Why Paradox should open the AI up fully for the modders

[Shireknight]

I am currently playing a vanilla campaign as Communist China. Both myself and Japan have been at war with Russia since before Germany even declared war on them in 1941 so really Germany should have won the war against Russia easily, they didn't but hey ho that's the way the campaigns go sometimes.

What this post is mainly about is the fact that despite Germany pretty much having a guaranteed easy game, thanks to me and Japan, they still managed to get invaded by the allies and to my utter disbelief lost Berlin to the Netherlands. I carried on watching expecting Germany to rally and retake it but many months later they still haven't, so out of curiosity I've loaded up the German game to find out what is going on and this is what I found.

Ignoring the total mess the AI has made of it's army structure look at Germany's border with The Netherlands, it's completely unguarded, the German AI hasn't even allotted one single division let alone an army to the border (that division you can see looks like it's just recently been built and is on it's way south to join up with an army down there) and it basically looks like a single Dutch division has spent the last year or so just slowly roaming through Germany taking over the regions one by one, robbing Germany of it's industrial capability while they concentrate on their non-core regions.

I'm going to try this campaign again using the Expert AI 4.0 mod but the guy who created that mod admits straight up that he can't do anything about how the AI controls it's units, so really I don't see how this situation can be averted from happening over and over again so come on Paradox/Johan, some of us have been saying for ages now that we know and you know and the screenshot above proves that you can't write AI routines so please, please, please, can't you just unlock the AI for the modders and give them a chance to make this great game you've created a masterpiece, please.

 

[Supremeleaderpies]

no matter how much i wish this would happen, i honestly dont see paradox ever doing this.

Already you have a large outcry that the modders are "Better" than the devs at their own game. which is debatable, but it has been a running thing since this game came out that the workshop mods provide a better experience than vanilla. Yes this is debatable and super subjective, but its still something you see often.

hypothetically if for some reason they did this and a modder was able to "fix" the ai in a few months, it would absolutely embarrass paradox. 4 years with no real fix to the ai, and a mod developer fixing it within a year? imo, paradox has to much hubris to ever admit that the community might be able to do a better job then them.

again though thats assuming that someone would actually be able to "fix" it.

 

[AP Erebus]

While I understand the desire, there is a number of practical things that make this essentially impossible.

• The AI code is compiled code, so making that available to modders would result in PDX needing to open source their AI code. This has discussed on another thread, but for a variety of legal and technical reasons, that'll never happen
• One theoretical option would be put "hooks" that modders could intercept and do work in. The practical issue here is how many hooks you would need for it to be worthwhile. Modders would then either need to write code that then compiles (and all that entails) or it'd need to be some kind of scripting language, which leads me to...
• Performance of the AI is a critical part of its design. Any AI can be made better, but can it be made better in a way that doesn't tank the framerate? How chatible do you think people would be to a mod if it took the framerate to 2fps? It also needs to run well on a variety of different computers, would modders need to test their AI mod on every PC, or would players just have to deal with it, and does that then reflect badly on PDX
• How much internal knowledge of how the AI works would modders need to know so they could make meaningful changes? I'm sure there is some crazy code in the AI, because it fixes a bug or simulates intelligent decisions at a speed acceptable to gameplay

I 100% agree the AI could (and maybe should) be better, but I don't think opening it up to modders is a practical solution

 

[Shireknight]

no matter how much i wish this would happen, i honestly dont see paradox ever doing this.

Already you have a large outcry that the modders are "Better" than the devs at their own game. which is debatable, but it has been a running thing since this game came out that the workshop mods provide a better experience than vanilla. Yes this is debatable and super subjective, but its still something you see often.

hypothetically if for some reason they did this and a modder was able to "fix" the ai in a few months, it would absolutely embarrass paradox. 4 years with no real fix to the ai, and a mod developer fixing it within a year? imo, paradox has to much hubris to ever admit that the community might be able to do a better job then them.

again though thats assuming that someone would actually be able to "fix" it.

I get what you are saying but Paradox should adopt a public "We provide a framework and you guys build a game around it" doctrine and be proud of it, I mean that is practically what they do behind the scenes anyway they just don't admit to us that that's what they do (or maybe they can't admit it to themselves).

The AI in their games is shockingly poor and I very much doubt they even have a dedicated AI team but that's never been Paradox's strength anyway, their strengths lie in the framework they build their games around, the problem is that with the AI locked the modders can't do the bit that Paradox also can't do and unfortunately that's the most important bit of all.

Paradox either need to face up to this and unlock the AI fully for the modders or spend some of their huge company growth that they keep going on about every year on getting a proper AI specialist team in and fixing the games once and for all, after all doing so can only help the companies future not harm it.

 

[kettyo]

The Netherlands has no real divisions there either. Are they in the Allies or go separate?

 

[Vlad123]

I get what you are saying but Paradox should adopt a public "We provide a framework and you guys build a game around it" doctrine and be proud of it, I mean that is practically what they do behind the scenes anyway they just don't admit to us that that's what they do (or maybe they can't admit it to themselves).

The AI in their games is shockingly poor and I very much doubt they even have a dedicated AI team but that's never been Paradox's strength anyway, their strengths lie in the framework they build their games around, the problem is that with the AI locked the modders can't do the bit that Paradox also can't do and unfortunately that's the most important bit of all.

Paradox either need to face up to this and unlock the AI fully for the modders or spend some of their huge company growth that they keep going on about every year on getting a proper AI specialist team in and fixing the games once and for all, after all doing so can only help the companies future not harm it.

Some time ago an AI lerning was made open source, adapt it so that PDX can receive the data every month / two months from the players who send it to them (or the game sends them to them) and the AI analyzes this data and improves by becoming better and better . When she gets good enough it stops and you have decent AI.

 

[Sayd]

IMHO:
1. PDX make too much provinces, so AI can't really handle them
2. AI can't understand reason why AI lost a ground. Or PDX made too much score for front AI, or probably 1 div of Netherland was rounded to 0 number of divisions, so AI thinks it should never set divisions to that front.

 

[Sbrubbles]

no matter how much i wish this would happen, i honestly dont see paradox ever doing this.

Already you have a large outcry that the modders are "Better" than the devs at their own game. which is debatable, but it has been a running thing since this game came out that the workshop mods provide a better experience than vanilla. Yes this is debatable and super subjective, but its still something you see often.

hypothetically if for some reason they did this and a modder was able to "fix" the ai in a few months, it would absolutely embarrass paradox. 4 years with no real fix to the ai, and a mod developer fixing it within a year? imo, paradox has to much hubris to ever admit that the community might be able to do a better job then them.

again though thats assuming that someone would actually be able to "fix" it.

Embarassing? Maybe. But it would also make the game a better product, and that can affect sales if the word of mouth gets around. If I'm buying a game, I absolutely value mod support, and the more mod support the better, because often modding communities fix post-launch games better than the developers.