Why are my allies always so passive?

[phlux]

It seems like the AI is decently agressive agains everyone surrounding them and attack their enemies in war.
Except when they are in an alliance of some kind with me, they stop attacking enemy settlements (barely attack them after like 10 turns if i ask them but otherwise not at all) and they just evade enemy armies letting them march past all of their armys end settlements to attack my stuff 2 regions behind...
I mean wtf? I try to use allies as a buffer between me and some enemies but when they act like that they don't defent ♥♥♥♥ for me..
Getting their units really seems to be the only use an ally has and that's kinda sad.
I would love to build an empire with big alliances but when i basically turn their AI off as soon as i ally with them it's really not worth the efford.

Does anyone else feel like the AI doesn't do anything anymore when you ally it?

In addition to that, they get weak.. just had a ally full stack ogre army fight against a stack of tomb king skeleton warriors. The skeletons got like 10% damage on their units while wiping the Ogres...
When it was my turn again the skeleton army was already replenished to full health as if nothing happened at all.
(playing on hard/hard that is.)

[SBA77]

No idea. There was an old theory going around that it was because their alliance with you made them lose their AI buffs, but hey you know rumors.

[Risotto]

I always avoid alliances in the game. Nothing wrong with just keeping them good friends, but I don't like being dragged into random wars.

[Jack Greedy]

Well, now im playing Radious and as Kislev/Konstantyn i have alliance with Empire and they give me active help in a war with chaos, maybe Radious made the AI smarter actually.
Previously i was on SFO and AI was dumb as in vanilla, not letting me a hand in wars.
So i can recommend You installing Radious and check by Yourself.

[Triple G]

Is it a major faction ally - or a minor one? So some faction which You could play - or a pure AI faction? The latter are basically placeholders to get captured by the others.

[BIG E.]

Because the moment you become ally with a faction, they loose their AI bonuses, UNLESS you are playing on Normal or below.

Anything above normal difficulty, your allies will loose good chunk of their AI bonuses. And factions that have lower relations with you will have more AI bonuses.

Generally avoid early game alliances. In late game you can go for it with big factions since at that point AI bonuses doesn't really make much difference for your ally.

[Jukelo]

Originally posted by BIG E.:

Because the moment you become ally with a faction, they loose their AI bonuses, UNLESS you are playing on Normal or below.

Anything above normal difficulty, your allies will loose good chunk of their AI bonuses. And factions that have lower relations with you will have more AI bonuses.

Generally avoid early game alliances. In late game you can go for it with big factions since at that point AI bonuses doesn't really make much difference for your ally.

Do you have a source for any of that?

[Triple G]

Originally posted by Jukelo:

Do you have a source for any of that?

Probably not. :o)

And it would be relatively easy to verify. The moment You ally them, they would probably have all that attrition symbol on their armies, because they couldn´t afford the upkeep any more if they lost some bonus - which is probably the biggest effect for gameplay. I bet they still spend most of their money on that - as when i played the Slaanesh campaign and the vassals payed double the amount of money to me, they hired as long till they got that attrition symbol, which usually doesn´t happen. They could probably fix that btw. :o)

[Basarab Laiota]

for best results, simply sign non-agression pact then give them some money over time

[Mr.Hmm]

Originally posted by Risotto:

I always avoid alliances in the game. Nothing wrong with just keeping them good friends, but I don't like being dragged into random wars.

I keep alliances so that they deal with other threats while i am consolidating power and when i am done i destroy alliances and take over their land.

[dulany67]

Alliances are fine for defending a flank as long as you realize that any alliance is another responsibility. Meaning you will need to help them rather than them helping you.

[Central]

you can always set some war targets for the AI to pursue, i found that the AI is much less passive when i do that.
you can also borrow their armies.

allies are still not great, but lets be honest, the AI in general is not great this game, CA still has quite a bit of work to do on that front.
at least they are somewhat better with allied recruitment and borrowing armies being a thing.

even though allied troops are not the best because they lack lord and tech boosts it is still another recruitment chain. recruiting allies does not delay recruitment of your own units. so you can raise armies quite quickly if you use normal recruitment+allied recruitment topped up with some regiments of renown.

