaviour that confuses the AI.

You need to communicate your intentions to the ai, and you do this by your own army movement orders. If you do that, it is very good. The key is to meet up with them for mutual support, then tell them what you want to do. They will either follow you, cover you, or, in absence of orders, find something to kill.

The ai will judge where it is needed most. If you move to attack an enemy army, they will come to your help unless the enemy is hopelessly outmatched, then they will do something else. The problem here is that you need to constantly update your intention. If the enemy moves out of the holding, you need to again right-click attack it again, or the allied ai might change its own target. If it sees that it will not reach you in time to help, it will not help you. If it judges the battle to be clearly lost even with its assistance, it might not help.

If the AI is the war leader, you need to do the same in reverse. Stay close and cover them.

Reduce your game speed. The situation can change quickly when an enemy stack appears out of the fog. Watch the map like a hawk, don't be distracted.

I wished pdox would communicate better how the ai works in ck3. Its creators have achieved maybe the best ai behaviour their games ever had, but they seem to not have told their community management about it. The pdox people who stream ck3 don't comment on it either.

So micro-management hell. And that's fun because? Plus I have no AI allies this is enemy who constantly moves because it knows I'm coming for them and they know which provinces are faster so they constantly evade me leading to unnecessary clicks. It's just whack-a-mole, who likes that?

 

[lll Sir Haze lll]

Nope, it's the opposite. It is your own erratic behaviour that confuses the AI.

While an AI might think human behaviour is erratic, I think the AIs behaviour to cancel a siege just because I move from a barony I finished sieging to the next one (both in counties adjacent to the one they were sieging) makes the AI incompetent.

I miss CK2s Command system of: Focus on sieging, focus on enemy armies, focus sieging that particular province, attach to this army.
That's the only feature I can't wrap my head around why it can't be implemented exactly the way it was in CK2. Most other things I understand the "we wanted to take a good look at it to see how we could improve/change it" mentality. But not here.

Has an AI command feature the same problems as the message settings? As in, it would make sense, but CK3 wasn't programmed with that in mind so implementing it now is hard.

 

[JonathanOfArc]

I wished pdox would communicate better how the ai works in ck3. Its creators have achieved maybe the best ai behaviour their games ever had, but they seem to not have told their community management about it. The pdox people who stream ck3 don't comment on it either.

I've largely stepped away from trying to explain these sorts of things in forum posts here. Some players hold assumptions on how they feel the AI should act, and when it doesn't do that, they throw a fit. The AI will try to preserve it's troops and not send them into battles they know they'll lose and thus through their domain into turmoil.

Many times I've had ally armies not join my near by battle until it was clear we were going to win. Sure, our side could have more easily won the battle with my allies help, but my ally would still be losing a bunch of troops. They are self preserving and it's actually kind of impressive. Is the AI great? No, but I'm happy with how they've improved it. I feel like your comment and mine will fall on deaf ears, as I mentioned before, I've been down this road before. It's like the players who want the ability to attach an ally unit to theirs, so they can use their allies as their meat shields.

A big problem is indeed that Paradox do not communicate these sort of abstractions in AI decision making. Some players on the forums lack a sense of tact when airing their complaints, which leads to articles coming out revealing that the dev team would just rather not interact here with all of us. Perhaps some sort of chief liaison would help if it were possible. The Paradox streamers could possibly be good for that kind of thing but I have no idea if they'd even want that kind of burden. We can argue in circles till the cows come home on the forums about why the AI acts the way it does in war, but for a streamer to constantly explain it could be a real headache.

 

[Rod Alexander]

You need to communicate your intentions to the ai, and you do this by your own army movement orders. If you do that, it is very good. The key is to meet up with them for mutual support, then tell them what you want to do. They will either follow you, cover you, or, in absence of orders, find something to kill.

The ai will judge where it is needed most. If you move to attack an enemy army, they will come to your help unless the enemy is hopelessly outmatched, then they will do something else. The problem here is that you need to constantly update your intention. If the enemy moves out of the holding, you need to again right-click attack it again, or the allied ai might change its own target. If it sees that it will not reach you in time to help, it will not help you. If it judges the battle to be clearly lost even with its assistance, it might not help.

