I am starting to think that, as an organization, the HoI4 dev team does not understand the gravity of the current AI problems. They don’t seem willing to consider game rules changes to make things easier for the AI. The AI developer basically throws up his hands that he doesn’t have the available CPU to solve the problem and it’s “not his call” to make gameplay changes.
Case in point, today they have another AI update. Someone asks whether they have addressed the issue of the AI transporting divisions through hostile sea zones. AI dev says he doesn’t have the CPU cycles, no solution coming in 1.4, or 1.4.1. Oh well, nothing can be done I guess!
To put some perspective here, Germany and Italy have a habit of sending lots of divisions to fight in Africa. That by itself is a problem. To make matters worse, they like to send these divisions by sea, through the English channel, down the Atlantic coast, around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Ethiopia. A shorter way to describe this troop movement is Mass Suicide. Or The Most Efficient Way to Get Your Armies Killed For Nothing. But I guess there is Nothing To Be Done!
Wait, say the players, can’t you just block sea transport of troops through sea zones where the enemy has naval superiority (like, uh, the North Sea, the English Channel, the whole freaking Atlantic?). You already do that for naval invasions. Well, checking that would be too expensive, since you have to do it all the time, for every unit. Maybe we could have a cache of recently tested paths? I guess that’s impossible.
I’m not seeing a willingness here to solve the problem. It’s like they are holding out for ultimate solution that will make the AI understand naval transport in a general sense, without using extra CPU. They don’t want to look at specific behaviors that are wrecking their game and put in some hard and fast rules to block it. It all has to be completely sandbox, no scripts, no guidelines.
AFAIK, they still haven’t done anything about Germany’s utterly disastrous railroaded war declarations either. Better to spend that time researching the minutia of Hungarian politics.