Why is the A.I this bad sometimes? A.I incapable of dealing with rebels, is it a bug?

[MadLane]

Hi, i don't post much or at all but this time i just had to do it in hopes that at least 1 Dev reads it.

As you can see in the image Tyrone is being sieged by rebels, they have 3 transport ships and have in french land 6 infantry soldiers, this is not the first or last time i have seen the A.I do the same exact thing, what is that thing you ask? AFK, 100% AFK, they could use the 3 transport ships to carry their 6 soldiers (3 at a time) into their land but instead they just stay there in French land like they have no idea how to use the ships or give a huge low priority to rebels that they won't bother to fight them.

Now i have tried different things, they are a vassal so i have tried offensive, defensive and no focus but didn't change anything, is this problem only when they are a vassal? i obviously can't check independent nations 24/7 like i can a vassal, it's starting to be very annoying having to always cover my vassals because they can't fight rebels.

Does anyone else encounter this issue? or is it just happening to me because i'm suppose to do something i'm not doing?

Thanks for reading.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't think it's just for vassals. I see AI troops bug out in general sometimes, where they are outright unresponsive for long stretches until something finally manages to trigger them to move/act like regular AI again. I can't imagine it's intended, but as usual it's a major detractor from utilizing subjects as anything other than coring bots/OE dumps.

 

[Volbound]

To be honest, compared to most video game strategy series, I think the AI in Paradox games are great. AI has limitations and it shows up even in these series. Nothing is perfect.

Play Civilization or Total War series, their AI does even dumber things. (The Historical Total War titles have really been hurt by poor AI. Take Empire: Total War which had awesome mechanics but was ruined by pathetic AI performance).

 

[Maxwell Tornado]

I swear the AI has gotten even more "special" in the past few patches. It refuses to fight anyone, ever.

 

[Volbound]

I will tell you want hurt difficult of the was the curry favor options. Now you can quickly curry favor in games and bring allies into wars very early on. In the past, it sometimes took 20-30 years before an AI ally would join you in an offensive war.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I will tell you want hurt difficult of the was the curry favor options. Now you can quickly curry favor in games and bring allies into wars very early on. In the past, it sometimes took 20-30 years before an AI ally would join you in an offensive war.

Unless you were willing to use them as a one-time ally by breaking a land promise (or less likely, actually giving them some) of course.

Curry favor probably helps AI do early wars more than player, who can manage offensive operations w/o allies in many cases, at much worse numerical odds than AI could handle or reliably be willing to declare.

Where currying favor really helps a ton is pushing trust to 80 faster, which will keep an AI from swapping you to rival or going hostile as long as you don't trash opinion too hard by taking too many vital interest provinces at once or getting so much AE that even the alliance status + improve relations can't hold it any longer. Example of the latter is making late game run on HRE while allied to France, you can get 100-200+ AE with France despite being allied. The alliance lasts long enough to do its job, though, which is just to delay France joining the coalition until tags in German land mostly stop existing as anything but you or client states/subjects.

These 80 trust alliances are quite handy if you're looking for AE shielding. Gist is to ally nations a distance hops away from targets for AE to reduce the gain there, while nations beyond them get too little to matter still. Then you can just tank the hatred in target region. Eventually you get so strong you can blast entire regions before they can react, but most nations don't start at that point.

 

[EarlKonrad]

To be honest, compared to most video game strategy series, I think the AI in Paradox games are great. AI has limitations and it shows up even in these series. Nothing is perfect.

Play Civilization or Total War series, their AI does even dumber things. (The Historical Total War titles have really been hurt by poor AI. Take Empire: Total War which had awesome mechanics but was ruined by pathetic AI performance).

So what you are saying is that in a race to the bottom PDXs AI is jogging along?

Total War has never had great AI, why and would it? The point of the game is for the AI to put up a good enough challenge for the player, not to definitely annihilate it. This used to be ok in the pre-Shogun Era because the starting positions were so different that difficulty could arise naturally from starting positions and rosters. Later tittles, by making every start out on similar conditions, made some of the AI shortcomings that much more apparent.

Civ, on the other hand, used to have great AI (take Civ II and IV) for its time. It was reasonably competent and would keep up a reasonable fight against the player. It is only with newer tittles, ever increasing mechanical complexity and the decreasing focus on having systems that are AI-friendly and less Dev resources going towards the AI that it has seen a massive plummet in quality.

EU IV, and other PDX tittles to a lesser or higher degree, suffer from a different problem: Even if the AI is competent at release, perpetually updating a game is so very taxing at the AI. The more thing you bolt into a game pos-release, the more variables the AI has to account for and the higher the chance that something will break. Add to that how for years there are any any one Dev that specialized at AI and how we have multiple expansions that were more akin to solitaire experiences rather than having the AI using the new tools and what you get is an old, inefficient, bug ridden AI that routinely do weird stuff, A.K.A EU IV's AI. And, while there has been more attention put into it, most likely at this state the only true solution would be to rebuild it from the ground up, meaning we will wait until the invariable EU V for a competent AI.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

People have made champion+ level bots in Rocket League now through machine learning...I wonder how long until someone pulls it off in one of these map games and creates an unplayable monster. Would be fun to sneak that in there on options that would make amusing meme outcomes like Aztec, Ulm, or something like New Providence lol.

 

[EllisDee]

Take Empire: Total War which had awesome mechanics but was ruined by pathetic AI performance).

I remember a great thread on the old TW forums about "the great penguin huddle", where the AI would split its stacks into individual units on the main map and huddle them around the original army they came from. It'd cause insane load times and crashes as the AI would try to navigate 60 individual units over bridges and the pathfinding would go nuts.
Great times.

 

[Richard-monagha]

I had the same thing happen in my England game. I called in Burgundy to force France into a PU and I was able to take all of northern France without seeing any French troops. Their vassals were running around in 2-4 stacks and I was wiping them easy. Then I got to the south and they had all their troops stood in just 2 provinces, not moving and not fighting. Won the war without fighting any of the French troops, only the vassals.

Later on when I declared on Brittany I sent my troops to siege them down expecting my PU's to take out their ally Savoy. Castile, France and Burgundy sent all of their troops to Brittany and stacked them all on the 2 forts. Once Brittany was occupied they then walked around for about 8 months before deciding to go to Savoy, they got there and only sieged down 1 fort province (none went for the capital), 15k on 1 fort and the rest just stood there watching from the French provinces. When that fort was close to falling Brittany had 8k rebels spawn and my PUs all stop what they are doing and all 80k+ troops marched north to kill those rebels and then started walking around for a bit before finally deciding to get back to fighting and over run Savoy...

 

[Volbound]

So what you are saying is that in a race to the bottom PDXs AI is jogging along?

Total War has never had great AI, why and would it? The point of the game is for the AI to put up a good enough challenge for the player, not to definitely annihilate it. This used to be ok in the pre-Shogun Era because the starting positions were so different that difficulty could arise naturally from starting positions and rosters. Later tittles, by making every start out on similar conditions, made some of the AI shortcomings that much more apparent.

Civ, on the other hand, used to have great AI (take Civ II and IV) for its time. It was reasonably competent and would keep up a reasonable fight against the player. It is only with newer tittles, ever increasing mechanical complexity and the decreasing focus on having systems that are AI-friendly and less Dev resources going towards the AI that it has seen a massive plummet in quality.

EU IV, and other PDX tittles to a lesser or higher degree, suffer from a different problem: Even if the AI is competent at release, perpetually updating a game is so very taxing at the AI. The more thing you bolt into a game pos-release, the more variables the AI has to account for and the higher the chance that something will break. Add to that how for years there are any any one Dev that specialized at AI and how we have multiple expansions that were more akin to solitaire experiences rather than having the AI using the new tools and what you get is an old, inefficient, bug ridden AI that routinely do weird stuff, A.K.A EU IV's AI. And, while there has been more attention put into it, most likely at this state the only true solution would be to rebuild it from the ground up, meaning we will wait until the invariable EU V for a competent AI.

I played Civilization II all of the time and the AI was literally no challenge. I will give you Civ 4. Civ 4 has a decent AI, I would still go with Paradox having a better one.

Total War is crap, I agree. It can be hard but that is more about starting position/spamming. I will say the AI in Warhammar is tough but not for good reasons. Total Warhammar's challenges are based on spamming units or the AI taking advantage of you not being able to build garrisons and the AI attack cities where you have no stacks at which is just tedious.

Speaking of Paradox, one great thing from Civilization series that I wish was in Paradox games like EU4 and Vic2 is zone of control rules. For example if an AI army comes near your army, it cannot go around without being forced to engage you first. A one province ZOC around a stack would be nice.

 

[Volbound]

Unless you were willing to use them as a one-time ally by breaking a land promise (or less likely, actually giving them some) of course.

Curry favor probably helps AI do early wars more than player, who can manage offensive operations w/o allies in many cases, at much worse numerical odds than AI could handle or reliably be willing to declare.

Where currying favor really helps a ton is pushing trust to 80 faster, which will keep an AI from swapping you to rival or going hostile as long as you don't trash opinion too hard by taking too many vital interest provinces at once or getting so much AE that even the alliance status + improve relations can't hold it any longer. Example of the latter is making late game run on HRE while allied to France, you can get 100-200+ AE with France despite being allied. The alliance lasts long enough to do its job, though, which is just to delay France joining the coalition until tags in German land mostly stop existing as anything but you or client states/subjects.

These 80 trust alliances are quite handy if you're looking for AE shielding. Gist is to ally nations a distance hops away from targets for AE to reduce the gain there, while nations beyond them get too little to matter still. Then you can just tank the hatred in target region. Eventually you get so strong you can blast entire regions before they can react, but most nations don't start at that point.

You are just piling on to my point. Diplo with AI is now really easy with the Curry Favor option.

 

[EarlKonrad]

I played Civilization II all of the time and the AI was literally no challenge. I will give you Civ 4. Civ 4 has a decent AI, I would still go with Paradox having a better one.

Total War is crap, I agree. It can be hard but that is more about starting position/spamming. I will say the AI in Warhammar is tough but not for good reasons. Total Warhammar's challenges are based on spamming units or the AI taking advantage of you not being able to build garrisons and the AI attack cities where you have no stacks at which is just tedious.

Speaking of Paradox, one great thing from Civilization series that I wish was in Paradox games like EU4 and Vic2 is zone of control rules. For example if an AI army comes near your army, it cannot go around without being forced to engage you first. A one province ZOC around a stack would be nice.

Fully agreed. A way of forcing engagements on PDX tittles would be great. As if, one of the hardest challenges when playing a PDX game is forcing a favorable engagement on an enemy that is at least moderately sized.