Heck with the garrison issue. This speaks to a much bigger and many times more important AI issue. Canada defeated the USA? That right there should not be possible so the AI must have been extremely bad to allow it.
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Heck with the garrison issue. This speaks to a much bigger and many times more important AI issue. Canada defeated the USA? That right there should not be possible so the AI must have been extremely bad to allow it.
Hey Karl, posted as a bug report but it's more of an AI issue- pretty simple one, where when playing as Australia the US sends volunteer forces that land in the Solomons (because it's the closest point, presumably) but then they cannot move their troops off the island to which they're delivered. By the time the US got into the war they had 9 divisions frozen on the Solomons for upwards of two years. Maybe have them deliver their volunteer troops to the capital instead? Thanks!
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Yeah this just happened to me. Japan had captured half the islands and the usa sent 6 divs that just sat in the same province of the Solomon Islands slowly dying of low supply.
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Yes exactly- the island with the port had been captured by the Japs, and the US Vols were in the island furthest to the east, which has no port. Presumably this is why they just piled up there.
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Whilst a Pacific War is happening. I've noticed two odd things, Japan was able to take Pearl Harbour whilst a US naval force patrolled all adjacent naval regions. So I have no idea how they managed to launch a naval invasion.
US was able to send reinforcements to French Vietnam and Cambodia despite the heavy Japanese presence in Naval Regions and surrounding islands. That does not seem very realistic. Australia had also fell to Japan. So there would be no way for US troops to get there unless they went the other way round the globe. Which they wouldn't have because I was defending Singapore at the time from the Japanese onslaught.
Another small thing I noticed is when I surrounded the Italian army in a port province in North Africa, despite them having larger numbers and having armour whilst I had only a handful of infantry divisions they would not try to break out of the encirclement.
Air Units, in previous versions the AI would build far too many, now there seems to be far too few air units. My Air experience of 25 and One Ace (Naval Bomber) in 1942 as Britain says everything. There are literally no enemy planes to fight? lol
US was able to send reinforcements to French Vietnam and Cambodia despite the heavy Japanese presence in Naval Regions and surrounding islands. That does not seem very realistic. Australia had also fell to Japan. So there would be no way for US troops to get there unless they went the other way round the globe. Which they wouldn't have because I was defending Singapore at the time from the Japanese onslaught.
Another small thing I noticed is when I surrounded the Italian army in a port province in North Africa, despite them having larger numbers and having armour whilst I had only a handful of infantry divisions they would not try to break out of the encirclement.
Air Units, in previous versions the AI would build far too many, now there seems to be far too few air units. My Air experience of 25 and One Ace (Naval Bomber) in 1942 as Britain says everything. There are literally no enemy planes to fight? lol
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Tried a few more games, In every one the ai builds way to few air units. Needs a fast fix. Edit will add a bug report to the air loss issue.
Given people are doing world conquest with 1-2 province minors, human-controlled CAN defeating another country is hardly shocking development. Especially if it's USA attacked early, they don't exactly have that much military at their disposal.
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And till it is impossible to do a WC with these little countries the AI will remain flawed IMO.
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Was just checking what allies were doing after everyone in Europe capitulate...
Looooooooong naval invasion
i thought that was fixed before 1.3? apparently not
Looooooooong naval invasion
i thought that was fixed before 1.3? apparently not
Agreed - but that's on podcat's head as a regrettable design decision - it's nothing to do with Karl and the AI.
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I actually think it's all AI. Here's why. Say you are CAN int he example above and I'm USA in a MP game. You DOW me. Do you think in a human vs. human game CAN can defeat USA?
Or that Luxembourg, after defeating Belgium could defeat a human France player or a human German player?
To me that is all AI related. We see human Poland defeating AI Germany. But can a human Poland ever survive against a human Germany?
I know there are design choices that PDS has made to allow a small country becoming big. I tend to disagree with these fantasy type designs but at some point they face off against a major. That is where the AI shows how bad it is.
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Was just checking what allies were doing after everyone in Europe capitulate...
View attachment 225866 View attachment 225867 View attachment 225868
Looooooooong naval invasion
mm always wondered if NALAV is a typo in:
MAX_DISTANCE_NALAV_INVASION = 200.0,
the only time in defines that NAVAL is spelled NALAV
so i've had another line below it with what i thought is the good spelling just to make sure. Maybe its a good time to ask again (but in a better place this time) if thats not a typo?
