AI cheating significantly increased

[DrUltraLux]

This seems to be a general policy for all Paradox games these days, however the AI blatantly and obviously cheating is beyond the pale, both in the new HOI4 version and in Stellaris.

Playing Communist China and even after blitzing Shanxi and taking his *only* 2 military factories, and in spite of the fact he starts with 2 factories, no resources, almost no ability to trade, and only 2 small militia divisions, still had only 3 divisions when I declared war, he has been able to increase his military to 24 divisions within the space of 3 months, who are all fully equipped and trained regulars, some are even elite... Most of them are 6 infantry strong.
That is more than 10x the amount of equipment and manpower a human player could possibly produce in that period of time.

Date is July 25th 1936.

Anyone else noticed the usual level of absurd cheating has rising to ridiculous heights?

Might as well just stop playing Ironman and spawn equipment in at this point.

Everything else I am really enjoying, and the AI actually seems to be much smarter for a change compared to past versions. However this makes the game unplayable as anything other than a major power.

EDIT: Take that back. The AI management of front lines is still amazingly stupid, completely abandoning important positions to the enemy in order to send 90% of it's force into a single tile to conduct a pointless attack it cannot win. Both my troops and the enemy troops.
The frustration level of this game has increased 500%

[DrUltraLux]

Game has a lot of great stuff about it. However watching AI just spawn in 10x more stuff than it should have, teleporting units, units with 400-500% movement speed than they should have, is just plain annoying

I would really like Paradox, just *for once* to actually put some effort into developing a decent AI instead of one that is so stupid can only survive by essentially using the console to cheat - and even then loses eventualy most of the time.

I am still winning this war, even horrendously outnumbered and outgunned by an enemy that literally has zero factories.

I should be neither outgunned or outnumbered, and even being that I am, I should absolutely not be winning.

EDIT:
Won, 3k losses, over 300k kills.

This is just stupid. lol.

Playing on Regular Ironman btw.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1324804612

[Raptor Jesus]

I agree wholeheartedly. Just had a game playing as Japan, China retreated at the Marco-Polo bridge incident so I went to war with Shaanxi. They had about 30 divisions and no forts, yet my entire army of almost 100 divisions which included tanks, infantry and motorised couldn't push them a single tile. They had no forts, my army was fully equipped with no attrition, full planning and air support and they couldn't move 30 poorly equipped divisions? I'm calling BS.

They weren't pushing me and I had to act on my war goal against China so I build level 3 forts on all my borders and let the Chinese break against me, leaving a single army of 24 divisions to make sure Shaanxi didn't push with level 3 forts. For a while the Chinese simply broke against me, losing about a million before they started to push me back and they pushed me back hard despite me having level 3 forts and air superiority. Turns out the AI was somehow receiving about 1.5k guns a month from the US, despite me having complete naval dominance and there being no way for the Chinese to actually get the guns... Anyway despite the fact they should have been suffering horribly from attrition and lack of supply they pushed me and were soon somehow able to contend with my airforce. I look at their stats and they somehow have over 200 divisions despite having less than 100 a month ago.

This is blatant cheating and it is not OK paradox, you seriously need to rework the AI because it knows the outcome of a battle without even having to fight it meaning where a player might have to seek out the weakest parts in a front line the AI just knows it, it knows what area to push to win and it clearly cheats. This is unacceptable and seriously makes me not want to play the game.

[Sykdom]

I second all these posts as I have had the same issues just nothing else to add, except stop adding expansions to get people to give you money and fix the base mechanics of the game.

[spike2071]

Originally posted by Sykdom:

I second all these posts as I have had the same issues just nothing else to add, except stop adding expansions to get people to give you money and fix the base mechanics of the game.

Heh, quit giving them money. You own all 3 expansions and the colonel upgrade.

[spike2071]

Hah, now who's the white knight?

[MapleEXP]

I agree! Its gotten to the point where I can't even have any fun with the game anymore The AI has nothing until a player is involved in a war. The moment the player is involved, the AI just starts spawning ludicrous numbers of divisions that are fully equipped (even for small nations) that it shouldnt be able to obtain so quickly.

Oh and lets not forget the penalty for trying to micromanage now, you lose all of your planning bonus the second you even try to manage troops yourself, leaving you at the mercy of a broken frontline system against an AI that you can no longer compete against.

It really does suck right now :(

[spike2071]

Originally posted by TheOneHighlander:

Oh and lets not forget the penalty for trying to micromanage now, you lose all of your planning bonus the second you even try to manage troops yourself, leaving you at the mercy of a broken frontline system against an AI that you can no longer compete against.