I happen to be an incredible player, and fight every war I fight on 1-speed, and what you're suggesting cannot work on a tactical scale if you're outmatched and intend to win through deception rather than numbers. Clearly you've never fought an independence war before where you're outmatched 2-1 or even 3-1. I win these wars, but I can't do that if I make my intentions to the AI clear. The AI, rather than reacting to me, should do what it is in its best interest, or at least follow me around. Many times it does this. But then, many times it doesn't. Let me give you some perspective:

You are a new ruler, and you've done everything you can to either prevent an independence war from happening, or postponing its ultimate arrival. Let's say it's inevitable, and you're a giant empire with almost 100k troops. You prepare by raising maybe 2 or 3 regiments of the best siege equipment, maxed out. The rebellion breaks out, and now you're down from 100k troops to about 40k troops, with all the AI rebels together having over 100k. You call in your allies, which boosts your numbers to about 50k. You hire mercenaries, because let's be honest: if your empire was 100k-strong before, you've got at least 50k gold in the bank; now you have about 50k men. Ok, you're ready to fight. But you're still totally outmatched! And the rebel kingdoms/duchies are all over your empire! How can anyone possibly win?!

Through subversion of troop movement, and fast-sieging. You have to play incredibly slow, and move your armies with the intent on moving where the enemy thinks you're moving in one direction, when you'll switch up your movement tactics last-second to hone in on armies much smaller. Take them as piecemeal. With sieging, take less-garrisoned and lower-tier fortified castles. They'll give you less war score, but have 10 of 'em in like 6 months. When you've raised armies, raise roughly 3-4 large forces near the capitals of your largest rebels and attempt to take their capitals. The process takes a LOT of practice, but with experience, it takes roughly 3 years of game time to beat the rebellion, even when you're outmatched, using these tactics.

Here's the problem with your AI allies: they have no discernment or perception of what you're planning when you're going full-on strategy like this. The AI's idea of war is "Attack armies. Siege counties. Follow player." But if you're moving in to attack an army but can't direct them to the exact spot where they are without them either moving away or having their allies move in before it's too late, your ally won't understand why you're moving close to them and will either sit still, or move somewhere else. If your ally is sieging down a county, but you start to move to their location, the AI thinks you're going to siege the county, thinking its work there is no longer valid, so it starts to move its army away when you move in, ruining any progress they've made in the siege for you when you take over.

So Subcomandante, to answer you, what you're saying only really works if you're fighting a straightforward war, be it either defensive or offensive. With those, as much micro-ing you have to do, it's world's easier to communicate your intentions to the AI because you have the time to do so. If you're fighting a live-or-die war, however, your advice is useless. I stand by my original post.

 

[Secuter]

Nope, it's the opposite. It is your own erratic behaviour that confuses the AI.

You know, comments like yours are a out of jail free card for Paradox. The fact is, that the AI doesn't understand a single thing of what it is supposed to do in CK3.

You need to communicate your intentions to the ai, and you do this by your own army movement orders. If you do that, it is very good. The key is to meet up with them for mutual support, then tell them what you want to do. They will either follow you, cover you, or, in absence of orders, find something to kill.

"Very good".. have you played the game? The AI doesn't have a clue of what is going on. Communicate through army movement.. what's next, am I to send smoke signals too? It would be a lot better if I could simply tell the AI what actions to take, a bit like in EUIV or Ck2. Should it hunt for weaker armies, support my own army, siege stuff etc etc. But we can't, so the AI flails around aimlessly.

As some other post pointed out some time ago: it can actually be a better idea to not raise your own forces because then your allies will actually do something. If that doesn't speak volumes about how poor the AI is, then I don't know what will.

The ai will judge where it is needed most. If you move to attack an enemy army, they will come to your help unless the enemy is hopelessly outmatched, then they will do something else. The problem here is that you need to constantly update your intention. If the enemy moves out of the holding, you need to again right-click attack it again, or the allied ai might change its own target. If it sees that it will not reach you in time to help, it will not help you. If it judges the battle to be clearly lost even with its assistance, it might not help.

The AI is pathetically poor at judging where it is needed. There shouldn't be a need for me to "constantly update my intentions". The AI should simply be able to read them. Moreover, the AI is horrible at judging whether it would win or not. I've had the AI attack over a large rivers in piece-meal fashion and simply get eradicated. There are also multiple posts on this forum from frustrated players who lost wars because the AI couldn't be bothered to come and help despite their combined forces outnumbering the enemy considerably.