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You can set specific equipment-sets for each template though, regardless of priorities.
Yeah, and because of that the AI lacks operational overview in all aspects of the game, and there are also a lot (in my opinion) of small misbehaviours.
Some of them are also in "misscomunication" of three different parts of the games AI.
Edit: production-overview-frontline
All what follows is my personal opinion without knowlege of how the AI works and what will actually be possible in the context of the game.
Everething is based on the last game i have played with version [1.3.0] (5153).
I just play singleplayer and there mainly GER and SOV because i like massive land wars.
First Production:
I dont know how the AI decide what to produce but if they would be humans i would say the one responsible for production is not speaking with the genearl in the field what he needs.
It seems production follows scripted pattern and is killed by enemy bombing.
Germany is not producing tanks or planes because they are to low in production priority and too much industrie is damaged. It looks like this fires back because in this game Germany stopted trying to train Tank divisions because they are unable to produce enought of them, which led to a higher recrutment of inf divisions and a higher demand of inf equipment which prevented them from shifting more MIL IC to tank production.
A solution could be to distribute the factory damage evenly across the production lines so that the ai will continue producing a bit of everything.
Lets say 30% damaged IC will reduce the Inf Equpment production to 10 IC per Line but they would still produce Medium tanks with 4 to 5 factories.
Its even maore acurate to distribute the damage because nowone in WWII could decide which factories of them would be get hit and it is to easy to have excess factories you dont mind to get bombend and your tank production is uninterrupted.
Secound:It seems production follows scripted pattern and is killed by enemy bombing.
Germany is not producing tanks or planes because they are to low in production priority and too much industrie is damaged. It looks like this fires back because in this game Germany stopted trying to train Tank divisions because they are unable to produce enought of them, which led to a higher recrutment of inf divisions and a higher demand of inf equipment which prevented them from shifting more MIL IC to tank production.
A solution could be to distribute the factory damage evenly across the production lines so that the ai will continue producing a bit of everything.
Lets say 30% damaged IC will reduce the Inf Equpment production to 10 IC per Line but they would still produce Medium tanks with 4 to 5 factories.
Its even maore acurate to distribute the damage because nowone in WWII could decide which factories of them would be get hit and it is to easy to have excess factories you dont mind to get bombend and your tank production is uninterrupted.
The AI seems unable to calculate relative power or the effects of terrain. They ignore mountains rivers everything and are still attacking if their tropps are clearly weaker.
This Battle is an hour old and i dont know why the ai even decides to attack there. They field a battle width of 34 and attack 240 width across a river??? In no situation ever should the do something like that! There is no situation or terrain where they are able to win these.and that goes along the whole front and leed to this
all defenses and there is a mannpower and equipment loss ratio of about one to ten. Some Battles are nearly 1/100.
Here are the losses summer 1941 and 1943 in the soviet german war. The most of them are from direct battle and just 100k-200k or so from encircelments.
Germany lost 1.95M aganst 200k of mine the German AI is simply killing itself. here is the 1/10 ratio of the stupid attaks again.
Its also a lack of good attackinf divisions because the production ai just throws out rifels which are good to defend but no tanks for a proper attack.
i refused to attack much because i also just started to pruduce tanks and was just not redy in 1941 for a large offensive witch happend in 1943
To improve this the AI have to learn the game, the map and some basics about war.
(It is getting a little weird now because i start talk to the ai, its late and im tired so dont wonder)
Stop attacking into mountains and across rivers if there are alternatievs. You just have to cross the river or a montainridge at one point an can use this as brigehead if you have no other way. Dont try to cross i everywhere at the same time! You can start some (clearly not all) attacks to see if you can breack throught somwhere, but if you have achieved it stop the other ones and reinfore the bridgehead and breack out of it.
Woods, hills, urban areas are ok to attack; jungle and swap is also ok, but avoid to stay at them to long if possible. If you get a chance attack at Plains. Calculate your relative power acordingly and just attack if you are strong enought to win. Try to attack with divisions which have a high breakthrough value.
Third:
This Battle is an hour old and i dont know why the ai even decides to attack there. They field a battle width of 34 and attack 240 width across a river??? In no situation ever should the do something like that! There is no situation or terrain where they are able to win these.and that goes along the whole front and leed to this
all defenses and there is a mannpower and equipment loss ratio of about one to ten. Some Battles are nearly 1/100.
