Armageddon XL

The best AI experience in HOI4. Polished. Tested.

The vanilla experience rightly balances challenge and historical flavor. This mod aims to create maximum AI challenge at the cost of both flavor and history. This is as much a matter of game design as AI programming.

– Map setup favors the AI. Multiple/sparse fronts are reduced by faction setup that encourages fighting along dense continuous fronts. Small ports are removed to reduce island hopping and take burden off the garrison allocation AI.

– War start date is railroaded to August 1939, so the AI can min/max for that date, rather than build up conservatively while the human takes the initiative.

– The experience gained from focuses and that used (inefficiently) by AI templates are matched to help AI countries reach decent templates before a warmongering human crushes them.

– The AI does not construct, produce, or research for historical flavor, instead putting all effort into what it uses efficiently given its limitations (templates, garrison allocation, terrain assignment).

– Many AI behaviors are mitigated through scripting (front allocation, front ping-pong, ignoring collapsing fronts, suicide invasions).

Setup

– 16 Countries from alternative history

– Forge one of 8 regional factions and fight symmetric war against powerful foes, or go alone and against all odds

– Every division, wing, and ship present at the start of the vanilla game is owned by the country that alt-historically annexed its owner.

– Every commander in the vanilla game is present and ready to lead for his regional power.

– Every country is fascist and expansionist.

– Starting economies have been converted to civilian industry to force early buildup and balance setup (the vanilla factory balance assumes certain wars occur early).

– Resources have been increased to post-war levels outside of Europe, reflecting the rise of developed nations in those regions. Inspired by Increased Resources.

– Land doctrines do not provide conscription and Mass Assault has been rebalanced for a no-minors world.

Custom Focus Tree

– Difficult tradeoffs determine how each country will outproduce, expand and exterminate liberate.

– Relevant geopolitical choices reflect the alternative history of the world.

– The state of world events is visible in everyone’s focus tree.

– Complete overhaul of AI strategies (necessitated by alt-history setup)

– Complete rework of AI focuses

– Bypass of early-game construction AI using a system of on-events to allow the AI to take advantage of a priori knowledge of war start date and min/max

– Bypass of the tech focus system by a system of generated scripts, as the vanilla system is time consuming to tune, hard to balance, and produces surprising results given the non-controllable and non-observable focus weights

– Rework of AI production and templates, as there are only 800-pound gorillas in this world

– Targeted AI research that is matched to AXL production

– Bypass of AI threat assessment by a system of generated scripts that limits AI front allocation to its current vulnerability surface and imminent additions thereto. As of 1.4.1, the vanilla AI uses a nebulous threat assessment framework that will, for example, designate its main front in response to the ‘threat’ generated by a war declaration between third party majors and subsequently abandon a home area front that is collapsing. This cannot be fixed by tweaking defines and I thank the HOI4 team for a comprehensive script interface. This AI subsystem works very well given the premise that there are no surprise wars (and no bugs:)). Accordingly, AXL reduces the Fascist war justification bonus to ensure >60-day fabrication/focus time.

– Custom peace AI that is better overall than alternatives and far superior for fluid alt-history scenarios. The dominant paradigm for peace AI, e.g. vanilla and Enhanced Peace Conference AI, is cellular automata supplemented with lots of special cases for regions. Cellular automata are myopic and a frequent result is multiple blobs per country. The AXL peace AI reduces the number of origin points and avoids working itself into corners, so greatly reduces the final number of blobs. Expect the AI to favor contiguous territory.

– 100% no cheating, stays up to date on technology, produces more equipment, makes stronger divisions, fights longer and harder

– Bottom line: AI construction, focus and research choices are almost identical to my choices. Idea/law selection is improved. Hardcoded production AI is a little wonky but is given less room to wobble. Hardcoded template AI still, as of 1.4.1, seems to lack a useful definition of the space it is searching so is very rando, but is tightly constrained within AXL design and usually does an approximation of a good job. Strategic/front AI is vastly improved, puts waaay more divisions into the fight, and eliminates the anti-climax of preparing for war only to advance unopposed while the defender has troops available. Front ping pong is greatly decreased. Tactical AI improves as vanilla improves.

– All files are generated for: states, country histories, OOBs, ideas, technologies. Will conflict with any mod that modifies these file types. Unless the other mod is a sub mod, this will surely produce weirdness.

– Map mods that do NOT modify states should work, e.g. More Sea Crossings.

– This mod replaces every AI file. It will not work with other major AI mods. It will work with neither technology mods nor research AI mods as AXL technologies and research AI are coupled by generated scripts.

– Will conflict with template AI mods and peace AI mods. Should work, but in-game behavior will depend on load order.

– Politics mods will likely work.

– Equipment / variant mods will likely work.

– Graphical/rendering mods should all work.

– User interface mods should work but will conflict if they edit the tech tree view. Known to work with Coloured Buttons, Colourblindness Mod.

This game requires Steam and the default location for this mod is

C:Program Files (x86)Steamsteamappsworkshopcontent394360973037553