I'm the author of multiple AI mods for Paradox grand strategy games: Anbeeld's Revision of AI for Victoria 3, the AI in Imperator: Invictus, and my old personal Stellaris AI mod. I'm not modding much these days, but I wanted the design knowledge to live on. ARoAI never had proper documentation, for instance.

The article covers utility systems, blackboards, planners, and what happens when the scripting language can't express any of them. It goes through how each mod approximated standard game AI architectures, what each gave up, and what actually worked.

Okay so I have loved HOI4 and CK3, and….

Kinnnnd of getting into EU5…

But can somebody help me understand what the fundamental pleasure of the game is? What do people feel like is the dopamine / reward release they get from the game?

Is it map painting? Is it story?

What is the pay off?

I genuinely think Paradox games distort your sense of time. You sit down planning to play for maybe an hour, then suddenly it’s dark outside and you’ve spent half the day managing trade routes, fixing succession problems, or reorganizing front lines for the tenth time. And the dangerous part is that there’s never a clean stopping point. There’s always one more war, one more construction project, one more technological breakthrough, one more political disaster to deal with.
I think that’s why these games become so addictive compared to a lot of other strategy games. You stop playing “missions” and start living inside long-term campaigns where every decision creates another future problem to solve.
Honestly, half my favorite gaming memories are just random emergent chaos from Paradox games that no scripted story could ever reproduce. What Paradox game has stolen the most hours from your life overall?

Beyond the Stormwall lies a lost continent. Detailed in precursor records found in Aelantir, they speak of robotic assistants built in giant factories and terrible, civilisation-crushing monsters, left to roam the lands abandoned by their creators. As the High Temples of Haless failed, the storms subsided just enough to let in a few brave explorers to loot these jungles rich in damestear and precursor artefacts. But the islands and mountains and jungles are not as empty as outsiders thought they would be.

Take down the great beasts and make off with incredible loot, or fight off these invaders to declare yourselves the Inheritors of Insyaa!

Grandfather Moss Meets Kalei by Wierzba

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uvtmId4FVw

• The final continent of Anbennar is here. Beyond the Kiamoa - the massive wall of storms off the Halessi east coast - lies Insyaa. Nations of men, ogres, and kobolds vie for control over the habitable islands, plains, mountains, and plateaus. But greater foes lie outside. Anbennar's newest race, the mechanim, have awoken and seek to revive their fallen, while terrible holohana - massive civilisation-destroying kaiju - roam the jungles, crushing all beneath their might.
• The magic system has received a complete overhaul. Command your mages to study one of Anbennar's eight magical schools to gradually unlock stronger spells. Store mana (not monarch points, actual magical mana) in preparation for an epoch-defining war to launch meteors at your enemy, or develop your nation by shaping the terrain to your whims. Start great magical projects with the help of your mages. Ponder the orb, construct a battlemage academy, build the perfect homunculus, or raise an army of the dead.
• The new magic system completely rewrites how magic works in Anbennar, and expands the number of new stories to tell, with new mission trees built around these new systems. Take the Death Bringing Cobra clan and sign the Umbral Covenant to invite the Vile One, the Night Hags' greatest tool. Create a centaur lich as Black Herd, or practice Necronomics as the newly reworked Esthil. Defeat the slavers of Taychend as Orenvalyam, or bend spiritfire as the harimari of Cangji.
• Almost every nation can make use of the new magic system, and there are so, so many nations with all new mission trees this update. Take any of the three Firanyan Harpy nations in Bulwar and reforge the Harpylen Queendom, or you could unite the Exodus Goblins into the new Overclan. Build behemoths of the sea as Deranne, or enslave merfolk as Karassk. Make Cannor embrace superior gnomish culture as Iochand, turn the Shadow Swamp into a paradise as Yemotaferi, seek and destroy the underground dragon as Gor Vazumbrog. Endhuvi, Samsumbat, Shadowdreamer, over 50 new mission trees in Anbennar's largest update ever!

If you’re not sure which country to play, check out this site with details on the dozens of new mission trees: https://sites.google.com/view/anbennar-missions/missions (those mentioned already are but a fraction!).

Have questions, or just curious about lore? Bring them here in r/Anbennar and the https://discord.gg/anbennar

Changelog: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M_niqSK45pnZmmy3lnFL7NYlCWg1s2GksWLVu0K5sbo/edit?usp=sharing

Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1385440355

Discord: https://discord.gg/anbennar

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/anbennar.bsky.social

Empires rise and fall, but the Colossus of the Americas will surely always stand eternal.

Check out our first dev diary for our 0.21 Ozymandian Principle Update focusing on the Grande Imperio of Brazil, its inspirations for AtE and its new mechanics! Come to Brazil!

I’m curious about the choices made for AI development (specifically combat), in pretty much all the paradox games. It’s relevant to me now because of the Vic3 Great Wave Incident, but I’ve long been aware of the strange way the AI plays hoi4 with having tons of armies and moving divisions around. I’m just wondering why, and this isn’t a post of “paradox stupid and bad“ I feel like there must be a reason. In my eyes its one of these 3, or a combination:

1. the current method is actually fairly effective, creating a more human-like playstyle doesn’t offer any gains

2. the current method is the most computationally efficient (a bit of a stretch since what we’ve seen with Vic3, but I’ll buy that it was a bug)

3. Paradox either doesn’t have the budget or time to invest in more advanced AI (would be disappointing, but I understand that the market for these games is relatively small)

im a coder by trade but im no game developer, so im not gonna barge in and offer a solution like im some genius with all the answers. But like what do we know about what goes on with the AI in these games?

Would you like to see economy and politics from Victoria 3? War mechanics from HOI4? Something new or different?

Personally, I would like to see a bit more nuanced politics (to level of the Democracy games), complex foreign policies to capture the Cold War era complexity, UN mechanics, the social unrest of the 70s.

I think Victoria is doing a great job on economy and industrialization but not so well in politics. HOI4 is doing great in war, but after 1950 the only regular war there was was the Korean war. Everything else was unconventional by WW2 standards (like the Afghanistan war, the Iraq campaigns, the civil wars in Africa, the war in Yugoslavia and so on).

The addition of Henry was unexpected and pleasant surpsie, although it wasn't perfect. And here's the main issues:

1. Name
   So, this was a thing that you wouldn't usually know unless you make research on it, but "Henry of Skalitz" is not the actual name, but a localized one, germanified if you want with name being localied to English and Skalitz being german name for the town he is from. His actual name is Jindřich ze Skalice. So here's my suggestion on how to fix it:
   For dynasty:

dynn_skalitz = {
name = "dynn_skalice"
prefix = "dynnp_z"
culture = "czech"
motto = dynn_skalitz_motto
}

For the name, just replace "Henry" with "JindR_ich"
And the name is actually mapped in-game to be an equivalent of Henry

https://preview.redd.it/0yvaqcexny0h1.png?width=1496&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3eb2b84eae4be6d94b2376a9d229866f059c315

2. Actual Looks
   I think our boy Henry was done dirty. He is surprisingly small and a bit on the wider side, while in the original games he's as tall and slim as his actor. So i've modified the DNA here's side by side comparison. Red shirt is what we have in the game now, blue shirt is my edit:

Vanilla

Edit

Vanilla

Edit

3. The Sword

So this a thing that i cannot fix due to my lackluster knowledge of modding 3D assets. But I'll describe it. So, Henry starts with a unique longsword model in his hands, which is actually close to the sword he got in the game. But as soon as he equips the artifact sword, the model changes to another sword, which is nowhere close to how the sword looks from the game, which also is not even a longsword. Again, I have no idea how 3D assets work, so I dunno if you can even assign unique model to an artifact (which I belive is possible due to Reichskrone and Papal Crown doing the thing). So i ask to assign the model to the artifact, since it already exists in thegame files.

And with that my fix suggestion box is over. I hope you'll see it and actually consider taking directly from this post. And i guess i understand why you even chose "Henry of Skalitz" as the name, since recognizability. But mechanically in-game it raises (minor) issues. So i hope you still consider it.

This was copied from my post on Paradox forums. So if you want, you can also check it there: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/regarding-quality-of-addition-of-henry.1922618/

Disclosure: I'm part of the STNH dev team, so this is OC from our community.

For anyone unfamiliar — Star Trek: New Horizons is a total conversion mod for Stellaris that's been in development for years, turning the game into a full Star Trek universe with all the major factions, ships, events, and storylines.

Tomorrow at 13:00 CEST (12:00 BST / 7:00 AM EDT), YouTuber J4mie drops the finale of his interview series about the mod — a roughly one-hour documentary covering:

- The history of Star Trek games and how we got here

- Why the team and community keep doing what they do

- A big announcement about where the project is headed next 👀

Even if you're not a modder or Stellaris player, it's a pretty solid watch for anyone into Trek or the wider sci-fi-game space.

Happy to answer questions about the mod in the comments if anyone's curious.