Here are the losses summer 1941 and 1943 in the soviet german war. The most of them are from direct battle and just 100k-200k or so from encircelments.
Germany lost 1.95M aganst 200k of mine the German AI is simply killing itself. here is the 1/10 ratio of the stupid attaks again.
Its also a lack of good attackinf divisions because the production ai just throws out rifels which are good to defend but no tanks for a proper attack.
i refused to attack much because i also just started to pruduce tanks and was just not redy in 1941 for a large offensive witch happend in 1943
To improve this the AI have to learn the game, the map and some basics about war.
(It is getting a little weird now because i start talk to the ai, its late and im tired so dont wonder)
Stop attacking into mountains and across rivers if there are alternatievs. You just have to cross the river or a montainridge at one point an can use this as brigehead if you have no other way. Dont try to cross i everywhere at the same time! You can start some (clearly not all) attacks to see if you can breack throught somwhere, but if you have achieved it stop the other ones and reinfore the bridgehead and breack out of it.
Woods, hills, urban areas are ok to attack; jungle and swap is also ok, but avoid to stay at them to long if possible. If you get a chance attack at Plains. Calculate your relative power acordingly and just attack if you are strong enought to win. Try to attack with divisions which have a high breakthrough value.
You have to learn how to wage a war.
Therefor you have to split up your forces (yes dont use one single large battleplan for the whole front because that is unable to adress the geography). Use small battleplans at the right areas of the map. If you want to attack somewhere you have to concentrate your forces first.
To the map.
Divide the map into blocking areas (red), areas you should avoid and key areas you should take at every cost because they will win you the war (dont know if it is possible to get the AI to this from a codeing point of vwie but i will just continue as if it is possible). Lets see how this looks like for ...hm... lets take poland.
You can see that the green areas leed to large junks of land that is hard to defend/easy to attack. You have to hold them if you want to defend yourself very easy or attack into enemy territory. Toget those use as much men and equopment as you need but dont wast it at the red areas if you can avoid it. Keep in mind thet bunkers can change these areas significantly.
Lets see waht you have done last time:
A large scale offensive at the whole front with sucess in the south (A) where i retreated and you advanced to Odessa (B). But you ignored the bottleneck (green) because romania is still netreal and so is was able to pocked some of your troops with my counterattack [1].
Some Yeras later the same thing. Just throwing men across rivers at the whole front in a deperate move to gain the initiative.
Do you remeber how i got all these land from you? With the map. From one green point to the next, take some lossen at the green points and gain a lot of land very easy.
That is how you should attack, not like your last attemt above. I used my six tank divisions for every single offensive. When have you last time concentrated the best divisions at a small front where you are going to attack? And yes i konw you are curently not able to do this with the battle planer.
The battle planer should also take respect of the red areas. A lot of this moves [3, 4, 8, 9] where unable with the battleplaner because it will always attack across the riversat the sides, even with the spearhead. So the battle planer could need some tweak too in my eyes (offer more control where your troops are moving and where not).
If im at the battle planer, the fallback line could also need improvement to actuall be able to fall back (fighting) till you reach this line and not just move to it.
Therefor you have to split up your forces (yes dont use one single large battleplan for the whole front because that is unable to adress the geography). Use small battleplans at the right areas of the map. If you want to attack somewhere you have to concentrate your forces first.
To the map.
Divide the map into blocking areas (red), areas you should avoid and key areas you should take at every cost because they will win you the war (dont know if it is possible to get the AI to this from a codeing point of vwie but i will just continue as if it is possible). Lets see how this looks like for ...hm... lets take poland.
You can see that the green areas leed to large junks of land that is hard to defend/easy to attack. You have to hold them if you want to defend yourself very easy or attack into enemy territory. Toget those use as much men and equopment as you need but dont wast it at the red areas if you can avoid it. Keep in mind thet bunkers can change these areas significantly.
Lets see waht you have done last time:
A large scale offensive at the whole front with sucess in the south (A) where i retreated and you advanced to Odessa (B). But you ignored the bottleneck (green) because romania is still netreal and so is was able to pocked some of your troops with my counterattack [1].
Some Yeras later the same thing. Just throwing men across rivers at the whole front in a deperate move to gain the initiative.
