Spectacular implosions of AI Kingdoms

[Garuda]

I've not played many games of CK, and the longest I've reached is my current game now at 1165. In each game I've played the AI controlled kingdoms have a nasty habit of falling apart. Although it is realistic in some cases to have fragmented kingdoms (such as the German states) and certainly fun ahistorically I'm wondering whether the whole thing is WAD.

Example: In my current game (1.04a England) France imploded virtually overnight. I saved and loaded up as France to see what was going on. The King of France's demesne was just one province despite the fact that the King could hold upto 5 personally. His vassals were mostly non-related and of low loyalty. I used Byzantine to white peace France's current wars and hoped it would stop the rot. I reloaded back as England and watched as one after another the Duchies, Bishoprics and Counts kept dowing their King. After several successive wars in which the Kingdom of France's 3,000 plus army did nothing (stood in Maine throughout all wars), the French capital was removed to Toulouse and France became a single province Arch-Bishopric with elective law and no king.

Does the AI's management of Kingdoms need tweaking? Am I seeing something that is rare or does it happen in your games too?

 

[Sera]

This issue has been discussed quite extensively and I think the consensus is it's not WAD. After centuries of play your kingdom is often the only christian remaining along side an ahistorically strong Byzantium. Hopefully 1.05 will tweak the AI to such an extent it will atleast attempt to prevent kingdom/dutchy implosions, as well as be more agressive and focused toward "kingdom" (re)building.

 

[Secret Master]

Here's something to try to keep AI kingdoms from falling apart.


Save and reload every 20 years.

This causes the AI to "wake up" and reassign chancellors and whatnot. It also creates country counsins in courts that are to small, so that the AI CAN appoint advisors.

More often than not, you can salvage 50% or so of these implosions by just doing this regularly. They other half are based on rulers with insanity, and there is nothing you can do about that.

 

[Garuda]

Thanks Secret Master. You learn something new every day!

If what you say works, it'll make a big difference.

 

[Secret Master]

No problem.

 

[bombshellboi]

I've not played many games of CK, and the longest I've reached is my current game now at 1165. In each game I've played the AI controlled kingdoms have a nasty habit of falling apart. Although it is realistic in some cases to have fragmented kingdoms (such as the German states) and certainly fun ahistorically I'm wondering whether the whole thing is WAD.

Example: In my current game (1.04a England) France imploded virtually overnight. I saved and loaded up as France to see what was going on. The King of France's demesne was just one province despite the fact that the King could hold upto 5 personally. His vassals were mostly non-related and of low loyalty. I used Byzantine to white peace France's current wars and hoped it would stop the rot. I reloaded back as England and watched as one after another the Duchies, Bishoprics and Counts kept dowing their King. After several successive wars in which the Kingdom of France's 3,000 plus army did nothing (stood in Maine throughout all wars), the French capital was removed to Toulouse and France became a single province Arch-Bishopric with elective law and no king.

Does the AI's management of Kingdoms need tweaking? Am I seeing something that is rare or does it happen in your games too?

I just watched this happen to France and am now watching it happen to Germany. But I think it has more to do with the fact that their Monarchs have been excommunicated and gained the "Heretic" trait than anything else.

 

[unmerged(19226)]

Here's something to try to keep AI kingdoms from falling apart.


Save and reload every 20 years.

This causes the AI to "wake up" and reassign chancellors and whatnot. It also creates country counsins in courts that are to small, so that the AI CAN appoint advisors.

More often than not, you can salvage 50% or so of these implosions by just doing this regularly. They other half are based on rulers with insanity, and there is nothing you can do about that.

That's the case in my last game as Poland. In this game I was playing usually about 15-20 years and again after loading saves. I've played till 1293 year and Germany and many other kingdoms still existed. Moreover Germany were near as big as in the beginning of the 1066 scenario (though it lost some provinces, but was able to conquer many new!). However this was on 1.03b and I don't know if such solution can be usful now on 1.04a?

By the way is AI cheating in CK? If not, maybe it would be good for playability of this game to have cheating AI?

 

[Chaingun]

I did never consider that the AI falling asleep might be an issue having to do with failing AI political entities. Now when I do however, it seems reasonable that this is partly the cause of some spectacular idioc inactivity from the AI.

Eventually this leads to a further suggestion that could be tried: Could anyone play a "close to hands off"-campaign on a fast speed and another similar one on a slow speed and compare how quickly (that is in game years), the kingdoms fall apart? When I played EU2 recently I noticed that when I slowed down the game I was DOWed more frequently because the AI had more time to process strength data to neighbours. This is because EU2 (and then proabably CK) uses threads which leads to different results depending on the CPU time allocated. It is also a frequent cause of CTDs; different pieces of machine code interfere where the programmers didn't account for it.

 

[unmerged(22135)]

I am almost through with my game as Aragon. England did implode the Scandinavian Kingdoms, Scotland also holding the Papalstate, and the newly found Lithunia did not. Also stayed France rather stable it was even able to grap some of the German border lands (seemed to be an inheritance). Hoever around 1300 the German King inherited France! It was lucky for me, that some of his dukes had broken away before the inheritence. So in this particlualr game, the world is rather sable (with the exception of England of course).

Yours sincerely,
OG