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EODAIP - an AI focused Darkest Hour Mod

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New update! I think this current Paratrooper use is as good as it will ever get, barring any Darkest Hour patches if they ever improve Paratrooper debugging/behavior. They don't get used 100% of the time, but it's relatively common in my runs to see several airlifts over the course of WW2. Remember that they're tied to invasions, though, so if an AI like SOV is struggling to maintain a front it will likely fail to airlift anything ever.

Known bugs:

  • SPR may generate a trade deal with its day/hour saved as -52/-51 (It’s not from any events, seemingly)
  • Transport Planes with loaded Paratroopers may idle for an indefinite amount of time
  • Paratroopers airlifted to air fields may instantly request the Transport to pick them back up and get killed as a result
  • ENG and USA, in their infinite wisdom, may attempt to garrison 0 value Pacific islands all throughout the war, and suicide tens of thousands of men and ships into the Japanese navy by doing this. I’ve fixed some of the worst offenders (by ignoring them in the garrison settings), but this is still possible with provinces that aren’t easily ignorable (Hong Kong, provinces with bases)
  • Game slows down if you reload multiple times without restarting the executable
Content:

  • (GER) Tweak the % of German Field Marshalls and Air leaders post-POL and FRA
  • (GER) GER AI now never trains Escorts to not screw with marshall group range too much
  • (GER) GER AI should now train more Heavy Tank brigades, slightly less Amph Armor and SPAA
  • (GER) Force GER to produce some Light Armored divisions before the war, regardless of what the Player is playing (GER would already train LA against certain countries)
  • (GER) GER now produces units other than 16 Strategic Bombers after Rhine
  • (GER) Tweak GER fronts and garrison after Poland, during invasion of Norway, and add a separate script for before and after Ardennes in battle of France
  • (SOV) Tweak leader %s
  • (SOV) Make SOV more likely to naval Invade Finland, Norway, Baltics
  • (SOV) Tweak SOV garrison %s
  • (USA) Tweak leader %s
  • (ITA) Tweak leader %s
  • (JAP) Decreased % territory lost for CHI needed to trigger the logistical challenge events
  • (JAP) Make JAP slightly less aggressive during CHI_backoff scripts
  • (Script) Add AI events that recycle Transport Planes to make sure they’re not stuck (as of now this strips them from Escorts and may mess up Paratrooper brigades, but I don’t have a cleaner solution & it’s unlikely I will find one that does not involve begging someone for a exe code fix(which is unlikely))
  • (Script) Add AI events that remove Transport Planes for all paratrooper countries that have any starting ones and re-add them when WW2 breaks out, to avoid TPs getting stuck too early
  • (AI) Tweak airgroup config on Paratroop-using countries to (mostly) disallow Naval Bombers and Fighters from idling with Transport Planes (or allow them to be taken out to other groups)
  • (AI) Higher priority on air_support for paratrooper countries
  • (AI) Tweak production of all paratrooper countries
  • (Brigade) Increase allowed range on Escort Planes so that they don’t gut range on bombers as much
  • (Difficulty) Fix separate Player difficulty modifiers unexpectedly changing between Axis-Allies, slightly buff Allies (0% Manpower on Balanced rather than a penalty)
  • (Misc) Increase lowest Air Leader Command Limit to 2 (1 was screwing over default AI deployments)
Click to expand...

Peak success achieved: the US now drops Paratroopers when invading islands sometimes.
1671920167596.png


Happy Holidays and Happy New Years, everyone! :)
 
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Pandrea said:
I'm sorry, but is it just me or are Italy's ministers a complete mess? The photos are all messed up and none of them match the names.
Click to expand...
I think that goes back to a (previous) version of EOD. There might be a fix in EOD's thread, but I don't remember for sure.
 
I'm seemingly using a version of EOD that I can't find on the forums right now, that has new pics and a larger minister list for AOI and ITA. I imagine I must've downloaded it from a link buried somewhere in the original thread? I know that there's no way I wrote those, because I was way too lazy to ever edit ministers when I was starting to work on this. The file was last modified (by its author) on 3rd of October 2019. Any EOD updates from around that day?

The pictures themselves are missing/wrong because I either didn't copy /pics when I was first working on EODAIP or they never existed, I'm not sure. Pics should've been in gfx->interface->pics and the list can be found at db->ministers. I don't know which (if any) EOD release has those pics because they're neither in 2.2 nor 2.2.22; but if someone has them and is willing to upload, I'll gladly add them to the mod.

As an aside, this AOI also has leaders using combat event odds traits; something I definitely would like to use for other countries, if just for variety. Not sure what's the best way to get around to adding them though.

