AI allies are terrible.

[Judas]

So I am siege a city. Ally comes in and sieges the same city even though there are loads of others they could siege. We are now both suffering massive attrition due to the numbers. I decide to move to another city to easy the attrition. AI ally follows me resting the siege on the original city and again causing massive attrition. We need to be able to set targets for our allies.

[Night Hunter]

Conversely, I've had lots of situations where I wish the AI would join my stack to boost the advantage for an upcoming battle but instead it just goes back and forth in neighboring baronies/counties, including when I already have a slight advantage (so it's not a suicide mission).

Here's hoping the siege target and join army controls available in CK2 are added soon, as well as some logic tweaks to the warfare AI.

[The Former]

Can't win. Some people complain when the AI forms on them because of the attrition, others complain the the AI is always "waiting nearby" rather than forming on them. A computer can only do so much with if/then logic.

[VipreRX]

Originally posted by Knight-Errant:

Can't win. A computer can only do so much with if/then logic.

Which is exactly why the CK2 commands need to be added back in.

Put them at the end of the decision tree if nothing else. Let the AI do its thing but if it does decide to help let us give it some suggestions about what to do that will actually be helpful. Even if it decides in the end to ignore them.

Right now it's like waging a war in which none of the participants ever bother speaking to each other.

[The Former]

I can see the argument for it, but I can also see the argument against it. If you can command the AI's armies, you can essentially wield them in place of your own armies. Putting commands at the end of the decision tree isn't a bad idea, but it does still run the risk of breaking the game by allowing players to send their allies into the meat grinder while keeping their own troops unraised.

As it stands currently, the AI doesn't do much of anything for the player that isn't centered around the player's own military activities. (In before jokes which cut my quote off at "player.")

[VipreRX]

Originally posted by Knight-Errant:

Putting commands at the end of the decision tree isn't a bad idea, but it does still run the risk of breaking the game by allowing players to send their allies into the meat grinder while keeping their own troops unraised.

As it stands currently, the AI doesn't do much of anything for the player that isn't centered around the player's own military activities.

You can do that anyway by avoiding enemy armies and letting the nearby Ally AI engage instead.

That aside it's why I say "end of the tree". The point isn't to override/force the AI to do something only to apply higher priorities to things it might decide to do based on what's needed at the moment.

[The Former]

Originally posted by VipreRX:

Originally posted by Knight-Errant:

Putting commands at the end of the decision tree isn't a bad idea, but it does still run the risk of breaking the game by allowing players to send their allies into the meat grinder while keeping their own troops unraised.

As it stands currently, the AI doesn't do much of anything for the player that isn't centered around the player's own military activities.

You can do that anyway by avoiding enemy armies and letting the nearby Ally AI engage instead.

At least you're still exposing your forces to the possibility of harm and, more importantly, paying full upkeep though.

[VipreRX]

If the AI won't do anything for you NOW unless you're in the middle of it then it's not going to do anything for you with priority commands afterwards because the priority commands should come AFTER the other decision making.

It either decides to help or it doesn't and THEN takes into account what you want help with. As is it's freaking near worthless.

[Gestum]

I originally had the impression that the CK3 AI is better than the CK2 one, but I no longer think so. It has now been just too often that I experienced AI allies acting in an absolutely useless way where even the most inexperienced bumpkin of a human player would have known where they were needed. From splitting armies into lots of little units and letting the enemy AI destroy them when they actually would have greater numbers... to just standing idle in the adjacent county instead of helping me in my battle... to the sort of thing described by the OP...

And it's also sometimes buggy, I think. Or am I the only one experiencing AI units at sea endlessly starting to move towards land, back to sea, to land, to sea, to land, an ever-repeating cycle of movement arrows shuttling back and forth whilst the enemy beats me?

[The Former]

Originally posted by Gestum:

I originally had the impression that the CK3 AI is better than the CK2 one, but I no longer think so. It has now been just too often that I experienced AI allies acting in an absolutely useless way where even the most inexperienced bumpkin of a human player would have known where they were needed. From splitting armies into lots of little units and letting the enemy AI destroy them when they actually would have greater numbers... to just standing idle in the adjacent county instead of helping me in my battle... to the sort of thing described by the OP...

And it's also sometimes buggy, I think. Or am I the only one experiencing AI units at sea endlessly starting to move towards land, back to sea, to land, to sea, to land, an ever-repeating cycle of movement arrows shuttling back and forth whilst the enemy beats me?

I've had that happen from time to time. My guess is the AI is in a Catch 22 between "I want to land for x or y reason" and "if I land, I will probably die".

Splitting armies is likely a side effect of not wanting to take attrition. To fix it, the AI will need to get better at recognizing when to converge on an ongoing battle. I don't often see the AI doing this, myself. Usually if there's a battle within four baronies or so, they'll send everyone to it. Usually when they don't, it's because they're using the smaller army as a diversion while they lay siege to one or two holdings.

Standing idle is the same thing, they're avoiding attrition. Allegedly 1.1 told the AI it was okay to join a nearby battle the player was in even if the numbers seemed to be in the player's favor, but if this is still happening, evidently it needs more refining.

