Paradox Interactive Thread: V3 'Check out my sick Germany blob' - Games

Color Slider for armies in HOI4 [t]https://i.imgur.com/EcV8Kno.png[/t] [editline]27th April 2016[/editline] [video]https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/725271684647915520[/video]

[QUOTE=Tuskin;50215170]Color Slider for armies in HOI4 [t]https://i.imgur.com/EcV8Kno.png[/t][/QUOTE] I still don't like the map, there was nothing wrong with the solid color political map. It just looks so much like some sort of map you'd see in a browser game.

[QUOTE=Anderan;50216815]I still don't like the map. There was nothing wrong with the solid color political map. It just looks so much like some sort of map you'd see in a browser game.[/QUOTE] also not a fan of the weird mix of political and geographic modes the giant cities/rivers/forests/mountains, fat glowing borders, wide units, and the undetailed 3D map (unfinished hopefully?) makes everything look bloated, at least when zoomed in [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/aBDYHbP.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/YZcRK32.png[/IMG]

It feels like Paradox has been working for a while to eliminate the need to switch map modes, at least political and geographical map modes. It all started with the "bumpy" map in CKII and EU IV and this seems to be some progression of that.

To be honest I'm not terribly worried about how the map looks, mods will fix it all.

I am new to Victoria 2. What's a good way to violently purge the anarcho liberals?

[QUOTE=SuperPlamz;50217381]I am new to Victoria 2. What's a good way to violently purge the anarcho liberals?[/QUOTE] Let them revolt and kill all of them. Beyond that prevention is the best measure.

[QUOTE=tehMuffinMan;50216975]also not a fan of the weird mix of political and geographic modes the giant cities/rivers/forests/mountains, fat glowing borders, wide units, and the undetailed 3D map (unfinished hopefully?) makes everything look bloated, at least when zoomed in [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/aBDYHbP.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/YZcRK32.png[/IMG][/QUOTE] That. First image is old as shot, it doesn't look like that anymore

