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Nations Dissolving in Campaign


Wowzery

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I know nations can dissolve during a campaign, but lately starting in 1890 by 1900 I'll have 1-3 primary nations will have dissolved. 

I'm not sure if its just a run of bad luck on my part or if there is something in the code calculations which makes nations fold so quickly.  Losing so many so early just doesn't make the game as fun IMO.

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I am currently playing in a 1890 Germany campaign were I have reached year 1902. 2 nations have collapsed as the curret state of the campaign with 1 nation returning from collapse in a much weaker state. The collapsed nations are Britian and Spain with both collapsing due to economy problems brought about by loss of transport in AI vs AI wars. Britian has return with 1 province and is very behind on tech.

The reason the transport losses were so high is due to their navy being unable to protect there homewaters by sending their fleet away (Britian) or their fleet were to weak (Spain). Both nations went into a war with France without being albe to protect their transports in their own sea region.

The AI do not know which sea regions which are inportent to its own survival, and will just move their fleet were whole fleet to a sea region bordering were the first nations that decleared war on them are, and ignore or undersupport all other regions, or move their fleet between regions constanly meaning no fleets are in the right place at the right time to defend transports. The AI still needs work here to make it more able to defend its transports which is needed for its own survival.

I might soon lose 2 more nations due to land conquest as their resorsers are depleted by constant waring and pressuer on all sides. These 2 nations are France and Sovjet Union (former Russia) which both thought that they could take on the entire world on their own and is losing badly. The AI is still to willing to start war with everone it can without thinking of the consecenses of their actions.

It looks like the AI is too much of a warhawk to avoid their own collapse in this version of the game.

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I think there may be a reason for the AI being very pro-war.  This is highly speculative however.

Players will notice that when their nation goes to war, their naval funds increase dramatically at the onset.  This results in being able to build and maintain larger fleets as well as faster research.  The manifestation of throw money at the problem until it is solved.  The obvious downside to this is that the funds have to come from somewhere, namely your GDP.  So, over longer wars, or multiple wars, robbing money away from the GDP's bottom line and crew from your nations workforce eventually sends the GDP into negative growth and often times an unrecoverable spiral of death.

I cannot say I have an answer to this, but I have an idea.   

There has to be a point, say a percentage of the GDP from when the war began, that the AI goes into self preservation mode.  As an example, if a nation starts a war with $100 billion GDP and 10% growth, the war drags on and now the nation has $30 billion of GDP and their growth is around 2%.  At this point, the AI should cut its losses, sue for peace and take steps to save its economy and identity.  If that means scrapping its fleet since maintaining an existing fleet is more expensive than building a new one, cutting back on crew training and research, cutting naval budget in totality, auctioning off its overseas territories, if it has any, or some combination of the above, so be it.  This should also be followed by a period of seemingly forced neutrality where the nation does everything it can to not be involved in any more wars until it has stabilized and is recovering.

I would rather see the British Empire cease to be an empire than to cease to exist entirely.

Edited by Suribachi
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I think one key thing that needs a nerf to stop the endless wars is fleet tension. Moving ships through a region generates way too much tension IMO. Right now moving a single DD can generate as much tension as a fleet of BBs, depending on the relative fleet powers. Could give a task force order that functions like In Being, which keeps fleet power minimum and thereby tension too.  

Tension should probably go through stages to slow the pace. Could be something like Ally>Friendly>Neutral>Antagonist>Hostile. Then have the same 100 points for each stage. Only when you get to Hostile should war be possible. Then peace should reset tension to Neutral. 

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Could make so tension doesnt start counting before 1 or 2 turns, so that single DD passing through doesnt start a world war, and/or tension can increase slightly overtime the longer the fleet stays. You can then either actively hunt it, and/or spesific missions could spawn to fight it

Edited by MDHansen
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1 hour ago, madham82 said:

I think one key thing that needs a nerf to stop the endless wars is fleet tension. Moving ships through a region generates way too much tension IMO

Agreed, there is no reason why a nation that is not at war with you should not be able to tell the difference between a fleet that is passing through or an invasion fleet. 