[Gran Quesote]

Ally declares offensive war, drags me into it. I go help. We combined have massive troop advantage vs the enemy. Easy win, right? Nooooo. AI decides to divide its stack into three or four smaller stacks and siege four different baronies while the enemy AI and allies mass up in doomstack. I try to goad the enemy AI into coming near my Ally's armies to crush them. I manage to bring the enemy doomstack literally one freaking barony away from ally. Ally never moves to help. We would have had easily 30% to 50% extra troops than them. I get the living crap kicked out of me because stupid ally doesnt mive a finger and lose the battle, my best champions and half the council. THEN the AI moves decides its a good idea to move and fights the doomstack alone once Im retreating after defeat. Ally gets crushed and we lose the war. Has happened to me twice now.

[NewbieOne]

AI shouldn't be forming on the human player and soaking attrition, sure, but neither should it spread across half the map, ending up unable to join battles in time (even if it actually tries to) due to the distance. Something that notably happens less to all-AI coalitions.

And part of the problem is that all-AI coalitions stack together, so all-AI coalitions co-ordinate better, but human-AI coalitions generally don't stack or in any case they stack less. This leads to human-AI coalitions losing to all-AI coalitions despite numerical advantage. And it means AI co-ordinates well with AI but has a difficulty co-ordinating with a human player, especially when it comes to stacking.

AI is also clueless in its decisions, choosing neither to join its 4K with your 4K for a battle against the enemy 8K, nor to run/sail away but to just get its army slaughtered after leaving your army unassisted to be slaughtered. This means there is a reactivity problem.

My other impression is that AI has deteriorated after one of the last patches, having been better before, though I'm not certain. There have always been problems.

For the record, I would be ready to accept that some of AI's blunders are the good roleplaying of bad commanders by an AI well-designed to roleplay.

However, overall I'm not inclined to believe that the AI is roleplaying or that it is well designed.

For a moment I thought that perhaps the AI might be well-designed but just momentarily suffering from a relatively simple, though unfortunate problem — like a single issue frustrating a comprehensive good design. If this was the case, however, the problem would long have been fixed by now. And it hasn't. Either the skill or the care is lacking.

Originally posted by Lockfågel, the Paradox Knight:

Can't win. Some people complain when the AI forms on them because of the attrition, others complain the the AI is always "waiting nearby" rather than forming on them. A computer can only do so much with if/then logic.

There is a reason or two programming school exists for (not to mention practical experience), and these are the sort of challenges intelligent teenage modders fascinated with coding are often quite capable of resolving, or people with some background in which they rely on logic. These issues may have challenging practical aspects to them, but they are no Gordian knots, no insoluble conundrums.

You're frankly inflating the difficulty level of a task that's not as complex as you make it in order to unfairly defend Paradox's lack of sufficient skill and care in the AI department (which is not the only such department in the CK2–3 series), and you're also being unfair to the people whose legitimate and valid criticism of the bad state of AI in this game (actually partially recognized by Paradox itself if you look at the comments in upcoming patch notes/DDs) you choose to discount so cheaply, in a way that doesn't hold water.

I probably shouldn't even respond to something like this, but it was hard to pass it by without retorting. And I once again want to stress that such attitudes by a lot of posters in community forums are responsible for enabling the sort of situation CK2–CK3 and Paradox in general is in, with very little QA/QC and sometimes issues that shouldn't exist even in a product that never went through QA and QC.

Originally posted by Gran Quesote:

Ally declares offensive war, drags me into it. I go help. We combined have massive troop advantage vs the enemy. Easy win, right? Nooooo. AI decides to divide its stack into three or four smaller stacks and siege four different baronies while the enemy AI and allies mass up in doomstack. I try to goad the enemy AI into coming near my Ally's armies to crush them. I manage to bring the enemy doomstack literally one freaking barony away from ally. Ally never moves to help. We would have had easily 30% to 50% extra troops than them. I get the living crap kicked out of me because stupid ally doesnt mive a finger and lose the battle, my best champions and half the council. THEN the AI moves decides its a good idea to move and fights the doomstack alone once Im retreating after defeat. Ally gets crushed and we lose the war. Has happened to me twice now.

Happens all the time to me and no amount of apologetics from fanboys can justify it. It's simply incompetent AI design/programming, which has been this series's glaring problem for years now. (Referring also to the state of AI in CK2 when CK3 was released.)

Originally posted by Gran Quesote:

Standing idle is the same thing, they're avoiding attrition. Allegedly 1.1 told the AI it was okay to join a nearby battle the player was in even if the numbers seemed to be in the player's favor, but if this is still happening, evidently it needs more refining.

Originally posted by Lockfågel, the Paradox Knight:

I've had that happen from time to time. My guess is the AI is in a Catch 22 between "I want to land for x or y reason" and "if I land, I will probably die".