You keep the planning bonus if you cancel the battle plan. I do it all the time. Create the frontline and the offensive line, wait for the planning bonus to max out, then cancel everything and attack as you want.

The only problem is that the AI moves your troops on the frontline while the planning bonus is building. I wish there was frontline command that let your troops defend in situ.

[HispanicAtTheDisco]

Agree wholeheartedly. 8 years of paying for DLC's and expansions from Paradox in games where the base underlying systems and mechanics simply don't work, and all of the subsequent systems integration attempts are rendered irrelevant and trivial due to the incompetence of the initial design implementation.

It's a damn shame naive well-wishing gamers keep falling into the same punji-pit set by the same trapper.

[Ice Forge]

Unfortunatly i dont really recognize myself in any of this tbh, i have seen the ai a LOT better at lend lease stuff though so that might be where they get influx or equipment and general stuff; as for the frontline i really really dont see an issue with it yes it is a bit obnoxious and needs some polishing BUT unless you are running 3x or higher speed i had 0 issues managing the entire eastern front as germany with 3 field marshalls all using 5 generals full with 24 div strenght holding the frontline and then i was using 2-4 panzer army's with mechanized to actually do pushes and force breakthroughs;

TL;RD frontlines works fairly well if you know how to set them up properly.

And by that im not calling people stupid for not using it corrently, im just saying that you need to rethink how you set up frontlines a bit for them to work properly, its a new system that needs adapting to ( my only complaint is that they ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up terrain combat perk gains, seems like the xp gain for terrain bonus is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and WAAAY to low ).

[MapleEXP]

Originally posted by spike2071:

Originally posted by TheOneHighlander:

Oh and lets not forget the penalty for trying to micromanage now, you lose all of your planning bonus the second you even try to manage troops yourself, leaving you at the mercy of a broken frontline system against an AI that you can no longer compete against.

You keep the planning bonus if you cancel the battle plan. I do it all the time. Create the frontline and the offensive line, wait for the planning bonus to max out, then cancel everything and attack as you want.

The only problem is that the AI moves your troops on the frontline while the planning bonus is building. I wish there was frontline command that let your troops defend in situ.

Thats no longer true, see for yourself. You keep the planning bonus but the moment you attempt manual control the attack plan bonus degrades at a much higher rate. I noticed it from playing and saw some people were talking about it on Paradox's own forums.

[Miyu]

In a recent game, where Germany + Italy was at war against me(Austria-Hungary), russia, and the Allies, Germany capitulated, so only the italian troops remained in that territory, They managed to recover one region for germany, who at that point still had 0 divisions, then soon, 40.

[spike2071]

Originally posted by TheOneHighlander:

Thats no longer true, see for yourself. You keep the planning bonus but the moment you attempt manual control the attack plan bonus degrades at a much higher rate. I noticed it from playing and saw some people were talking about it on Paradox's own forums.

I saw the bonus didn't last as long, but I assumed they just nerfed it for everyone. Oh well. The longer bonus isn't worth letting the AI taking over. :)

[DrUltraLux]

Originally posted by Ice Forge the Reveller:

Unfortunatly i dont really recognize myself in any of this tbh, i have seen the ai a LOT better at lend lease stuff though so that might be where they get influx or equipment and general stuff;

You can right click on the nations and see who is sending them lend-leases etc. The AI still doesn't engage in any diplomacy of any sort that it isn't hard-coded to do through events or focus trees. Lend Lease doesn't explain the mountains of free equipment or suddenly spawning in units far beyond their capacity to ever create.

To really see just how terrible the AI is and why frontlines are totally worthless unless you have a huge force, try fighting the Spanish civil war at the moment. As either side, though the Communist side is much harder and illustrates it better. Setting no orders and micro-managing the entire war is the only way to win. You cannot let the AI control a single unit or you are very likely to lose.

[DrUltraLux]

The AI also appears to not lose manpower at the same rate. I have watched carefully in several games since I made this post and in spite of watching 100k+ of casualties rack up, their units remained at full manpower and their reserve manpower totals didn't fall at all.
Though that may be a bug as I have found that repeatedly reloading a game every few months seems to solve that.

[Sandvich]

Originally posted by avantech:

Originally posted by Sykdom:

Stop adding expansions to get people to give you money and fix the base mechanics of the game.

This post should repeated in every thread.

You don't own the game. You don't even know how the game works. You're just assuming things.