49 minutes ago, MDHansen said:

Could make so tension doesnt start counting before 1 or 2 turns, so that single DD passing through doesnt start a world war, and/or tension can increase slightly overtime the longer the fleet stays. You can then either actively hunt it, and/or spesific missions could spawn to fight it

That said, I like @MDHansen's idea that the nation in question could have a mission to "inspect" the fleet anchored off shore and that could generate tensions easily.

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The biggest issue is that the decision to go to war is solely a function of tension. The AI cannot factor in the relative strength of its navy or economy, or even the position of its navy before it decides to declare war. There has to be some attribute or overlay that inhibits tension based war declarations. Likewise peace declarations, at least for the player if not the AI, are based on a certain amount of VP plus a dice roll. A country with a more weakened economy [looking both at naval budget deficit and/or GDP relative to some benchmark] should be willing to peace out sooner and for less gain. 

As far as generating tension itself my recommendation would be to have  limited stance during peace time always not generate tension, and then have 'sea control' during peacetime be a sort of posturing that can be used to generate naval prestige and/or tension. 

And moving a fleet in certain sea zones associated with a war during a war stage doesn't by itself generate tension, but might generate events [diplomatic incidents] which involve either generating tension with nearby neutrals or paying in prestige and/or money. 



 

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15 minutes ago, admiralsnackbar said:

The biggest issue is that the decision to go to war is solely a function of tension. The AI cannot factor in the relative strength of its navy or economy, or even the position of its navy before it decides to declare war. There has to be some attribute or overlay that inhibits tension based war declarations. Likewise peace declarations, at least for the player if not the AI, are based on a certain amount of VP plus a dice roll. A country with a more weakened economy [looking both at naval budget deficit and/or GDP relative to some benchmark] should be willing to peace out sooner and for less gain. 

As far as generating tension itself my recommendation would be to have  limited stance during peace time always not generate tension, and then have 'sea control' during peacetime be a sort of posturing that can be used to generate naval prestige and/or tension. 

And moving a fleet in certain sea zones associated with a war during a war stage doesn't by itself generate tension, but might generate events [diplomatic incidents] which involve either generating tension with nearby neutrals or paying in prestige and/or money. 



 

so, regards to your first paragraph. There is a plethora of strength measures ingame allready, it should be doable to use that as a measure for nations shouldnt it (?)

-prestige, provinces, technology, army force/logistics, gdp, navy power, navy tonnage, bilateral relations.

so china/russia has -100 relation. at the next turn a calculation should run, with some random modifier/multiplier on top of everyhing else. it ends up with them deciding against a war because <insert story fluff reason> because of said information above. 

 

I like the peace situation where "limited" stance doesnt generate tension, its a good idea indeed. Gives the player a choice

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4 hours ago, admiralsnackbar said:

The biggest issue is that the decision to go to war is solely a function of tension. The AI cannot factor in the relative strength of its navy or economy, or even the position of its navy before it decides to declare war. There has to be some attribute or overlay that inhibits tension based war declarations. Likewise peace declarations, at least for the player if not the AI, are based on a certain amount of VP plus a dice roll. A country with a more weakened economy [looking both at naval budget deficit and/or GDP relative to some benchmark] should be willing to peace out sooner and for less gain. 

As far as generating tension itself my recommendation would be to have  limited stance during peace time always not generate tension, and then have 'sea control' during peacetime be a sort of posturing that can be used to generate naval prestige and/or tension. 

And moving a fleet in certain sea zones associated with a war during a war stage doesn't by itself generate tension, but might generate events [diplomatic incidents] which involve either generating tension with nearby neutrals or paying in prestige and/or money. 