[url]https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hearts-of-iron-iv-development-diary-54-ai.924168/[/url] [QUOTE]Greetings every one! This weeks DD is about something I know many of you have been hoping and waiting for a long time; AI! "The field of ridiculously high expectations and abysmally low standards." - Wiz Being the only one crazy enough to want to take on the AI in HoI4 as Wiz went on to other projects, I was thrown in to it over a year ago now, and while it has been the hardest job I have ever had, it has also been the most fun and rewarding one. So, lets jump in, shall we? Right off the bat there were a couple of MASSIVE challenges in making the HoI4 AI; 1: Maintaining plausible historical behavior in a relatively dynamic and sandbox oriented game 2: Making the execution of player drawn battle plans solid enough that it would feel beneficial to use it. Rest assured that significant amounts of sweat, blood and tears have been shed to tackle these issues. For the first challenge, a couple of things sets the AI of Heart of Iron apart from the other PDS titles. First of all the chronologically compact and recent nature means people have different expectations on the HoI AI to act more or less according to history. While HoI4 is more of a sandbox experience than at the very least its latest predecessor, the set up is still historical and there were often reasons for countries to take certain actions at the times that they did. The challenge here was to have an AI capable of handling new situations dynamically in a way that makes at least some sense, regardless of if they are historical or not. Our approach to this problem is a dynamic AI as a foundation, with game mechanics pushing countries in certain directions both for players and AI. The primary mechanic for this is, of course, the national foci, which have been covered in previous diaries. These direct the player and AI towards various goals both before and during the great war that eventually happens. But how does the AI pick focuses? This can either be strictly scripted on a per country basis and activated by playing the game in 'historical focus mode'. While it is fully moddable a historical setup for this is included. When that mode is NOT active, the AI picks foci using a combination of scripted weights and dynamic underlying systems that look at the situation of the country. That dynamic system pushed by scripted weights is something that runs throughout all of the AI. Aside from well over 200 tweakable defines which tweak various aspects of the internal dynamic AI behavior, the weights can pretty much always be tweaked using the trigger system discussed in the modding DD. All in all there are practically no aspect of the AI which cannot be touched through defines, weight tweaks or both. For example, the desire for Austria to accept the Anschluss event could look like this: ai_chance = { base = 30 modifier = { add = -25 GER = { has_army_size = { size < 20 } } } modifier = { factor = 10 GER = { has_army_size = { size > 19 } } } } And if they refuse, Germanys attitude towards them can be altered like this: anschluss_rejected = { # Conditions enable = { tag = GER has_completed_focus = GER_anschluss country_exists = AUS } abort = { NOT = { country_exists = AUS } } # Modification if strategy is enabled ai_strategy = { type = antagonize id = "AUS" value = 300 } } To give even more flavor to the behavior of countries, there are ways to modify things like the attitude towards other countries with...well, modifiers. These modifiers can be attached to to things like ministers, laws or even leader traits. This means that depending on who is in charge of a country, their interactions with other countries can vary, not just because of their ideology. This is something I want to look at expanding on even more in the future, but the modding possibilities are already notable. Such a trait may look like this: warrior_code = { random = no ai_call_ally_desire_factor = -40 } Or this: warmonger = { random = no ai_focus_aggressive_factor = 0.5 } A couple of areas that gives the modder extra freedom is division template design, where you can tweak target templates, weight which stats the dynamic system should prioritize for specific division types, per country. The dynamic system will even pick up on if they have an unused equipment type and make a template design to accommodate it. The other noteworthy system is how the AI scores its options in peace deals, which is fully scriptable, both per ideology as well as per country, if you so wish. Big thanks to Groogy for spending the time required on that! The second big challenge; making the execution of player drawn battle plans good enough to feel useful. Whenever you give over control of a system to the computer, you expose all the weaknesses of the system for player scrutiny. An AI country that makes mistakes with its own troops can often get away with it, but messing up with the players units will lead to frustration. The solution to this is mainly design; the system is not intended or built to be a magical "win war" button, but rather a tool to organize large numbers of units when every single detail is not critical. Both the AI and the player is expected to oversee critical operations, but they will not have to think about no-brainer situations, and is thus free to handle much much bigger armies and operations than if they had to micromanage them. This means that the internal workings of how the AI handles the units that are part of plans needs fewer bells and whistles, and by extension has fewer things that can go bonkers. Even so, making it has been as hard as it has been rewarding. So lets have a peek behind the curtains, into the mind of the AI. In this situation, Germany has just gone to war against Poland. This tooltip tells us about the general, long term attitude of a country towards other countries. Germany, as we can see, is looking with unkind eyes towards its closest democracies while being supportive towards its fascist faction members. [IMG]http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/161335/DD1.jpg[/IMG] Netherlands, meanwhile, is feeling the heat. Being threatened by Germany, they either want to see it weakened or to be their friend, but do not want to openly antagonize them at the clear risk of being crushed: [IMG]https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?attachments/dd2-jpg.173987/[/IMG] A more detailed look at Englands attitude towards Netherlands at this time shows us they want to protect the democratic minor of western Europe: [IMG]http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/161337/DD3.jpg [/IMG] But as England has entered the war against Germany moments later, Netherlands is very reluctant to join the Allies, being at clear risk of ending up under the heel of Germany at this time: [IMG]http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/161338/DD4.jpg [/IMG] And lastly, I want to give you a peek at how the AI determines troop levels for orders. Keep in mind that many groups need to share troops, and they may end up with less than they want or need if another group has a much higher priority: [IMG]http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/161339/DD5.jpg[/IMG] Exactly which types of troops end up in which order is also done dynamically, but I have no cool tooltip screenshot of that. I would say that the proudest moment for any AI developer is when their own creation defeats them in an unexpected manner. For me, such a moment came about two weeks ago when I was playing singleplayer as Germany. I had taken over western Europe easily enough through careful planning and superior weaponry. Wanting to take out England before looking east I was covering guarding my coast in case the Allies got and D-Day ambitions, as well as making sure my border with Soviet was covered, while putting as much resources as I could towards building up my forces for a naval invasion of Britain. It was then that England and USA managed to overwhelm BOTH the Italian and Spanish coastal defenses and gain a solid foot hold. Sending troops to back my friends up, once they arrived both England and USA had landed A LOT more troops, overwhelming both the Italian/Spanish defenses as well as my reinforcements. I could probably have taken on one of them, but both together with such a solid hold in southern Europe was more than I could manage. Save for that, my best days are when Da9l comes and tells me the AI kicked his ass in one way or another, or just forcing him to change his plans. A few bullet points that should answer the most burning questions: There is no 'hard coding' outside of the scripts. No where in the code does it say "if country is X, then do Y" or similar. The dynamic AI systems does not cheat. They use the same information as is available to the player, including estimating enemy forces based on intel numbers. Save for boosting party popularity, there is no feature in the game that the AI is completely barred from using. It being intended more as a sandbox feature for players. We have also had to limit it a lot when it comes to staging coups. Extra kudos goes out to Wiz as head AI honcho, who makes sure I don't fuck everything up, and Groogy, who has gotten to step in and help out when the work load has become too much for one person. I would also like to extend gratitude towards all the amazing beta testers, who have provided tons of valuable feedback and support! As a closing comment I just want to say that, while no one can hope to meet everyones hopes and expectations of the 'best' possible AI for a game like this, we at Paradox fell it is shaping up really well, and I really hope you all will enjoy playing HoI4 as much, and even more, as I have had making and playing it.[/QUOTE]