[chickabumpbump]

I have a dawi game and the VC are throwing all their armies at me in Zhufbar while the empire do very little to help.

The AI is bad

The balance is bad

And the player bias is obvious to see

[BIG E.]

Originally posted by Triple G:

Originally posted by Jukelo:

Do you have a source for any of that?

Probably not. :o)

And it would be relatively easy to verify. The moment You ally them, they would probably have all that attrition symbol on their armies, because they couldn´t afford the upkeep any more if they lost some bonus - which is probably the biggest effect for gameplay. I bet they still spend most of their money on that - as when i played the Slaanesh campaign and the vassals payed double the amount of money to me, they hired as long till they got that attrition symbol, which usually doesn´t happen. They could probably fix that btw. :o)

My source is two things,

First source, in total war warhammer 2 there were straight up differences to AI power, relative to its relations with the player, for example AI loses their auto-resolve bonuses once they ally with the player(this exists in TWWH3 aswell). You can google on this to learn more but there are ♥♥♥♥ loads of discussions on this that i cannot be bothered to type every single thing here. So again, nothing a quick google search can't solve.

Second source, my years and thousands of hours of total war warhammer experiance. I don't need someone to data mine this information when i literally manually tested it for hundreds of Legendary campaigns.

The moment you Vassalise or Ally a faction, their strength, agressiveness and the amount of armies they field literally go down in half. This has been the exact same thing for me, for hundreds of campaigns. I never had a different result.

The moment you Ally a faction they stop expanding and, well, doing anything really. And they will rapidly go down in strength ranking. Opposed to when you don't ally them, they continue painting the map.

Again, i know back in the day CA said there was no buffs or debuffs for diplomacy outcomes, but if you played total war warhammer games for long enough you know that just is not true.

You can literally test this you don't have to belive me. Play a campaign where you ally Karl Franz early and then play a campaign where you let him be for the entire campaign. See the difference.

Originally posted by Triple G:

The moment You ally them, they would probably have all that attrition symbol on their armies,

AI doesn't get attrition from running out of money. Thats not how AI economy works.

So yeah basicly, my source is NOT that i made it the ♥♥♥♥ up, but rather i tested it for years so i guess i get to make it the ♥♥♥♥ up.

[Zeek]

Originally posted by Jukelo:

Originally posted by BIG E.:

Because the moment you become ally with a faction, they loose their AI bonuses, UNLESS you are playing on Normal or below.

Anything above normal difficulty, your allies will loose good chunk of their AI bonuses. And factions that have lower relations with you will have more AI bonuses.

Generally avoid early game alliances. In late game you can go for it with big factions since at that point AI bonuses doesn't really make much difference for your ally.

Do you have a source for any of that?

I did a bit of searching about this subject and the best I could find is this official forum thread talking about it:

https://forums.totalwar.com/discussion/326351/does-it-feel-to-anyone-else-that-getting-a-military-alliance-with-a-faction-nerfs-them/p3

It's really just the first 2 pages of interest.

The TL;DR:
No one really knows for sure and seems to come down to "gut feelings" which can sometimes be proven wrong.

[chickabumpbump]

Originally posted by Zeek:

Originally posted by Jukelo:

Do you have a source for any of that?

I did a bit of searching about this subject and the best I could find is this official forum thread talking about it:

https://forums.totalwar.com/discussion/326351/does-it-feel-to-anyone-else-that-getting-a-military-alliance-with-a-faction-nerfs-them/p3

It's really just the first 2 pages of interest.

The TL;DR:
No one really knows for sure and seems to come down to "gut feelings" which can sometimes be proven wrong.

Surely an easy test would be to play as Tyrion, sit in your starting province and boost influence until you can get an alliance with Alarelle for example, do nothing for 50 turns and see how she does.

Repeat without the alliance, Im sorry but there is no real rng in this game at all, so she will likely have a similar campaign in what she does