AI not attacking at all in campaign

I doubt anyone will know what to do about this... but it made me unhappy and I figured I'd post it especially as if I ever figure it out it will be good knowledge.


The AI in my campaign does not attack, ever. I let a campaign auto run for 40 years and no borders changed. Difficulty is on hard. It's got to be the result of some of my modding but I don't know what particularly as I've modded many things.

I have not changed the AI personalities. I did change unit upkeep costs, some construction times and other aspects of buildings. I removed the armor/weapon/valor bonuses from buildings and provinces. Ships are removed but landbridges are everywhere. All nations start with plenty of money.

They just build buildings and recruit armies until they run out of money but they never attack period.

They buy all of the horse breeder buildings in every province first but I seem to recall that happening in vanilla as well.

Aha! I finally discovered what it was. Funny how you post about something and then immediately you find the answer after having looked for hours before posting..

The problem was that I had watchtowers disabled entirely. The AI must only attack when they have a watchtower adjacent to the target province. It surprised me, but it makes a little sense.

I had disabled watchtowers as I liked not being able to see enemy armies before invading. I also limited myself to one of each type of agent so I would be limited in what I could see around the world.

Yes I tried this once and had the same result. The best approach is to entirely disable border forts, but keep watchtowers and pre-build them (add them to the startpos) in every province. I would go further and add a fort to every single province as well. This ensures that the AI has at least some basic starting infrastructure in every province.

Good ideas, certainly will carry them out.

Any other tricks for getting the AI to be more aggressive? They still seem to not like taking rebel land as much as they ought..

Have you tried changing the starting personalities? The "expansionist" types are usually the best, if you want an overly agressive AI.

Giving the AI more money and greater stability makes them attack sooner and a more effective force as a whole though.

If you want to go up against a very challenging AI, you would need to set up something like Raz posted about here:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...52#post2502552

This is basically a per faction startpos approach - I think it's a superb idea and if I still played MTW, I would definitely go for this instantly.

It's worth noting that if you increase rebelliousness to something like +1 or +2 for all provinces, the AI will likely sit there and not attack for years. This needs to be done in combination with giving them more money for best results.

:bow:

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It's worth noting that if you lower the provincial loyalty to something like -1 or -2 for all provinces, the AI will likely sit there and not attack for years. This needs to be done in combination with giving them more money for best results.

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I assume this sentence is backwards in some way. The higher number means they are more rebellious and the AI will sit there, I realized I had upped rebelliousness by +2 on every province, I bet this is a problem. Going to test without that now.

It worked.. screenshot says it all. After 20 years of war with France I have been beaten.

https://img251.imageshack.us/img251/618/00000002d.jpg

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Originally Posted by Garnier

I assume this sentence is backwards in some way. The higher number means they are more rebellious and the AI will sit there, I realized I had upped rebelliousness by +2 on every province, I bet this is a problem. Going to test without that now.

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I could have sworn negative values increase rebelliousness... I don't have the game installed so can't check.

:bow:

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Originally Posted by Asai Nagamasa

I could have sworn negative values increase rebelliousness... I don't have the game installed so can't check.

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Well its wrong regardless, it is the other way around.

Positive “rebel-values” in startpos = - loyalty/stability, 20% per point
Negative “rebel-values” in startpos = + loyalty/stability, 20% per point

I've just done, what I should have done before - downloaded my own mod - and indeed it is correct that it's positive values that increase rebelliousness. I had all of the provinces set to +2 and some at +3 and +4.

So I was correct in assuming that increasing the rebellious factor causes the AI to stay put and not invade. Garnier's results also seem to confirm this.

It's probably best left at 0 as the AI does seem to struggle to deal with anything higher.

:bow: