Wake Up!

[King]

Well the Rome AI is a very different animal for the HoI3 AI. Doomdark considers it to be one of its best works. It set ups regions, builds armies to defend them fights in these regions. If a region is out numbered it gets reiforced. With HoI3 you have front lines, which makes things ever so slightly more difficult. However from a testing perspective the HoI3 AI was one of the easiest. Set up your theatres and observe. Oh look the AI is not transporting units, better get that fixed. There were a lot of bugs with the AI that were quickly spotted and fixed thanks to the theatre system. Making HoI3's AI in some ways in the best shape of any release AI. However the complexity of World War II made it seem inferior to the EU:R's AI or EU3's 1.0 AI.

 

[King]

Is the creation of new theathre being looked into for 1.4? Currently it's very tricky to use and I think this also botches up the AI a lot. As an example, if you play USSR and take over Denmark, Germany AI will move disportionate amount of troops to Denmark region, leaving the Eastern Front very poorly defended.

Because I think currently the AI does excellent job when it can face you with right number of units, but it has trouble facing you in the first place.

Theatre creation is a tricky one, we ditched player defined theatres pretty early because of interface issues. There are rather a lot of provinces out there and it was going to be so much work for a player to define areas. So that kind of thing will require a lot of work on interface which isn't patch material I am afraid.

However the AI problem you are seeing it not 100% a problem. The AI has two fronts against the SU, Denmark and Poland. Denmark is the weaker of the two so the AI is trying to eliminate the weaker front to allow it to concentrate its forces. Now the idea isn't bad it just needs to work a bit more on the execution here.

 

[King]

Yes I can totally see how it is tricky. Maybe preset theatres that unlock as you occupy any province that is part of the preset theatre? Like Germany that started in 1936 campaign can unlock the Norwegen theatre by occupying any part of Denmark/Norway/Sweden/Finland?

And well after reading your reply I guess I forgot an important detail... which is that Germany made this extreme redeployment (by extreme I mean it left about 2 ~ 3 divisions max per province, while sending vast army to mere 2 province that share border with Denmark) while we were at peace. It sort of "overreacts" to new potential fronts by applying disportionate force (which is needed elsewhere). Perhaps this problem was addressed by solution to the superstack issue, which would be nice.

Preset theatres work for historical situations. The problem comes when there is an ahistorical situation. There is also the issue of well we know Germany needs a Nrowegian theatre, but what about other countries? We personally thought that static theatres could cause as many problems as they solved and also give the player who did not use theatres an advantage over the AI.

There is the superstack issue there, there is also the nasty AI habit of trying to win quickly by deploying overwhelming force. Not a bad idea in general, just needs fine tuning.

 

[King]

The AI really just needs to focus on solidifying its frontlines up to a certain degree, I mean each area has a specific frontage, so it's not like it really needs every unit it has at a single point, just enough to maximize the frontage it can cover.

Once it has achieved this, it should use extra units as reserves or contribute them to a point where it intends to make a "breakout".

That should help alleviate some problems as well as make it harder for the AI to be encircled if there is a break in its lines.

The AI does try to do that, but also tries to take the initiative as well. It is trying to find the right balance. Make the AI too cautious and you end up with a dumb AI that sits around and does nothing because things are never quite right for it. At the moment it is too agressive and needs to asses things a bit better. However if we are going to err here I would prefer to do so on the side of agression.

 

[King]

I agree with this philosophy, but adequate testing on a variety of platforms means you need to keep the RC cooking for a sufficient amount of time. Everyone was complaining about graphical problems, for example, in the RCs, and they were never resolved because there was a rush to get something, anything out the door. As a result, I've had to tell people who ask about HOI3 that they shouldn't buy it yet, because its graphics are still in beta (flags, counters cut off, not being able to click on units, flashing bars in the corner when you click on a province, selection boxes slanting, etc). This is the type of problems people noticed right away, but because no one was responding to their cries, they just gave up trying to help you make a better product.

Naturally, the RC testing process would work better in a forum if there were a moderated first post listing all known bugs in the current RC (and likely the graphics processor type/windows version) so people could see that their complaint was listed on there and see the official response in the next RC. I personally felt rather insulted when I stood up to say that there were still many known problems, and I was told by Paradox that they weren't going to be fixed, despite the claim that you guys would "fix everything we can."

I'm not demanding perfection, but if you won't even fix the problems we take the time to tell you about, you'll never hear about the rest of the problems.