If the AI is the war leader, you need to do the same in reverse. Stay close and cover them.

This point of view surfaces from time to time, but it really needs to put to the grave. Yes, it is called the "war leader", but you are allies. What this means is that you are supposed to help one-another. The alleged war leader shouldn't just stand with his army doing nothing while his allies are slaughtered because somehow they didn't actually agree with just standing around doing nothing.

Reduce your game speed. The situation can change quickly when an enemy stack appears out of the fog. Watch the map like a hawk, don't be distracted.

The issue isn't the speed, but that the AI is bad.

I wished pdox would communicate better how the ai works in ck3. Its creators have achieved maybe the best ai behaviour their games ever had, but they seem to not have told their community management about it. The pdox people who stream ck3 don't comment on it either.

Paradox' AI has never been stellar. Granted, AI's are very hard to make, even more so to make them good. But there's a reason for why Pdx don't talk about the AI on their streams; it's arguably one of the weakest points for CK3 at the moment. At least if we ignore how shallow the game is, and how boring it quickly becomes.

 

[Rubidium]

Nope, it's the opposite. It is your own erratic behaviour that confuses the AI.

You need to communicate your intentions to the ai, and you do this by your own army movement orders. If you do that, it is very good. The key is to meet up with them for mutual support, then tell them what you want to do. They will either follow you, cover you, or, in absence of orders, find something to kill.

The ai will judge where it is needed most. If you move to attack an enemy army, they will come to your help unless the enemy is hopelessly outmatched, then they will do something else. The problem here is that you need to constantly update your intention. If the enemy moves out of the holding, you need to again right-click attack it again, or the allied ai might change its own target. If it sees that it will not reach you in time to help, it will not help you. If it judges the battle to be clearly lost even with its assistance, it might not help.

If the AI is the war leader, you need to do the same in reverse. Stay close and cover them.

Reduce your game speed. The situation can change quickly when an enemy stack appears out of the fog. Watch the map like a hawk, don't be distracted.

I wished pdox would communicate better how the ai works in ck3. Its creators have achieved maybe the best ai behaviour their games ever had, but they seem to not have told their community management about it. The pdox people who stream ck3 don't comment on it either.

Except that the AI is almost as bad in fighting its own, AI-only wars. Crusades are the most visible example (even without human intervention, the AI does all sorts of stupid stuff that basically dooms it), but any sufficiently large AI war will see similar behavior. It really doesn't know how to handle multiple stacks at once (and its tendency to split up when facing attrition means that any war involving large enough forces will cause this behavior to surface).

It's true that adding a human into the mix makes the AI worse (which is one reason I remain baffled by the refusal to bring in a CK2-style "attach to army" or not button, which even the CK2 AI was capable of occasionally saying "no, I'll fight my own war elsewhere" to limit abuse), but the AI issues are much deeper than just that.

EDIT: It also has no idea how to prioritize sieges; it can even be baited into sieging lands belonging to folks other than the primary target (which by definition will give 0 war score), while ignoring its own capital under siege.

 

[Subcomandante]

I've largely stepped away from trying to explain these sorts of things in forum posts here. Some players hold assumptions

I know I know. As far as I can see, everybody is still playing as if it's CK2, chasing around armies, sniping castles, doing bait and switch exploits, painting the map...it's tragic. I haven't seen any streamer or youtuber who has grasped that this is a new game with lots of new options and a completely new warfare system for example.

 

[Rifal]

I've largely stepped away from trying to explain these sorts of things in forum posts here. Some players hold assumptions on how they feel the AI should act, and when it doesn't do that, they throw a fit. The AI will try to preserve it's troops and not send them into battles they know they'll lose and thus through their domain into turmoil.

The AI will "preserve" its troops by being picked off piecemeal rather than unite force and decisively win the war.

It's like the players who want the ability to attach an ally unit to theirs, so they can use their allies as their meat shields.

I want to do the reasonable thing and fight side by side with my allies. As it is now I am the meat shield who does the maority of the fighting while the AI runs around like a headless chicken.