Do you remeber how i got all these land from you? With the map. From one green point to the next, take some lossen at the green points and gain a lot of land very easy.
That is how you should attack, not like your last attemt above. I used my six tank divisions for every single offensive. When have you last time concentrated the best divisions at a small front where you are going to attack? And yes i konw you are curently not able to do this with the battle planer.
The battle planer should also take respect of the red areas. A lot of this moves [3, 4, 8, 9] where unable with the battleplaner because it will always attack across the riversat the sides, even with the spearhead. So the battle planer could need some tweak too in my eyes (offer more control where your troops are moving and where not).
If im at the battle planer, the fallback line could also need improvement to actuall be able to fall back (fighting) till you reach this line and not just move to it.
Edit:
@SteelVolt you said i yourself (see quote above), but i think the overview part is very important, its the key. The ai is now produceing something and attacking somewhere and hopes to win. But it should more "think" about what do i need and where have i to attack to beat country xy.
Hope it was at least a little bit of use (not so sure about it).
I wish the PDX devs team and the comunity Merry Christmas
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Hi there! First off thanks for all your hard work! I'm sure it's not easy. The Changelogs and AI Devdiaries all sound really amazing! I'm really looking forward to where this will lead! I stopped playing a while back because of the AI trouble (especially the AI abandoning fronts) and when reading this decided to give it another try. Even bought the Expansion.
However, tonight I tried my first 1.3 Together for Victory Campaign as South Africa and can't help but feel dissapointed. Germany still had tremendous difficulty dealing with France. It pushed right through the Maginotline, not even caring about belgium, but then suddenly declared war on Denmark and Belgium/Netherlands and prioritized that, meaning that the advance was halted right before Paris - Which only fell a year later in November/Dezember '41 (dont remember when exactly) and was only won when Italy moved all its troops to the French border, completly giving up on Africa. Now this all seemed to me like the Front-Abandoning-Issue was still not fixed, but I was happy to see that Italy actually thought France to be more important than Algeria.
However, what confused me was that after I declared war on Belgium to free the Colonies, I found myself fighting the entire Allies. Now I dont like this mechanicwise as this really means you need to actually make the Allies Capitulate to achieve freedom, when I'm sure that the Boers didnt plan on invading Washington, London, Paris and Brussels, but nvm that.
What struck me the oddest was the sheer amount of enemies I was facing, when I was sure there was a more important war going on and when looking more closely I found next to huge amounts of American volunteers (why would they care about british colonies!?) also some Norwegians (!!!) and even some Greek Divisions (!!??), even though Greece was being overrun by Italian boots already in Athens!
Looking at the War-Tab I see that EVERY allied nation, expect Luxembourg, Poland and Denmark have lost men against me. - I'm assuming this is because these 3 didn't live long enough to have their men reach me. I have hundreds of planes above me and in the battlelog (which i love, btw) I can see that I have destroyed thousands (!) of light tanks which im sure could have been more useful in Europe! In one of the devdiaries you wrote that you put an extra emphasis on countries defending their homeland before "further away land like Siberia" but in my very first game, maybe 2 hours in, I see all Nations fight in Africa with no regard to the European theater, prioritize English colonies over their own homeland and can't help feeling rather dissapointed.....
What the AI is doing: Sending its troops to Africa while losing its homeland.
What the Ai should be doing: Get it's prioities straight.
On a sidenote, at some point i deleted my faction and joined the Comintern and witnessed an old problem:
They kind of lost against Germany and the Allies (I dragged them into my wars), it was pretty tied but very slowly the SU was being pushed back - but then the Soviet Union declared war on Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and moved troops down, opening up its Western-Front.
What the AI is doing: Declaring wars while Losing anyway
What the should be doing: not that.
1.3, TfV, no mods.
Thanks for reading and have a nice christmas.
However, tonight I tried my first 1.3 Together for Victory Campaign as South Africa and can't help but feel dissapointed. Germany still had tremendous difficulty dealing with France. It pushed right through the Maginotline, not even caring about belgium, but then suddenly declared war on Denmark and Belgium/Netherlands and prioritized that, meaning that the advance was halted right before Paris - Which only fell a year later in November/Dezember '41 (dont remember when exactly) and was only won when Italy moved all its troops to the French border, completly giving up on Africa. Now this all seemed to me like the Front-Abandoning-Issue was still not fixed, but I was happy to see that Italy actually thought France to be more important than Algeria.
