Incompetent said:
Agreed. The AI seems to suffer from the Turkish problem of not controlling the strait properly, and being unable to fight on both sides of it at once. I actually see BYZ do reasonably well against the Turks - it's the Orthodox minors who seem to cause all the difficulty. Of Bulgaria, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia and Serbia, perhaps 2 of them should be allied to or vassals of Byzantium at the start of the game. We also need to make these minors much less aggressive, so they don't spend half their time trying to occupy Constantinople for no discernible purpose, and at times BYZ needs to be less aggressive, so it can be sensible and diploannex the 1-prov minors instead of clobbering them. Finally, we can look at DP settings - it may be that the minors have eg very high Land, causing their morale to be more than BYZ can deal with.
The trouble with the Orthodox minors is a mirror of the problems every country faces with ai controlled minors around it. As soon as they are allied with someone bigger, the DoW someone, assuming you'll join them. Having Byzantium begin the scenario allied to some of these powers will ensure that that either Byzantium takes the stab hits for refusing to support them, or else will be in a war with Hungary and/or Ukraine in the first year or so. At this stage, the Hungarian DP settings and leadership will likely crush Byzantium, unless the ai takes on the offending minor first and ends the war quickly. But then that minor will DoW again in five years. The instability of the minors is something you have pointed out elsewhere and dealt with very well with regard to the German minors, it would seem.
An ai Byzantium can't cope with wars on its Northern borders. It needs to annex these little guys to build effectively, but the cores on Karaman etc drag it southwards into wars with the Khaliphate, which it also can't deal with early on. It's party because it's has naval settings at the start in contrast to its large aggressive neighbours to the North and South. Watching it from a distance, ai-Byzantium tends to do well mostly when Hungary is dragged away into northern wars, and the Khalifate southwards. This leaves it alone long enough to build a little more, but it isn't a sure thing.
The idea that Byzantium would start 50% naval if logical and poetic, but in practice the importance of these sliders at this point in the game to the all-important land wars makes it impractical. We need to re-set them to maybe 7 for Land, something that might deal better with all of their neighbours.
You mention the war settings, and that's something I thought we agreed on in another thread, to reduce all the general 1419 ais to zero for War to stem the 1419 bloodshed cycle. In fact, we ought to consider this for the next upload, just to see how it works. We can always edit them all back in about 15 minutes.
We ought perhaps to entangle the minors more effectively with their major neightbours. Set the relationships high and give most of them the MilAccess to prevent easy DoWs and RMs to reduce the risk of conflict.
Its 1791 now and no civil war.