Edit: Just after writing the post I found the update, it's 2.3. I'll dig into its interface pictures and take a look if I can find the missing ministers
 
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Okay I remember now. So the pictures in /interface are named 1, 2, 3... 10000. But the ministers lists asks for pictures named like this: graziani_rodolfo_u49. So unless Hirz himself wanted to chime in with a list he has of the names (if it exists), this will never get fixed :p
 
Hello Sheien,

good to see that someone of the community still finds the time to further improve the world war two experience in darkest hour! I am honored that your mod builds on my previous work and develops it even further. After all the AI was always terrible (also in vanilla), so it is nice to see that you focus on this (very time consuming and exhausting) part of the game!

I think that I have a somewhat bug-fixed version on my PC which also adds some difficulty if you are playing on hard or very hard (but certainly no fundamental changes). If you like I can upload this bug-fixed version, but do not expect too much from it. This version also solves the ITA minister / leader pics issue as well as adding some new events. Moreover the map is slightly adapted accounting for mountains that block the way to an adjunct province.

I also tried to work on the african theater to improve the overall experience. My main goals was to avoid situations in which more than 30 ITA face another 30 ENG divisions in the dessert. However, I failed! I spend many hours on this part, but without sucess and got frustrated. Maybe you have an idea on this? If the AI behaves correctly than it would be easy to write events for the human player which penalize him for having too much divisions in low-infrastructure provinces... This would at least partially solve one of the biggest issues of darkest hour - a completely under-developed logistic and supply system.

Best regards,
Hirz
 
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Sheien said:
Okay I remember now. So the pictures in /interface are named 1, 2, 3... 10000. But the ministers lists asks for pictures named like this: graziani_rodolfo_u49. So unless Hirz himself wanted to chime in with a list he has of the names (if it exists), this will never get fixed :p
Click to expand...
Could this be of any help? Or is it incompatible?


forum.paradoxplaza.com

Project Italy

This project is aimed at improving the portrayal of Italy. I tried to remove all the historical inaccuracies and improve the database with hundreds of real ministers and leaders. I added dozens of new events and a playable Democratic Italy, and...
forum.paradoxplaza.com forum.paradoxplaza.com
 
Hirz said:
Hello Sheien,

good to see that someone of the community still finds the time to further improve the world war two experience in darkest hour! I am honored that your mod builds on my previous work and develops it even further. After all the AI was always terrible (also in vanilla), so it is nice to see that you focus on this (very time consuming and exhausting) part of the game!

I think that I have a somewhat bug-fixed version on my PC which also adds some difficulty if you are playing on hard or very hard (but certainly no fundamental changes). If you like I can upload this bug-fixed version, but do not expect too much from it. This version also solves the ITA minister / leader pics issue as well as adding some new events. Moreover the map is slightly adapted accounting for mountains that block the way to an adjunct province.

I also tried to work on the african theater to improve the overall experience. My main goals was to avoid situations in which more than 30 ITA face another 30 ENG divisions in the dessert. However, I failed! I spend many hours on this part, but without sucess and got frustrated. Maybe you have an idea on this? If the AI behaves correctly than it would be easy to write events for the human player which penalize him for having too much divisions in low-infrastructure provinces... This would at least partially solve one of the biggest issues of darkest hour - a completely under-developed logistic and supply system.

Best regards,
Hirz
Click to expand...
Hey Hirz,

Huge thanks for such an unexpectedly quick reply, and thanks for making EOD! I'm a huge fan of your work and I find that it's one of the only mods where it felt like a proper "lategame" was added to HoI. I remember finishing my first German playthrough and being amazed on how much events there still were even after winning against SOV :D In other mods (and later Pdx games), I've instead felt that there is just nothing after about 1942, so EOD was a very nice change of pace.

If you can upload the version with fixed ITA/U49 minister pics I would be very grateful! I can take a look at other things, but I've since changed a lot of files in my end (Province connections were changed to fix various issues in North Africa, Difficulty was reworked to work on an Axis-Allies scale instead of generic Player vs AI) so I wouldn't necessarily be able to implement anything wholesale :p. I would be definitely interested in at least taking a look at new events, especially if you remember in which file they are.

There are several ways in which we can control AI division distribution: on fronts, AIs will deploy garrisons + front troops proper. Garrisons are the less obvious part: even if the theatre is a war zone, it will still have a garrison (and this garrison can even sit on the front). This is particularly annoying in cases like the Maginot, where the AI will keep an unnecessarily large amount of divisions even if you set front province_priorities to a very low value.
Instead, you'd also need to operate on home/oversea_multiplier, war_zone_odds (ratio of desired troops in area compared to enemy) and area multipliers + province priorities to keep troops out of places you don't want them in, and in places you want the AI to focus on. I think it would be relatively easy to force ITA and ENG to keep a low amount of troops in North Africa, but honestly I personally would feel like it's harder to make events that punish Player (regardless of country played) for division stacking in a sensible way.

