here's a few more problems

[Oranje]

In my GC (playing as Thüringen, I'm in the 1740's now) I noticed the following:
1. Austria, very succesful on its own, having swallowed Bohemia, Hungary and large chunks of the Balkan, being one of the biggest powers in Europe, then gets vassalized by England and agrees to be diplomatically annexed some time later. Seems strange to me that a country, other than by inheritance, would agree to vassalisation/annexation as long as it can hold its own against its enemies, has no serious stability problems etc. Doesn't seem to be very historic either.
2. Great powers seem to be relatively uninterested in building naval forces in the game, after the bulk of discovery has been done. Ship numbers for all countries that traditionally dominated the seas and oceans are declining steadily, except for Holland. Together with a very succesful Russia and a bunch of Italian minors they rule the waves. Seems like the English AI is seriously lacking courage here, while their naval tech is obviously a little behind in my game, this should be more than offset by their superior set of admirals available? Seems more like waving the rules than ruling the waves to me.
The lack of naval transport hampers English overseas war efforts greatly, they declared war on Japan at one stage, but never managed to get any soldiers over there. Moreover it seems that some countries put too much emphasis on building ships. What would the pope (without an overseas empire) want with a mighty fleet of 70 ships, if his most likely enemies are just a few days travel on foot, but he hasn't got much of an army to fight them with. This is just an example ofcourse, the same argument goes to some extent for Russia and other Italian minors.
3. Genua declares a war on England that it has no hope of winning, having no allies. It still has only the two original provinces.
Seems like a very unwise decision of the AI to declare this war.
4. Hansa (allied with England) gets involved in this war. It has only one province left at that time, has great naval and army tech, but all the AI does is building extra army units that suffer attrition losses because the province can't feed them all and then the AI decides to build some more troops.
It never tried to build some more ships and transport them to enemy territory.
In my view this is clearly a bug. No countries' AI should build troops in a province that already supports the maximum number of (friendly) troops.
5. The AI for England seems in need of a little tweaking here and there too.
This war with Genua has been going on for a very long period, and the AI doesn't make a real effort to end it. It keeps sending small armies into Genua's main province that bleed on the cities walls but cannot conquer the city. Revolts pop up everywhere in the former Autrian empire, but the English AI does not make any effort to suppress them.
No troops can be sent to Corsica because of lacking naval transport capacity. Strange AI conduct, very strange.

greetings, Oranje

 

[unmerged(199)]

Simmilar situations I have noticed:
1. Hungary becoming a vassal of Austria, though in all their common wars, Hungary performs best and is the nation that acquires territory; Austria without fail looses or settles for status quo. So what's the point of the vassalage?
2. The AI generally does not seem very good at fighting across the seas. It occasionally manages to land troops in another country, but never supports them and seems incapable of coordinating the war effort properly once ships are involved.
3. Venice declaring war (alone) against Spain? Lotharingen declaring war on France?
4 and 5. Same comment as 2. This does seem to be a distinct weakness of the AI.


[This message has been edited by strategy (edited 27-11-2000).]

 

[Hartmann]

But here´s the best:

In a game I played, Brandenburg had conquered a nice empire from eastern Pommerania to Munster (Saxony, Hessen and Thuringia also annexed). It was allied with Netherlands plus Baden plus Cologne plus a quite powerful Lorraine (The Netherlands had only The Hague and Zeeland, but nevertheless amassed an army of about 100k). Poland had Hannover as an enclave.
Now a new war started: Poland and Spain against Brandenburg, Netherlands, Lorraine and Baden. Poland conquered Munster and Hessen, but then was exhausted and had no troops left in Germany. The Brandenburg alliance did extremely well, pounding Spain and Polands German provinces. Then the following situation arised: The main army of the Netherlands had just liberated Hessen and the main armies of Baden and Lorraine were somewhere in the northern Spanish provinces. Although the situation looked really good for the allies (Munster was about to be liberated soon), suddenly Brandenburg for no apparent reason settled for peace with Poland giving them Hessen and indemnities (there was no Polish army left and no Spanish forces to speak of)! This, by itself enough of a surprise, cut off the armies of the Netherlands and Baden/Lorraine from their homeprovinces, so that they had to DIE from attrition! Of course, in the soon following war, the alliance was quickly pounded into oblivion...

Hartmann

Edit: Recounting from memory, I had to edit out a few errors of my first recount of the situation. I hope, I got everything straight now...


[This message has been edited by Hartmann (edited 27-11-2000).]

 

[unmerged(368)]

I noticed a similar behaviour with regard to Astrakhan. They were allied with a very powerful Ottoman Empire (me) and had taken one or two Russian provinces. The Turkish armies were poised to throw back the Russians to Moscow, but of course Astrakhan sued for peace and offered the Russians most favourable terms. As a consequence, Astrakhan was later annexed by Russia, and Turkey liberated the provinces that formerly belonged to Astrakhan (and several others) from the Russian yoke.

Another very strange situation arose during the 'Age of Reason' scenario, while I was attempting to play Prussia (the game kept crashing on me). Austria went to war against Spain and gained control of Milano. Obviously, Spain did not want to cede the province to Austria, which did not want to settle for anything else. Needless to say that neither the Austrians nor the Spanish took any further actions. As a faithful ally, Prussia burned all accessible Spanish trading posts in the Biloxi area, and gained control of the Spanish colonies and provinces in Florida. I tried to settle for a separate peace with Spain, but they denied my every offer. After a few years, troubled by revolts, I lost patience with Spain and actually sent an expeditionary force to Spain. The Prussian forces immediately took control of three (!) unfortified provinces in Northern Spain, but Spain still refused to offer anything in return for peace. But the strangest thing was that there were not troops anywhere in Spain. The AI did not even care to raise any troops after the Prussian invasion. Given enough time, Prussia would have taken control of all Spanish provinces.

Is this a serious AI bug, or a feature, because the Spanish AI was absolutely certain that the Austrian AI (the leader of the alliance) would eventually settle for a white peace regardless of whether there were any Spanish provinces left under Spanish control? Oh yes, and of course Spain was not troubled by any rebellions despite dragging on the war forever.