The AI discussion

[Ufnv]

We had a long discussion on Discord and it turns out that under "bad AI" the players mostly mean that the AI does not want to mindlessly throw waves after waves of the ground units towards its neighbors, but instead "stay passive" investing into research to increase its chances in winning the match later on. To address specifically this, I've included the "aggressive AI" setting that was already tested by players on Discord (special thanks to those helping for the invaluable feedback!) and confirmed to do just this - much more conventional warfare by the AI, a lot of invasions and regions changing ownership. This will be publicly available with 1.0.5, but if you want to test it before it becomes public, please DM me.

The second problem is that the AI, depending on its chosen strategy, may not be able to resist the aggressive player investing everything into ground units to rush the invasion. This is addressed in 1.0.4 that is available as a public beta, you should definitely try it if you are concerned about the AI.

The third problem is the AI not being good at using transport ships/airdrops. This is to be addressed in 1.0.5.

So, to summarize, if you have concerns about the AI, please try 1.0.4, you should find it challenging to invade its lands long term.
If you are looking for the really aggressive AI, you may test the work-in-progress version by contacting me in Discord.

[perl]

we as the player will win every game already, so if the AI stays passive to invest in research to increase its chance of winning, it just results in a boring game.

the AI should throw waves after waves of armies, that's just part of how nations fight a conventional war. in HOI4, the AI will not remain passive and research the whole game, that'll be very boring.

i've tried to mod the AI to be more invasion-focused but to no success, so I'm very happy to hear you are changing this.

nobody likes passive AI. i am eagerly awaiting the release of 1.0.5 for the AI invasion changes you mentioned

[Ufnv]

you can even take more active part in testing/tuning it by contacting me in Discord

[rout]

I started games and just run with max speed and shared radar with everybody- there were invasions but not really conquests against countries. sometimes AI seems to have no knowledge of their advantage- like 5 armies right on the border no enemy in plain sight and they just won't invade. of course both countries are already in a long war at that point. Literally just passive dead AI.

[Ufnv]

Originally posted by rout:

I started games and just run with max speed and shared radar with everybody- there were invasions but not really conquests against countries. sometimes AI seems to have no knowledge of their advantage- like 5 armies right on the border no enemy in plain sight and they just won't invade. of course both countries are already in a long war at that point. Literally just passive dead AI.

See the point #1. The AI in its current state always prefer defence over attack.
5 armies are just nothing when they attack - the resource spent. They are more valuable defending. So in the long run it is better to keep them in your own land until you can get a really good advantage. Otherwise you have a high risk of a failed invasion attempt with your lands remaining undefended.

I've added the setting that tunes up the aggressiveness so the AI would attack in this case event if it's probably not the smartest move in the long run. It will be available in 1.0.5.
Meanwhile you can just _play_ against the AI with 1.0.4 and try to invade/steamroll it to check is how the current tweaks work.

AI vs AI behaviour in 1.0.4 is different from AI vs Human.

[rout]

Ok I will try 1.0.4 and 1.0.5. If there is a setting to tune up aggressiveness, then I will use that all the time because aggressive AI is better than passive one in terms of gameplay experience.

[Licgan]

Question: Do jammers have any effect in a single player match against only AI opponents? It seems the AI always knows my unit placement with or without a jammer nearby. To that end, an AI with NO investment in space (no space radar or sats) will consistently build army and air bases outside the scope of my satellites. How are they pulling that off? At this point, when playing the AI, I've stopped investing in jamming and EC because they seem mostly ineffective. Am I imagining this?

[Ufnv]

Originally posted by Licgan:

Question: Do jammers have any effect in a single player match against only AI opponents?

AI does not have any extra knowledge compared to human players. So jammers have exactly the same effects.

It seems the AI always knows my unit placement with or without a jammer nearby.

Jammers do not "hide" the units, they just affect the range of the enemy radars. Typically the "jammed" radar will have 65% effective range comparing to the normal one.
However it is better to ask dounttron about the specific effects - I develop the game engine itself, not the content.

Please note that there are a lot of ways to know the unit's placement, including espionage, intelligence trade, spec-ops teams, etc. And once the unit location is discovered, its "ghost" remains, so the AI will hit it.

To that end, an AI with NO investment in space (no space radar or sats) will consistently build army and air bases outside the scope of my satellites. How are they pulling that off?

I would say, pure luck/unluck. The positions of where to build the bases are actually pre-defined in the AI cache files, they are not generated dynamically, as it would be very costly operation. You can see all these possible positions by using the CHEATS version of the game in the AI-points browsing mode.

At this point, when playing the AI, I've stopped investing in jamming and EC because they seem mostly ineffective.

I think it depends on what you define as "effective". They do lower the radar ranges and this may be critical. For example, majority of anti-air weapon require "precise targeting" of LW radars that don't have very long range and further decreasing it will definitely pay off.
But if you think of jamming as a magic cloaking device - it is not.

[perl]

on 1.0.5, will the AI try to conquer the world if they have the armies to do so?

[Ufnv]

Yes. You can try it now (wip version), check it yourself and maybe give me some more insights.

[Nox]

going to wait for 1.0.5 to jump back in, was trying to play as cold war, my american ally ai left me to die basically lol.

[Redacted but not so]

The problem with this "aggressive ai" is that they will spend so much resources that they will get absolutely evaporated even more so than they do right now, as when the icbms start flying, they will have a bunch of useless armies and army tech and not many silos or interceptors, making what was the selling point of this and the first game pretty boring, even more so than normal as there they actually can pose a threat.

[perl]

Originally posted by Redacted but not so:

The problem with this "aggressive ai" is that they will spend so much resources that they will get absolutely evaporated even more so than they do right now, as when the icbms start flying, they will have a bunch of useless armies and army tech and not many silos or interceptors, making what was the selling point of this and the first game pretty boring, even more so than normal as there they actually can pose a threat.

i disagree. if you play a game of conquest right now, the AI is really passive and boring. even on the iron curtain map, there's never any territorial changes so the map will always remain the same. making them invade more often will make the game better

[Redacted but not so]

What I meant was that you would be able to ICBM them into oblivion late-game because all they can really do is use armies because that is where they spent all their resources and not on defense and silos but you may have been talking about all this so this message might be useless.

[Redacted but not so]

Although yeah, having large warfare against the ai would be cool.

[Brumes Wolf]

While I know a lot of people hate it, I would have no problem with there being a setting or difficulty that would allow the AI to get extra resources as the game goes on.
So they can somewhat remain as a credible threat against the player(s), obviously it shouldn't pull them too far towards the player as that would just punish you for playing well.
But factions not being able to recover from a defeat at all is also no fun.

Maybe 1 or 2 AI that are the furthest away from the player/not in conflict with them initially should get chosen as "hero" AI and given extra resources so they can provide a later game challenge, ideally this would be combined with them using these resources to aggressively go after the remaining AI factions to get more territory and resources instead of them just using their bonus to turtle.

TLDR: Dev(s), Allowing the AI to cheat here and there to create a more fun/challenging match is perfectly fine, as long as the player is informed about it ahead of time and its not too blatant.