The problem is that to compete with such players who expand at every opportunity, the AI needs to do the same. If the AI does the same, the RP sort get screwed over by the near-constant-warfare.
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The problem is that to compete with such players who expand at every opportunity, the AI needs to do the same. If the AI does the same, the RP sort get screwed over by the near-constant-warfare.
Then make offensive military campaigns more expensive, to slow down player expansion. Better AI is good - but there is always a way to fix problems using game mechanics as well.
Only areas where the AI cheat (iirc) is with naval attrition and locating enemy units. If you are playing with lucky factions on, they get more cheats like money and prestige ....
One issue with this is when do the "fix problems using game mechanics" fixes become "too much". One glaring example of this is the faction system for Ming in DW. A game mechanic fix to a problem that most players hate.
The simple fact of the matter is no ai is going to present a serious challenge to a human in a game this complex using a reasonable amount of resources (both on the players' machines and on PI's part). It wasn't so long ago that it took room sized supercomputers to beat humans at chess and EU games are substantially more complex than chess.
And I disagree again.
There is no contradiction. That there should be two distinct AI programs is just a horrible gameplay concept. The AI in EU3 is not programmed to act like a conquering player, it is merely programmed to look for advantages. It will not do long term planning to take you down - it just looks at its surroundings, calculates how much they fear you (threat perception), how much they like you (relations) and how the balance of forces is (military strength) and then makes a decision. Often times this is a decision to not attack you, even though a conquering human player would attack you because he would ignore relations and would only take the balance of military forces into account. When the AI decides there is no one to attack, it stays at peace and spends money on peaceful things. The conquering player would instead keep spending on military because he KNOWS he is going to attack someone soon. The AI does not really think about that, it just holds its military at whatever level is thinks is okay for peacetime.What I think would make sense is to have difficulty system, which mainly influences the AI's opinion and threat perception values versus the player by means of static modifiers. I know EU3 had already a sort of "threat perception" because each country had a list of perceived threats.
Easy difficulty -> All AI nations get +20 to opinion vs human player, and -30 on threat perception. (Or perhaps: a cap on how threatening they perceive you, and a cap on how much they can hate you.) You can still get attacked, but only if they really hate you. AI vs AI is unchanged.
Normal difficulty -> no modifiers. AI vs AI is unchanged, and AI vs human is "default".
Tough difficulty -> -20 to opinion vs human player, +30 to threat perception. They always seek for opportunities to cut you down. AI empires ally against you more easily. Lots of warfare against you. AI vs AI is unchanged.
The reason there shouldn't be different AI scripts is that it would (I think) make the game harder to develop. You'd have not one but two components in the AI system that need to be developed, tuned, tested and so on. So IMHO it does not make sense, to ask for two AI modes, one where they are all peaceful vs one another and no one blobs, and one where they conspire to attack one another and lots of blobs form. Better to have it all be the same, and only exempt the player in some ways by giving him advantages in how they perceive him. If the game still ends up in a way where all the small nations are eaten up by 1550 then there is something wrong with the game rules, that make conquest too easy, not with the AI.
The main problem I see is, eventually you will get into a situation where even on easy mode you are seen by the AI as a REALLY weak, and REALLY tempting target. Even with caps and modifiers you will get into their crosshairs eventually. You can't rule that out even if you play on easy.
No one was arguing for that.And I disagree again.
I though that's what you meant, when you said the EU3 AI was unsatisfactory for the peaceful players?
IMO there should be several toggable options in regard to cheats. Things like AI land attrition - None/Halved/Full. That way, everybody could decide how many cheats the AI would use.
No. I was never arguing for two different AIs. I was arguing for an AI with a focus on RP because a "WIN AT ALL COSTS" AI is just not suitable for a game like EU (where a lot of the fun is based on immersion). It might be OK for CIV, but for EU it is detrimental to the experience.
This would be great. The AI would assume someone who plays on Hard is more of a threat.
Hmm okay, but you brought the counter-argument to that yourself, namely that competitive players (i.e. anyone who wants to see his nation big and wants the AI to put up a challenge) would find this unsatisfying.
