Please don't tune down Condi renting for VH in 1.19

[Chaingun]

You should probably tag @Gnivom since he's the one that decides this stuff now.

Basically, the reason I made Condottieri as they were was for the AI to be able to fight threatening nations more liberally than wars (and rivals) allow. Reverting it is going to take game a notch back to static "AI loses without trying to stop snowballing" mode; there are certainly legit counter arguments however in terms of predictability.

 

[Chaingun]

I think Gnivom played around with budgeting in 1.18 and the FL behavior is a result of it. AI builds up to 75% nominally and is fairly reluctant to fill up to 100% even. IMO this could be improved in some cases, but overall the saved money does have its uses. Human is going to counter it either way by either trying to out-build the AI militarily, or outgrow it by trying to get away with a smaller army.

 

[Gnivom]

@Chaingun made a good explaination about their new budgeting and army levels compared to forcelimit. As for condottieri on VH, it was not my decision but rather a genuine design decision, based of what I understand on wars being too hard and (especially) unpredictable.

 

[Chaingun]

Little ventured, far less gained.

How often do you rent out condotierri for free right now, and in what circumstances do you do so? This is an important question and I'm not going to let it go so easily .

If you are not willing to rent out condotierri for free, presumably you have better alternative uses for those units, and petitioning for the AI to do something you know is suboptimal intentionally is probably not the best course.



Playing the game is an artificial reason ?

Maybe the AI could do more wars if it doesn't hand its units to other nations for free? Surely you're not suggesting that this case of perma-war is just players role playing and that it's actually optimal to rent condotierri ?

On a high level it's about additional dynamics to a rather static game situation. From the individual AI country's perspective it's the ability to do something about a potential future threat with less risk than outright war. It's also easier for the AI programmer to be flexible and to "bend the rules" regarding what countries to rent out condottieri to than with war declarations because 1) there are less restrictions or they can be easier ignored (especially soft ones displayed in the user interface such as AI attitude), 2) it's simply not as drastic, especially as a potential F-up (risk is mostly limited to troops put in there and then), softening impact of the chicken-and-egg problem on declaring on stronger expanding countries that aren't (yet) fighting sufficiently strong enemies even if they are a threat to everyone around.

IMO, the main problem is where it is left with insufficient troops for defending after renting, but that's difficult in general (another example: deciding how built up to force limit AI should be peace time). I'd argue cost/reward ratio isn't a problem (even with free renting). AI could use those troops to A) expand for itself to grow stronger relative to the threat, or B) against the threat directly, with condottieri belonging in category B. B is potentially a more damaging option, but which one is actually better is difficult to judge since it above all depends on the actions of third party countries. It's certainly the case that in terms of AI draining each others' resources in AIvsAI wars, outright wars are actually more damaging than renting condottieri short term to their ability to resist the human player, even though wars may produce blobbed up AI nations (but blobbing we were trying to slow down for other reasons).

Reasoning about what the AI should do or not based on what a human does is somewhat limited in the sense AI don't talk to each other, at all. Not solely because it's more complicated to implement, but also because coordinated attacks can feel like "AI cheating". Thus, coordinating attacks in practice is something the AI is way worse at than a human, leading to the (already described above) issue of strong human (and ultra strong AI) countries never being attacked mid-late game, because nobody dares to throw the first few stones. Free Condottieri is a small measure against that, if not nearly sufficient, since condottieri troop sizes tend to be outscaled.

Not saying the implementation was perfect btw, just outlining the thinking and objectives behind the up-to-1.18 behavior. I think in terms of difficulty, it will be around +/- zero due to the number of shoddy rent outs in addition to the useful ones, but dynamics/unpredictability = fun IMHO (but then, not everyone agrees apparently ).

 

[Chaingun]

You'll probably have to petition @DDRJake seeing as design team took over the issue according to @Gnivom. However, they probably made up their mind already.

If it isn't already so, an alternative idea is to keep old behavior on defines to allow AI mods to use it.