Catch 22's need a tie solver. A tie solver is a very basic concept in just about any area of life that includes voting or decision-making under uncertainty, which includes people flipping a coin when you need to have a democracy of two voters. I really don't want to be mean, but it's really not something that should be a foreign concept to an IT-school graduate.

Splitting armies is likely a side effect of not wanting to take attrition.

Sometimes it's moving. But attrition generally seems to be probably in the centre of it, though unequally judged by human-AI coalitions (which don't stack) and AI-AI coalitions (which do stack, and thus win despite numerical inferiority).

To fix it, the AI will need to get better at recognizing when to converge on an ongoing battle. I don't often see the AI doing this, myself. Usually if there's a battle within four baronies or so, they'll send everyone to it. Usually when they don't, it's because they're using the smaller army as a diversion while they lay siege to one or two holdings.

IIRC AI used to be relatively good at joining ongoing battles earlier in the patching history… perhaps more so than in CK2. I actually recall noting that AI appeared to be smart in helping you.

Allegedly 1.1 told the AI it was okay to join a nearby battle the player was in even if the numbers seemed to be in the player's favor, but if this is still happening, evidently it needs more refining.

Well, I'm glad to see you aren't taking the 'everything is perfect, you guys are just toxic/ungrateful' approach, after all, but 'needs more refining' doesn't cut it. And especially not after what we've been through with CK2 AI ever since 2012.

Paradox needs to get more serious about AI design and scripting. More skill, more care. Either sit down and make an effort and finally get it right or hire someone new who can, or get some additional training. But too long is too long for AI to always be largely inept and fraught with really silly problems such as indecision loops, inability to make basic choices or not knowing how its own WS rules work, or standing next to raised ships for months without embarking in CK2, or standing immobile in a single province, allowing smaller enemy armies to pass by any siege all the way to 100% (also CK2) or AI insisting for years on hiring and sending holy orders versus people of the same religion as the order (or on not hiring them when available and when having enough piety and needing just the order or at least a band of mercs in order to defend and survive — CK2). The problems are too baffling, too many and too basic-looking for a professional game. And having to wait so long for fixes is not acceptable, and especially wouldn't be if it was something as simple as attrition checks, which could easily be reverted to pre-patch status with a quick hotfix.

[dwarfpcfan]

To me the most frustrating thing about the AI is that the enemy AI always seems much more competent then the ally AI. Unless I'm conquering a county level region and calling an adjacent ally to take a piece of land with 2-3 cities to siege down tops, I can never count on them to properly back me up.

But enemy AI, they have no problem meeting up to create a huge stack and having their allies siege down two different sides of the map to force me to divide my forces.

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by dwarfpcfan:

To me the most frustrating thing about the AI is that the enemy AI always seems much more competent then the ally AI. Unless I'm conquering a county level region and calling an adjacent ally to take a piece of land with 2-3 cities to siege down tops, I can never count on them to properly back me up.

But enemy AI, they have no problem meeting up to create a huge stack and having their allies siege down two different sides of the map to force me to divide my forces.

Indeed. I don't think enemy AI has any problem getting its act together to join battles when it makes sense to. I may occasionally see some silliness going on between two AI belligerents, but in my own wars enemy AI is certainly more competent than ally AI most of the time.

[dwarfpcfan]

Originally posted by NewbieOne:

Indeed. I don't think enemy AI has any problem getting its act together to join battles when it makes sense to. I may occasionally see some silliness going on between two AI belligerents, but in my own wars enemy AI is certainly more competent than ally AI most of the time.

I've been trying over and over to do the Daurama Daura starter and this is the main reason why I never seem to be able to survive to the 3rd generation without significant territory loss
from the huge gains I make from Daurama and her first heir which are generally very strong, even with the difficulties of dealing with tribal government

In my last attempt I managed to take all of the Yoruba land and Igboland with Daurama's heir, conquered everything up to the the like 3-4 kingdoms that eventually congregate then

I get curbstomped because while I'm trying to finish off the Gaurama lands(not sure I'm spelling this correctly) the other green kingdom (don't remember the name) declares war and calls freaking Ghana (obviouslyt the strongest kingdom in the region at this point)

and bring in a stack from Ghana of 10K soldiers with their 6K soldiers

while my armt is stuck on the other side of the map dealing with the army I was actually trying to defeat. They attacked at the perfect time, even without being allies (I checked on every combatant involved) and creamed me completely

Maybe I suck at this game, but I could never count on my allies to be this efficient

I could have beaten back the green kingdom and Ghana alone but both, while I was stuck in a war with another kingdom, no way

[The Former]

Originally posted by NewbieOne:

Well, I'm glad to see you aren't taking the 'everything is perfect, you guys are just toxic/ungrateful' approach, after all, but 'needs more refining' doesn't cut it. And especially not after what we've been through with CK2 AI ever since 2012.

Isn't refinement technically what we're all asking for, though? :) The unfortunate thing about CK2 AI is it doesn't apply to CK3 because the algorithm for the AI was rewritten from the ground up for the new game. They can of course take general lessons learned from CK2's AI work over the years, but they can't literally pick up where they left off. They're more or less starting over from square one.