More on Supply and last dev diary before the summer break.
Thanks Kevin. I’m still hoping for more core combat changes. July will be long!
Supply is looking a bit like Shadow of Empire, I’m sure it will be less complex. In general supply shouldn’t be something you have to worry about fighting in Europe, or in place with a modest amounts of troops. Only in place where you have a lot of troops in area with poor infrastructure. Now that may not be completely true, I think gameplay should be more important than realism.
What combat changes are you looking forward. I like much of the combat system, especially if there are way to influence the tactics.
What changes are you looking for?
On offense I think the system works well enough. Draw a front line, draw and arrow, hit go. It seems to me if fails pretty badly on defense the AI is constantly shifting and losing the entrenchment bonuses. I think you need to be able to set defensive posture, delay, normal defense, and hold and all cost. Plus I’d like to some concept of reserves. Some percentage of your army should be held in reserve to allow you exploit breakthroughs on offense and fill in gaps in defense. I end up microing it on offense, but I really don’t want to.
Sorry, I missed this before. On the pure combat level, I’d like to see them deal with combat width more consistently. Like not having a division fire entirely at a random division each hour.
Maybe they can solve the issue with large divisions taking fewer casualties and inflicting more casualties than an equal amount of men and equipment organized into more divisions. If the do that, they can fix men in small divisions being more willing to die for the cause than men in large divisions.
If you are continually having you divisions retreat from the front line, you should eventually get pushed out of the province. A division getting attacked by vastly inferior forces shouldn’t be completely pinned.
A fallback line should bend back when a province is taken, rather than just breaking. When you complete an encirclement, the front lines shouldn’t go completely nuts. In general, adjacent army lines should keep themselves in better order as they advance ir retreat, rather than spreading each army over the whole front.
There are a lot of terrible design decisions in the unit controller, as bitmode has found. It should take into account unit type and terrain. It should be willing to advance into empty territory when the enemy is falling back. The front should move forward in a way that interpolated between the starting and end line rather than try to make a straight line in the middle. It should be far less willing to shuffle units.
All very good points. The 3 infantry battalion Chinese division being able to pin my armor divisions until they ran out of org, always annoyed me. In general, I’m more forgiving of the AI being bad on Offense, because I don’t do much micro on offense. But, I definitely agree that defensive AI really needs work.
It is bad enough that I don’t play Allies because the AI tactical defense is too frustrating.
See, when you’re the one attacking, it’s not AI defensive blundering, its cleverly expoiting subtle weaknesses in the defensive scheme.
I mean ultimately the problem with all Paradox games is that the AI doesn’t know how to play them. You can trivially defeat the allies by late '37 with Germany with no RNG required because the British AI won’t even bother to defend the channel with their navy. There is literally no way a human player would let that happen but the AI just doesn’t seem to think defending the channel is much of an issue.
So yea, they could do a lot of things better.
That must be some type of record for DD. Do we get college credit for completing the diary, wow? Seriously, I think playing the Soviet Union and understanding the Soviet focus tree is got to be more comprehensive than a 20th century. Soviet history class at many universities.
It is pretty ambitious. Which makes me wonder if the A.I. Is going to be able to use it effectively.
Want some Trotsky or Bukharin in your revolution?
Got a legit late night cackle out of me. Every Paradox DLC in ANY of their published games introduces new features the AI can’t use properly and thus makes the game easier.
But then again the AI can’t even do the most basic things like “align your armies on the border BEFORE you declare war”, “apply distance calculations before assigning army movements”, “perform a successful naval invasion”.
It’s a good thing they are the only game in town because they do truly suck. I eagerly await the day another company forces them to step up.
Does Troy Goodfellow still hang out here? This is what he shared on Twitter and it caught my eye.
There’s some low hanging fruit (or so it seems to me as an observer, code-wise it might be an entirely different story) but for the most part I’m pretty impressed what the AI does do, especially considering that it’s in a realtime scenario. It doesn’t have the luxury of a turn-based game where it can analyze things in a static state and takes its time formulating decisions.
I do think that if this is going to be Paradox’s business model, they do need to invest more into AI. I think there should be one dedicated AI developer per team just to keep up with the ever-changing games which constantly obsoletes previous AI work.
That’s a highly misleading title. Preventing the UK from sending it’s entire army to Egypt or it’s entire navy to Singapore isn’t much about holding back a “too good” AI.
A good AI would never care about Africa. Or start the war in the first place.
Well I might have been being slightly dramatic or hyperbolic depending. I obviously do enjoy the games quite a bit. But the AI does have some real low hanging fruit as you suggested. So low hanging that it’s a bit offensive to me after a decade plus.
It is literally inexplicable that in these games the AI doesn’t appear to assign any value at all to distance when it assigns troop/fleet movements. They only value undefended areas and will happily run across half the universe to attack a strategically useless location that won’t give them any warscore. In fact I strongly suspect the AI doesn’t even consider how much warscore it will get when it makes decisions AT ALL, which is… not great. And leads to a lot of bad AI behavior because of a basic fundamental lack of understanding about HOW the AI should be making decisions to begin with.
The problems only really rear their heads because you as a player can abuse all these systems Paradox has included in the DLCs of these games but the AI can’t. So every patch and expansion makes games with a pretty trivial difficulty even more trivial. Which is kind of a weird and unfortunate downward spiral.
I’m not nearly as down on the AI as you are. Not that you said anything that isn’t true. But I strongly agree with you that virtually every DLC that Paradox puts out introduces a new system, which the AI for all intensive purposes can’t play. In the case of HOI IV that’s pretty much everything from ship design to espionage and increasingly complex focus trees.
The net effect that as I get better playing the game, the AI at best seems to stand still and often gets worse. The addition of Expert AI mode made that less true than most Paradox games.
I agree that HOIIV has become easier over the years in some ways (especially playing small countries). But i don’t think this is paradox-wide at all, EUIV has become alot harder for me for instance.
Hey, it’s cool if you want a Tsar, or something
Ok, it’s not cool, but that’s how we find the traitors of the revolution.