Ok, so. This particular problem stems from the fact that the fact that the player is an ally in the war. I would like to emphasize that this is the current implementation.
So, the issue arises from how the War Coordinator decides which War Stance it is in. In most circumstances it does exactly what it needs to do, but the player throws a bit of a complication into this. The War Coordinator chooses the Offensive stance if they outnumber the opposing side, and the Defensive stance if they are being outnumbered. The player(s) are, from the war coordinator's perspective, extremely unreliable allies. The player(s) does what the player(s) wants, and the war coordinator has no way of knowing what your intentions are. Because of this the player's strength is not counted for the army strength on the side they are on, it is extremely pessimistic here. On the other hand, the other side is counting on the player's strength when calculating the strength of the opposing side, because it is pessimistic on its odds and never knows what the other side is up to.
So what we then have is:
| Attacking War Coordinator Sees | Defending War Coordinator Sees | |
| AI Attacker | 2610 | 2610 | |
| AI Defender | 2941 | 2941 | |
| Player Attacker | | 1167 | |
This pessimistic look means: the attacker sees 2610 strength on their side and 2941 strength on the defender side; the defender sees 3777 attackers and 2941 defenders.
The attacking war coordinator only see the units it is in control of, so it thinks it is outnumbered and is thus in a defensive stance. The defending war coordinator calculates the full strength of the opposing side, regardless of which opposing war coordinator is in charge of it. So we are now in a situation where both sides are in a defensive war stance, which is why the attacker is holding back in this war.
This behaviour is something we want look into at some point in the future, but I cannot give a timeline to give as to when.
I hope this has clarified it.
Now to address some of the other points in the thread.
1 is correct, the units assigned to the war coordinator on the player's side will follow the player to a self-detrimental level.
2 is by the logic given above not accurate, the AI really does not expect anything from the player allies, for better or worse.
The AI understands what war goals are and what gives war score. The AI will however make a decision for whether they can feasibly (it will try to avoid attrition) reach the provinces that give war score or not and is supposed to begin prioritizing provinces in the direction of the war goal. There is also some prioritization on what's close to the armies, where it will prioritize closer objectives higher than far away provinces. There might be some numbers to tweak in the war stance priorities that can help here, but anything touching AI needs thorough testing before we commit it for an update. We want to avoid making a change and have the result be worse than current behaviour, and this is something we only can test by having the change live for a long time on our development branches.
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