 

Tension should only be 1 prereq for war. 100 tension should allow either nation to choose to declare war, but the AI will only do so if it expects to benefit. (i.e. Stronger or equal to the enemy, not in or recovering from another war.) The player should be able to request a declaration of war manually, but there should also be a chance of the government declaring war unilaterally. The AI willingness to accept peace should be based on the balance of forces and the benfits/penalties of peace. If the AI is 200k VP down, but just completed a new fleet and gained an ally, it should attempt a turnaround. If it is 1k VP behind, but horribly outnumbered, it should accept peace to cut its losses. If the AI is 10k VP ahead, but outnumbers the enemy 4 to 1, it should seek to draw out the war to gain additional concessions unless the economic strain has become too much. 
 

 

3 hours ago, MDHansen said:

so, regards to your first paragraph. There is a plethora of strength measures ingame allready, it should be doable to use that as a measure for nations shouldnt it (?)

-prestige, provinces, technology, army force/logistics, gdp, navy power, navy tonnage, bilateral relations.

so china/russia has -100 relation. at the next turn a calculation should run, with some random modifier/multiplier on top of everyhing else. it ends up with them deciding against a war because <insert story fluff reason> because of said information above. 

 

I like the peace situation where "limited" stance doesnt generate tension, its a good idea indeed. Gives the player a choice

The issue is that each war causes global polarization, which will eventually create a runaway effect. Also, limited stance doesn't solve the issue of tension increases during wartime from deployed navies. The check should count enemy ports in addition to allied ports when deciding if you have "too many" ships in a zone.

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The AI simply doesn't seem capable of allocating ships in a sensible manner. It will pile their ships into one or two large formations which it will proceed to fling around the world. This then leaves any/all of their sea regions unprotected and causes them to bleed out transports. Britain and Spain seem most vulnerable to this problem, but I have seen it drag France down too.

The irony is that the AI often has more than enough ships to shove a few obsolete CAs/CLs in every sea region to protect their trade and still be able to attack places, but they just....don't.

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14 hours ago, AdmiralBert said:

The AI simply doesn't seem capable of allocating ships in a sensible manner. It will pile their ships into one or two large formations which it will proceed to fling around the world. This then leaves any/all of their sea regions unprotected and causes them to bleed out transports. Britain and Spain seem most vulnerable to this problem, but I have seen it drag France down too.

The irony is that the AI often has more than enough ships to shove a few obsolete CAs/CLs in every sea region to protect their trade and still be able to attack places, but they just....don't.

The campaign AI is clearly only half-finished, just like most parts of the campaign. At this point I would rather the devs had limited the game to just Europe and maybe less of a hot mess.

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8 hours ago, anonusername said:

The campaign AI is clearly only half-finished, just like most parts of the campaign. At this point I would rather the devs had limited the game to just Europe and maybe less of a hot mess.

Limiting the game to Europe only would skip pretty much every interesting naval action of the period covered by the game. Tsushima? Nah, wrong side the world. Spanish-American war and the battles at Manilla & Cuba? Nope, not important. Admiral Von Spee's escape from Tsingtao, beating Admiral Craddock at Coronel and his defeat at the Falklands? Who would care about that?

It also completely breaks all the historical considerations faced by the European powers; Britain freed from having to have ships overseas would simply be unbeatable, and we could all save so much weight on our ships by cutting out long range fuel storage etc because we'll just be fighting over European waters.

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The campaign AI is just not that great. Indeed illogical wars are regularly declared and the AI seems to have difficulty in understanding how to have a sensible naval build program. I have seen hundreds of ships getting queued by AI Britain, USA, France and I don't believe that even Britain has the ability to build 350 ships without incurring a severe shipyard construction penalty. Unless the AI is not bound to the same rules as the player of course. 

Also, AI diplomacy has improved. I see moves being made by the AI to me. However, still there is much to improve on that front. Especially minor nations seem to make illogical alliances. For example, why would Portugal make an alliance with Japan. Seems to me little sense to me. 

Edited by Tycondero
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