If I were to ask ITA to have fewer troops in Africa I would do it like this: (did not test those values in-game, just a quick mockup)
Code: 
garrison = {
    defend_overseas_beaches = yes
    home_multiplier     = 1.0
    overseas_multiplier = 0.4 #Lower multi for ITA becuase we want a small deployment of troops in africa
    war_zone_odds         = 1.0 #War Zone Odds is multiplied on all other multipliers; default is 2.0 but let's use 1.0 here and manually set multipliers for areas we care about


    province_priorities = {
        #Garrison these provinces
        419 = 20 #Rome
        400 = 20 #Venice
        430 = 20 #Palermo
        425 = 10 #Reggio Calabria
        421 = 10 #Neaples
        434  = 10  #Sardinia
        379  = 10  #Rhodes
        
        # Important provs we want garrisoned in North Africa
        752  = 10 #Az Zawiyah
        750  = 10 #Tripoli
        761  = 10 #Benghazi
        771  = 10 #Bardia
        769  = 10 #Bir Hakeim
        770  = 10 #Al Jaghbub
    }
    area_multiplier = {
        #More priority for provinces threatened by Op Husky - stacks with other multipliers
        431 = 1.2 #Messina - Sicily
        425 = 1.2 #Reggio Calabria
        421 = 1.1 #Neaples
        
        # North Africa - low multi, small garrison (1 div?) but more important than random areas - stacks with other multipliers, so even though it appears to also be 1.2 it should really be lower
        769  = 1.2 # Az Zawiyah - Magdalena
        752  = 1.2 # Wadi al Hamim - Interior Libya
        765  = 1.2 #Tobruk - Tobruk
        
        #Ignore
        921   = 0.1  #bad african desert
        808   = 0.1     #bad african desert
    }
}
front = {
    province_priorities = {
        425 = 1.50  #Reggio Calabra
        431  = 1.30  #Messina
        
        
# North Africa - important provinces in North Africa, again stacks with other multipliers and should come out lower than mainland provs
        752  = 1.20 #Az Zawiyah
        750  = 1.20 #Tripoli
        761  = 1.30 #Benghazi
        771  = 1.20 #Bardia
        769  = 1.20 #Bir Hakeim
        770  = 1.20 #Al Jaghbub
        765  = 1.30 #Tobruk
    }
}

One notable thing is some AIs have war_zone_odds 5.0 in the vanilla game (and thus in most mods), which makes them overstack and suicide divisions on small islands in the middle of nowhere (USA :() against a single enemy garrison division.
 
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Is that easily moddable/fixable? The overstacking and suicide divisions to small islands? I love playing 1942 and the 1943 scenario, but I keep seeing and exploting the stupid mainly usa ai stacking on small island in the mediterranean and pacific. Would great to avoid this in vanilla too if possible.
 
Actually I could imagine an event chain that checks if a certain amount of (allied) division are in an area (lets say North Africa). If the amount is close to the limit for the area/region (to be defined) the human player will get a warning. This should be possible via the garrision event command.

If it is above the limit he suffers from a strength hit for his total army force (vice versa to the mobilization strength gain). Of course it would be better to focus only on the divisions which are placed in the certain area/region. However, this is not possible by the currently available event commands. After all, we are talking about a human player, if he once makes the mistake and suffers from the strength hit, he will certainly remember and avoid such situations in future games.

Of course the event would be persistent and needs to check the amount of divisions on a regular interval (10 days or so seems legit for me)
 
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Amberle said:
Is that easily moddable/fixable? The overstacking and suicide divisions to small islands? I love playing 1942 and the 1943 scenario, but I keep seeing and exploting the stupid mainly usa ai stacking on small island in the mediterranean and pacific. Would great to avoid this in vanilla too if possible.
Click to expand...
I'm fixing some of the overstacking in the next update I'll upload, though I'm not super concerned about overstacking itself and more worried about invading AIs (USA, ENG, JAP) suiciding divisions because of front shuffles between islands when below desired ratio. For example, when US is set to want 5x the enemy division numbers (vanilla D-Day script requirement), that's really hard to satisfy for the AI and it just makes it panic between multiple fronts, typically failing to satisfy most of them.
As a result it may move a division from mainland US to, for example, Tunisia, immediately move it back to mainland, and then move it again to an island on the Pacific.

Also leads to another ugly case where the AI may frantically move divisions between provinces in the same region with 2+ areas, even when it could attack a weaker enemy and go deeper inland.

It is easily moddable insofar it's just tweaking ratio parameters, but it takes time to test in-game how they work out on different fronts & throughout the war
Some islands are just really bad to get onto in general, and in that case we would probably want to ignore them in garrison settings (some small pacific islands for US, JAP)

Pasha said:
Could this be of any help? Or is it incompatible?
Click to expand...
Definitely incompatible, but now that Hirz chimed in there should be no need! :)
Hirz said:
Actually I could imagine an event chain that checks if a certain amount of (allied) division are in an area (lets say North Africa). If the amount is close to the limit for the area/region (to be defined) the human player will get a warning. This should be possible via the garrision event command.