That sounds amazing!

Agreed, this is a great step for PI on making their AI better. Crucial even for a game like HoI.

[QUOTE=Lone Wolf807;50225465]Agreed, this is a great step for PI on making their AI better. Crucial even for a game like HoI.[/QUOTE] Yeah, in hoi3 it was common to see the ai make decisions like dumping 300k troops on an island the size of Iwo Jima making it pretty unplayable. Japan often did this weird tactic in my vanilla hoi3 games.

Honestly the worst offender was the fact that you could drop 10 divisions on the Japanese homeland and annex them without any resistance. So much for Operation Overlord.

Overlord is France, you're thinking of Downfall

Yep, my bad. I always get those mixed up for some reason :v: EDIT: If you were playing a mod would you be opposed to a random chance that you have no control over? I'm thinking of making it so there's a chance after the Spanish Civil War that the Libertarians/Moderate-Conservatives/Marxists begin fighting as well, as a player would you enjoy that or would you rather have full control of the events to have it play out as you wish?

[t]http://i.imgur.com/rEhb5IE.png[/t] [t]http://i.imgur.com/fK3C0da.png[/t] [QUOTE]COMING TO A LOCATION NEAR YOU HENRI DE BISSI HAS ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A CRUSADER AND DENISE BINT ALPHONSE HAS ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A MUSLIM WHAT HAPPENS WHEN STARS COLLIDE AND THESE TWO COURTIERS... ARE TO BE MARRIED!?!?!?!? SAY "DUES VULT" THIS SUMMER FOR WHAT CRITICS ARE CALLING THE MOST INCEST FILLED DISGRACE TO CINEMA SINCE THE FANTASTIC FOUR: CRUSADERS OF LOVE[/QUOTE]

Not to be the pessimistic one yet again but Paradox has claimed repeatedly in the past to have fixed their ai to mixed results. At least it sounds like the AI will react much more sensibly diplomacy wise. It's really hard to say though with AI until it's been exposed to a very large number of scenarios like it will when it's actually released. Some previous games didn't really have some of their more glaring issues become noticeable until you'd played a couple dozen games. Also, this isn't even really a Paradox thing, but pretty much any interview or dev diary where a developer talks about AI they talk about one instance where the AI does something "smart" to showcase how "dynamic" their AI is. [QUOTE=Lone Wolf807;50226415]Honestly the worst offender was the fact that you could drop 10 divisions on the Japanese homeland and annex them without any resistance. So much for Operation Overlord.[/QUOTE] Even worse was the fact that several event chains seemed to rely on other, completely unrelated event chains. IIRC at one point you could stop WWII (or at least part of it) from happening by not instigating the Great Purge as the USSR, so the events leading to it never took off. I think the AI would just declare war eventually but it would still fuck everything and it would all be a few years behind.