The graphic problems I saw, like the flags, were specifically caused by the Steam version. We couldn't duplicate the problems in house so we couldn't do anything about them. We aimed to fix everything we could.

 

[King]

Well now we have some more infromation about the flag troubles I can have another look at them. For those of you who felt the need to swear please go edit your posts.

 

[King]

What about simple north/south/east/west theatre for everyone?



I would strongly advise you guys against this policy of big patches only. Game mechanics oriented patches could be held of for big ones, but as for bug fixes, there are some critical bugs that carry serious consequence to the series' name. And unless releasing few smaller bug fix patches here and there between the big ones seriously jeopardize the production speed of patches overall (which I doubt it would), holding off on few fixes that you guys have is nothing but counterproductive, as it would mean that community just waits for the fixes with absolutely no gain whatsoever. I mean we gain nothing and lose a whole lot from one big patch that comes in 5 months compared to 5 smallers patches that comes 1 month each if both adds up to same amount of fixes.

building and testing a patch installer (assuming it works first up) is a day long process so 5 small patches is 4 man days of time lost that could be fixing stuff.

 

[King]

So the balancing factor is the amount of time it takes to test the patch installer?

Hell, I would take that and get small bits of fixes here and there even if it takes 4 months to fix most of the stuff than wait 3 months for same amount while having nothing in between.

Edit: Also on preset theatres, I've been thinking, I see absolutely no problem with preset theatres and ahistorical war. As I suggested, if the theatres pop up after you occupy a territory that belongs in the theatre, what would be wrong with it? Would the AI eat up too much resources trying to reorganize everytime it conquers and get new theatre?

Also King, I don't know if you guys have worked on this yet, but please let AI programmers know that AI should avoid certain amount of stacking penalty as a matter of being hardcoded. Right now it suffers too much from stacking ridiculous amount of divisions on small province that the combat effectiveness of the units in there are completely lost, and with poor theatre commander, most units never see fight while end up retreat/surrendering. I'm seeing this happening too many times in 1944 scenario as Germany, fighting against USSR.

We have finite budgets for patching, that's the way things are. So time taken to make installers is time subtracted from making patches, reducing the ammount of things we can do with the patching process.

The supetstack issue is being looked at.

 

[King]

You're saying you know 1.4 isn't betatested yet?

1.4 is in closed Beta at the moment.

 

[King]

It could be different, but if I remember the post right, it was stated that they were fixing "the problem of superstacking WITHOUT just fixing the overly obvious Channel Islands specific occurrance of it"

yes the Channel Islands is a nice expample of the problem, but we also have several invasion saved game with huge stacks kicking about. Trying to fix the problem generically instead of specifically.

 

[King]

I do not think any company would set out to produce a bad game.

But I think Hoi3's release caused alot of consternation due to two annoying factors we games have been seeing as a trend lately.

1. Buggy game
2. Download content.

Total War: Empire comes to mind. Buy our buggy game..and buy purty sprites while you're at it. Now i don't think DLC should be free..but to charge for sprites! jesus...any company trying to charge for 'graphical enhancements' will get bad will. In Hoi3 terms, -15 relations for each spritepack released.

Now if the DLC was say an expansion, an extra campaign with new research..extending the game with enough meat and not a starving chicken. Gamers and fans will pay and you'll get +15 relations. (does not of course include clueless idiots who buy everything)

Hoi3 launched out of the box unplayable with very very glaring bugs. We're gamers and not developers. Take for example the Consumer Goods issue. We cannot for the life of us understand that if PI thoroughly beta tested the game, how could you have missed out this issue as it rendered the entire game unplayable within a year of game time?

Anyways, it's good to hear some honesty. Which is why you still have a fan base. As gamers, we want everything for nothing. Its how you as developer pick and choose your fights.

And please..stop issuing DLC for 99 cents..is unbecoming of PI when you've got a patch 1.4 to work on. (it makes us think you're pushing us gfx which most of us feel should have been included in the first place) Like Horse Barding.

Well I a don't know what the problem with Downloadable content is to be honest. We did it partly to see if you guys wanted it and downloadable content was never essential to play the game. A sprite pack is a sprite pack, and some people want them and some people don't. In that regard why should a sprite pack bother you. First off it is created by the 3D artist and not a programmer so it in no way effects the code, patches or anything else. So in that regard DLCs do not in any way stop us working on patches.