A big problem is indeed that Paradox do not communicate these sort of abstractions in AI decision making. Some players on the forums lack a sense of tact when airing their complaints, which leads to articles coming out revealing that the dev team would just rather not interact here with all of us. Perhaps some sort of chief liaison would help if it were possible. The Paradox streamers could possibly be good for that kind of thing but I have no idea if they'd even want that kind of burden. We can argue in circles till the cows come home on the forums about why the AI acts the way it does in war, but for a streamer to constantly explain it could be a real headache.

We really just need to stop giving Paradox money until they fix their problems.

 

[Rod Alexander]

I know I know. As far as I can see, everybody is still playing as if it's CK2, chasing around armies, sniping castles, doing bait and switch exploits, painting the map...it's tragic. I haven't seen any streamer or youtuber who has grasped that this is a new game with lots of new options and a completely new warfare system for example.

You're talking smack a lot. Explain your method that none of us (who have thousands of hours of in-game experience) have. Tell us your secrets.

 

[jmpnjkrbbt]

thousands of hours of in-game experience

Careful how you speak mate, or you know who will show up with his 2400hrs of having the game running screenshot for the umpteenth time.

 

[klopkr]

I know I know. As far as I can see, everybody is still playing as if it's CK2, chasing around armies, sniping castles, doing bait and switch exploits, painting the map...it's tragic. I haven't seen any streamer or youtuber who has grasped that this is a new game with lots of new options and a completely new warfare system for example.

Please tell us the magical way you play the game differently than the rest of us?

Careful how you speak mate, or you know who will show up with his 2400hrs of having the game running screenshot for the umpteenth time.

Gotta heat his room somehow right?

 

[Genocidalvirus]

AI on this scale is extremely difficulty to code, especially when considering all the parameters they use to control them.
The main issues I found that I think could be addressed:
1) AI location prediction 2) AI grouping / supply 3) AI goals
1) should initially arrive and move based on what they believe the other player or AI will do, instead of just picking one location and traveling, it should almost be like the first 5 moves of chess, in which the AI will do A if X happens and do B if Y happens and C if neither option is selected.
2) AI handles troop supply better than any human player, but it should calculate movement speed and take more troop sacrifices if it knows it can catch up to the army, to many times AI just sits idle or moves awkwardly because of where the other armies are located ally or enemy. If it knew it could destroy an army before they could run, it would be better to focus that.
3) Lastly, I think in some situations AI, should be focusing on more simple goals, ie. just killing the army or taking the capital cities. This is only really an issue in larger battles over a larger distance of land. Players can just exploit the armies that are separated, while easily just hiring mercenaries if their capital is getting rushed by a small army. If the AI would combine forces based on how large the enemy army size was it would make more sense.

 

[merlinium]

What about bringing back the feature being able to attach an army to your ally's army? That was the first thing i missed when i first played ck3.

 

[Torredebelem]

I know I know. As far as I can see, everybody is still playing as if it's CK2, chasing around armies, sniping castles, doing bait and switch exploits, painting the map...it's tragic. I haven't seen any streamer or youtuber who has grasped that this is a new game with lots of new options and a completely new warfare system for example.

Mechanically speaking, painting the map is the way the game is designed for. Of course one can refrain from doing such, but the AI will try it again and again, many times weakening itself dearly in the process, while blobbing is the major reward for any type of play without any drawback. Different religions and cultures should put a significant hurdle in keeping a realm together for more than a generation and should be converted much slower and with less precision.

As far as the warfare AI, I can understand the points a user or two made about it not being fully understood by the crowd, but a list of simple commands available to give to ally armies would be much better and would almost get Paradox out of the hook of the "terrible warfare AI" meme... at least when concerning with a player's own wars because if the player starts to follow AI vs AI warfare all sorts of shenanigans continue to happen.

This being said, developing proper AI for a game as complex as CK3, would be extremely difficult and would bring any present computer to its knees.

 

[AlipheeseXV]

Careful how you speak mate, or you know who will show up with his 2400hrs of having the game running screenshot for the umpteenth time.

I hear thy summoning and hereby answer your call.

Now speak you mere mortal peasant, as to why thou seek to disturb this goddess rest?
But make it quick or endless pain shall be upon thou for the rest of your mere life!