I just don't see where you can bring both ideas together - that there should be an AI which does "roleplay" vs the AI and the player, and on the other hand that there should also be an AI that can challenge the player if he so desires.
The game rules and the AI targets should ideally match up... i.e., what the game rules allow and favor, should be what the AI wants. I.e. if there are two or more strategies to become a safe and prosperous nation, don't make the AI use only one of them. Don't make conquest easy but discourage the AI merely because it "feels" better.
AI programmed to "feel" better is what the shooter games do... in shooters, already many years ago programmers stopped thinking about how to make the AI a strong opponent, i.e. make him find pathways in a clever way, utilize obstacles, get behind the player, ambush him. They did this for a time but due to mass market pressures and due to most shooter players wanting easy successes they instead came up with the concept of "credible" AI opponents. They stopped improving AIs which is why shooter AIs are today still as smart or stupid as the ones in the original Half Life which is from 1998 and was played on Pentium computers.
What you get nowadays are mostly "cinematic" games which are totally on rails, where the AI actors just stupidly follow scripts in order to create a believable experience for the user. If you step through door X then three baddies appear on the far side of the corridor, who will move only around waypoints A, B and C and only use obstacles D, E and F for cover. They shoot at you until you kill them. Why is this so? Because they don't program them to attack you, flank you, exploit your weakness. In some games they do but gamers end up crying that those levels are too hard unless the AI is made to be stupid again (i.e. yell or start shooting at the player from far away to alert him to their presence).
This is NOT what EU should be about... it should be a game where the AI stomps on you and eats you if you play badly. Tune it to act a little less aggressively towards the player, if necessary, but don't make compromises where it purposefully doesn't do things the player does just because this would not fit into conceived notions of what it should feel like. Every other paradigm just leads to degeneration of the strategy genre.
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That was not me, but I will address it anyway... Yes they will find it unsatisfying, but they always will. The AI can never bring the challenge a player needs - especially in a game as complicated as EU.
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Thats the worst solution. It creates so much more permutations to test.
So the solution is to REDUCE the amount of challenge?
I think the challenge level in EU3 was okay. In EU3 you do find challenges when you are playing a small nation. And also when you are a medium sized nation. It just stops once you are close to the biggest AI nation, then you no longer find challenges. If for EU4 they would improve this just a little, i.e. make the AI better at tactical things (fleet movement, economy management) this would perhaps make it able to hold out a little longer but it wouldn't totally change the game, I'd still be fine with it.
If they can build an AI that has a tunable knob for "aggression vs player" this would be fine by me. I just don't like the idea that there is a Paradox AI programmer, working on scripts that make the AI act like a tame pony for users who want tame-pony-gameplay, when instead he could be working on improving its competitive ability.
Its always the same with us Paradox players. There are the realistic roleplayers and the warmongers. On the majority of topics these two groups disagree of how it should be. There will never be one game that is capable to satisfice both groups. But we will not get two games, just one eu 4. And Paradox will make design decisions as good as they can, to have both groups as customers. But we will also get modding possibilities to make the game more the thing we want to have.
Of course that it does, but nothing will irritate the players more than hardcoded cheats. If somebody uses non-standard settings, then it's obvious that the game will be easier/harder than it is on the standard settings.
I don't mind AI cheating BTW, as long as they are not over-the-top.
Well the AI will become predictable anyway and if that is the case then I would rather have an AI that acts like a nation would and not how a player would. It makes for a much more immersive experience.So the solution is to REDUCE the amount of challenge?
Well. Most of the cheats were not really hardcoded in EU3. Only the naval attrition IIRC (and it was a necessity).
You are probably referring to mods which changes X or Y. That's fine, but keep in mind that most players will judge the game by playing the Vanilla version...
I agree.
If the AI needs to cheat in order to survive and be a challenge fine by that, the bad taste might come if they have advantages that you could not know and your strategy plan is ruined by that, when you discover it in the middle of a war.
(I remember the first time I saw AI navies having no attrition and always knowing where I was, I started yelling sentences this forum would censore by itself, wihout even the need of a mod...)
I wouldn't says "irritates", really. I just deal with it like Calvin (of "Calvin and Hobbes") does: "They cheat, I cheat."