However, what confused me was that after I declared war on Belgium to free the Colonies, I found myself fighting the entire Allies. Now I dont like this mechanicwise as this really means you need to actually make the Allies Capitulate to achieve freedom, when I'm sure that the Boers didnt plan on invading Washington, London, Paris and Brussels, but nvm that.
What struck me the oddest was the sheer amount of enemies I was facing, when I was sure there was a more important war going on and when looking more closely I found next to huge amounts of American volunteers (why would they care about british colonies!?) also some Norwegians (!!!) and even some Greek Divisions (!!??), even though Greece was being overrun by Italian boots already in Athens!
Looking at the War-Tab I see that EVERY allied nation, expect Luxembourg, Poland and Denmark have lost men against me. - I'm assuming this is because these 3 didn't live long enough to have their men reach me. I have hundreds of planes above me and in the battlelog (which i love, btw) I can see that I have destroyed thousands (!) of light tanks which im sure could have been more useful in Europe! In one of the devdiaries you wrote that you put an extra emphasis on countries defending their homeland before "further away land like Siberia" but in my very first game, maybe 2 hours in, I see all Nations fight in Africa with no regard to the European theater, prioritize English colonies over their own homeland and can't help feeling rather dissapointed.....
What the AI is doing: Sending its troops to Africa while losing its homeland.
What the Ai should be doing: Get it's prioities straight.
On a sidenote, at some point i deleted my faction and joined the Comintern and witnessed an old problem:
They kind of lost against Germany and the Allies (I dragged them into my wars), it was pretty tied but very slowly the SU was being pushed back - but then the Soviet Union declared war on Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and moved troops down, opening up its Western-Front.
What the AI is doing: Declaring wars while Losing anyway
What the should be doing: not that.
1.3, TfV, no mods.
Thanks for reading and have a nice christmas.
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Part of me wonders whether this is the AI attempting to take out smaller threats first and to be able to bring its full might to bear on the big threat. It seems in line with what seems like the German AI's better ability (compared with 1.2) to focus on wrecking Poland before going after France in full force. An unexpected side effect of what is usually an improvement?
I will also send this save to the bug forum, but for now, here is a save with an example of the AI using grey factories as if they are real. I tagged over to Germany in this game as Sweden because I had yet to encounter a single Luftwaffe plane over Denmark (which is the Northern Germany air zone) in nine months of fighting and was curious where they were.
What the AI is doing wrong: The German AI is producing aircraft entirely with grey factories. The save is at 0200 and Germany hasn't been losing ground, so I don't think this is just an uncorrected factory allocation after losing a major city, especially given that there are dozens of grey factories involved. Further evidence that this isn't a recent temporary thing is that German aircraft are almost entirely their starting tech aircraft, while they have more advanced types being 'produced' (for example, all of their fighters are HE-111 while their production lines show FW-190).
What the AI should be doing: Producing aircraft with real factories, and adjusting priorities to match the smaller factory number. Incidentally, tagging around to the other majors after spotting this, the AI actually seems to be doing a good job with production elsewhere. For example, the Soviets have some 35 factories producing T-34s to make up their 5k shortfall (although maybe in that case it shouldn't have recruited so many medium tank divisions? But still, production choice is solid).
Unrelated, both the German and British AI seem to be heavily invested in using their limited airforces to stratbomb north africa... I'm not going to report that as an obvious error, but it is odd to see and I thought I should point it out. The Italian AI is allocating most of its planes in NA to close air support, as it probably should.
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Can you increase the chances for ahistorical Japan and Italy to make their own factions please? Ahistorical barely deviates, in my experience, unless it is the player that does it.
For my part I'd rather that the focused on making historical mode less ahistorical, if anything ahistorical mode needs to be made more plausible as well.
That said, Japan founding its own faction is actually a better representation of history than having them join the axis, send their air force to Europe, their army to Africa, and join in on Barbarossa.
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Yeah, give Japan their own faction, give Germany a national focus to join Japan's war with America, and give Japan a national focus to join Germany's war with the Soviets.
Japan joining in on Barbarossa from Manchuria isn't that bad, it could have believably happened. But Japan joining Barbarossa from Europe is ridiculous.