I can't believe all the pointless techs the Soviet AI researches in all the AIO mods. Is that a problem in Vanilla too?
Tech priority in general needs a rework. I have a feeling not much effort was commited there.
Disclaimer: Not being a modder, take everything I say not for granted.
Tech researches are defined in the approbiate .ai file of the country. Let's take Albania, the secret super power with not only 3 but even 4 IC. Within ..\Darkest Hour\Mods\Darkest Hour Full\ai\alb_1936.ai we find (as in every ai-file) the expression:
with the sub-expressions:
Code:
endgoal = { }
preference = {
# Manufacturing
5810 5820 5050 5830 5060 5070 5110 5120 5840 5850 5860
# CONSTRUCTION
5800 5080 5090
# Assembly Line
5180
# Regular Infantry
1010 1020 1030 1040 1050 1060 1070 1080 1090 1110 1120 1130 1140 1150
# Field Artillery Support
2290 2300 2310 2900 2910 2920 2930 2940 2320 2330 2340 2360 2950 2350
#Landdoctrines
#6560 6030 6110 6120 6130 6140 14070
}
and a much longer list of what all techs to ignore (which I left out):
finishing with numbers giving relative weights to each tech fields:
Code:
armor = 0
infantry = 4
industry = 2
aircraft = 0
naval = 0
land_doctrines = 0
secret_weapons = 0
air_doctrines = 0
naval_doctrines = 0
In this case only 2 tech fields shall be taken into considerations: infantry the most and with half the weight industry.
Which also means, all the defined prefered techs for artillery won't be done because the approbiate armor tech field has a weight of zero, same, btw, for land doctrines.
If I understand it correctly, ai-files are taken at game start and then incorporated into your save file. If you edit ai-files after a game starts, this edits won't change anything before you start a new game. To be taken into account you would need to edit your save file, I think.
I don't know how ai-switches are handled in this logic.
If you want to rework those tech specifiers and weights... it is a lot of work... probably... hopefully already done by one of our fine modders. It would be splendid, if this work could be pooled together in an own thread and made accessible. Also what general guide lines were used.
For example, as important as we players judge many of the techs in the industrial field, do they make any sense at all for a 3 or 4 IC country?
Would it be approbiate to define some different standard ai-sets for
- very small 3-6 IC countries
- minor countries of 7-15 IC
- and so on...
And from that base of standard ai-sets fine tune some of them?
Other things come to mind which might be logical but not historical
Example: Personally I'd set all naval techs and doctrines for very small countries to ignore, regardless wether they have a coast line or not: Luxembourg researching destroyers doesn't make sense without even having access to sea... but even with access to the sea it wouldn't make much sense. In history and in reality, yes, even the smallest country seems to find it necessary to have a navy (and if it is equipped and serves purely as a cost guard it makes even sense... in DH not).