If it is above the limit he suffers from a strength hit for his total army force (vice versa to the mobilization strength gain). Of course it would be better to focus only on the divisions which are placed in the certain area/region. However, this is not possible by the currently available event commands. After all, we are talking about a human player, if he once makes the mistake and suffers from the strength hit, he will certainly remember and avoid such situations in future games.

Of course the event would be persistent and needs to check the amount of divisions on a regular interval (10 days or so seems legit for me)
Click to expand...
I think an interesting localized malus for North Africa in particular could be to give the affected Player huge Desert movement/att/def penalties, but it would ofc not work for mountains or other areas. Would you think to write this with tag = (...) of all countries? I wonder if that's not a big performance hit for a repeated event...
 
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Here you go: https://mega.nz/file/Y0oUHThB#GVudHo_W7riztBhXPIc5KaP9aalDZ_cHDB3LvUPU5n8

These are the changes I did for the version:
- I adjusted the province.csv - as outlined I blocked movement for certain provinces to simulate mountains, desserts, ...
- I created difficulty settings for ITA and Britain (basically the German player, can decide on the level of difficulty he wants to face)
- created scripted events for Torch (incl. Eilbote), Huskey, Japanese invasion of the Philipines... -> I could imagine a event at the beginning that asks the german/usa player if he wants these events or not (DDay is missing by the way)
- some gameplay additions
- ai adaptions -> ENG now focus on strategic bombers, my africa dilemma, etc.
- ITA has now leader / minister pictures
- Increased difficulty settings for GER (no more total mobilization before Speer comes into office in '42 if you're playing on hard / very hard)
- many other adaptions, I no longer remember
 
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Sheien said:
I'm fixing some of the overstacking in the next update I'll upload, though I'm not super concerned about overstacking itself and more worried about invading AIs (USA, ENG, JAP) suiciding divisions because of front shuffles between islands when below desired ratio. For example, when US is set to want 5x the enemy division numbers (vanilla D-Day script requirement), that's really hard to satisfy for the AI and it just makes it panic between multiple fronts, typically failing to satisfy most of them.
As a result it may move a division from mainland US to, for example, Tunisia, immediately move it back to mainland, and then move it again to an island on the Pacific.

Also leads to another ugly case where the AI may frantically move divisions between provinces in the same region with 2+ areas, even when it could attack a weaker enemy and go deeper inland.

It is easily moddable insofar it's just tweaking ratio parameters, but it takes time to test in-game how they work out on different fronts & throughout the war
Some islands are just really bad to get onto in general, and in that case we would probably want to ignore them in garrison settings (some small pacific islands for US, JAP)


Definitely incompatible, but now that Hirz chimed in there should be no need! :)

I think an interesting localized malus for North Africa in particular could be to give the affected Player huge Desert movement/att/def penalties, but it would ofc not work for mountains or other areas. Would you think to write this with tag = (...) of all countries? I wonder if that's not a big performance hit for a repeated event...
Click to expand...

for now I was only thinking on creating these events for the main players (ENG, USA, GER and ITA) in the african theater. This would certainly reduce the impact on the gameplay perfromance. Of course this would open completely new opportunities and could be extended to other areas (China, Caucasus, Mesopotamia, ...) and nations as well.
 
Hirz said:
Here you go: EoD 2.5 (1.12 GB)
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot. Not only for the update but the mod itself which is the one I played and liked most.
I am sure you'll make a lot of other players happy when you also update the download link within the official EoD thread.

Just to clarify: This is EoD without the AI-improvements done by Sheien, isn't it?
 
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Altruist said:
Just to clarify: This is EoD without the AI-improvements done by Sheien, isn't it?
Click to expand...
Exactly. I am going to post the mod in the EoD forum as soon as the african theater runs on a more realistic level. This will make EoD 2.5 an official version.

Pandrea said:
Is there any folder I can use for my Italian problem?
Click to expand...
you have to change the italian leader csv file, this should already do the job
 
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Hirz said:
Exactly. I am going to post the mod in the EoD forum as soon as the african theater runs on a more realistic level. This will make EoD 2.5 an official version.


you have to change the italian leader csv file, this should already do the job
Click to expand...
Thank you! Leader or minister csv?
 
I hope that Sheien will add all his AI improvements to the new EoD 2.5 and post EODAIP 2.5 Ultimate version.

These AI improvements are amazing. AI is a lot more competent. ENG and US naval invasions are well organized and difficult to defeat when I played as Axis Turkey.
AI army composition is also better. And that's all without cheap "spam free scripted infantry for AI" "improvements" common in many other mods.
 
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