It makes me mad that Stellaris releases on a monday :v: [editline]1st May 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=Anderan;50229531] Even worse was the fact that several event chains seemed to rely on other, completely unrelated event chains. IIRC at one point you could stop WWII (or at least part of it) from happening by not instigating the Great Purge as the USSR, so the events leading to it never took off. I think the AI would just declare war eventually but it would still fuck everything and it would all be a few years behind.[/QUOTE] I believe that was fixed with For The Motherland but I could be wrong. I've usually played Hearts of Iron III with the Historical Plausibility Project, and had some pretty fun moments. Like, when I fucked up as the USSR so bad that the fascists took power. (At that point, I used cheats to become Russia and join the Axis. Also fuck me if that makes sense)

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50236589]It makes me mad that Stellaris releases on a monday :v: [editline]1st May 2016[/editline] I believe that was fixed with For The Motherland but I could be wrong. I've usually played Hearts of Iron III with the Historical Plausibility Project, and had some pretty fun moments. Like, when I fucked up as the USSR so bad that the fascists took power. (At that point, I used cheats to become Russia and join the Axis. Also fuck me if that makes sense)[/QUOTE] The sad part about Stellaris releasing next week is that I have this one off.

oh man I have finals this week, nothing next week. Cool! I'll pick it up once its released.

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50236589]It makes me mad that Stellaris releases on a monday :v: [editline]1st May 2016[/editline] I believe that was fixed with For The Motherland but I could be wrong. I've usually played Hearts of Iron III with the Historical Plausibility Project, and had some pretty fun moments. Like, when I fucked up as the USSR so bad that the fascists took power. (At that point, I used cheats to become Russia and join the Axis. Also fuck me if that makes sense)[/QUOTE] Lmao, what? How the fuck did you manage that. I've only ever really seen that happen in BIce when I purposely support my party all game on the USSR, but the events just make it swing back to Stalinist anyway.

[QUOTE=Lone Wolf807;50237689]Lmao, what? How the fuck did you manage that. I've only ever really seen that happen in BIce when I purposely support my party all game on the USSR, but the events just make it swing back to Stalinist anyway.[/QUOTE] I clicked repeatedly on the wrong choices for decisions with the HPP and the fascists managed to seize power either due to emergency elections or a coup or something.

I think everyone knows this at this point, but you can mess also around with factions by editing a save file in a text editor.

The most weird things i've seen happen was France leaving the allies somehow and the US electing Eisenhower (or was it Mac Arthur? Could have been him i can't remember) or Alf Landon. These were in BICE. I believe i also saw the Japanese attack the USSR and take a huge chunk of it's eastern territory and i saw them land in Australia and take it over a few times as well.

[video]https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/722109469530959873[/video]

[QUOTE=Adarrek;50239047]The most weird things i've seen happen was France leaving the allies somehow and the US electing Eisenhower (or was it Mac Arthur? Could have been him i can't remember) or Alf Landon. These were in BICE. I believe i also saw the Japanese attack the USSR and take a huge chunk of it's eastern territory and i saw them land in Australia and take it over a few times as well.[/QUOTE] I always see people give BIce shit for railroading but I've seen strange shit like that happen as well. Japan taking over all of Australia or actually winning the Sino-Jap war. I've seen them do a land invasion of the USSR too. Usually ends poorly because of shit infrastructure. The older versions of it are way better than the new ones though, imo.

[QUOTE=Lone Wolf807;50240769]I always see people give BIce shit for railroading but I've seen strange shit like that happen as well. Japan taking over all of Australia or actually winning the Sino-Jap war. I've seen them do a land invasion of the USSR too. Usually ends poorly because of shit infrastructure. The older versions of it are way better than the new ones though, imo.[/QUOTE] Yeah with the scripted invasions event, Germany can take over the UK, (which i've seen happen a few times) and then if London falls they have the chance to land troops in the US as well which also happened with me when i was playing the US. Japan can also invade Hawaii and have the event to land troops on the west coast which also happened with me.

[video]https://twitter.com/PDX_Dev_Studio/status/727142970844127232[/video] [editline]2nd May 2016[/editline] [quote]Is there something similar for other software besides Maya, such as Blender? Unfortunately not at this time. It's an addon for Maya. But [b]we will be releasing our .mesh format so that anyone willing and with the skills can write an exporter for other software, like blender.[/b][/quote]

Okay, that's beautiful. Cannot wait to be able to take a crack at making models for ancient stuff for EUIV mods. [editline]2nd May 2016[/editline] When they say "partially compatible", probably in regards to animations and whatnot

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYIsjsntFo&ab_channel=ParadoxInteractive[/media] [t]http://i.imgur.com/0RbYMZI.png[/t] I was on the fence at first but I'm really coming along to the map.