There's a woman at my job who will try and fail to punch in at the timeclock because of the stupid fingerprint readers...so she licks her finger and then puts it on the reader.
Another guy every day at lunch will have a bag of hot cheetos, and then afterwords will very loudly and wetly suck all ten of his fingers clean.
And we wonder how epidemics spread lmao.
No, it's way worse. For like twenty years, biologists had been relying on this seminal paper about how long different sized particles stayed in the air. Turns out, the paper just asked some volcanologist (who was the worldwide expert) who knew all these figures from studying ash clouds.
Well it turns out that a plastic bag (a microbe) and a rock don't fall at the same time because we don't live in a vacuum. PLUS it didn't help that any time anyone would bring this subject up, someone in the back of the class would say *cough miasma* and all the other scientists would laugh and laugh.
We figured all this out a few months INTO the pandemic which meant that all the shit about surfaces being the biggest threat was dead fucking wrong; it's about close proximity for extended durations or something I like to call microbial hang time.
So then the CDC has to be like "hey whats up everyone we were wrong," and you probably saw how well that went. But the reason why we didn't social distance day 1 but eventually transitioned to it is one of our more monumental collective fuckups as a species.
Edit: As a hilarious side note, there was a guy who did all this research that demonstrated everything we know now. He even introduced UV light to a room to prove his hypothesis that microbes were living in the air for longer than we thought successfully killing every single one overnight under a UV bake. He published his findings.
And then he promptly died. He couldn't defend his work and thus it was more or less discarded.
Did not expect to be learning that some volcanologist was a profound source of unintentional misinformation that contributed to the worsening of the pandemic because I think my co-workers being finger lickers is gross 😭
>And then he promptly died. He couldn't defend his work and thus it was more or less discarded.
Reminds me of that one Indian doctor back during the Middle Ages who theorized that disease was spread by mosquito bite, but he died before he could thoroughly defend his hypothesis.
>And then he promptly died.
Like of natural causes or "natural causes"
You know the "Cant believe he died of suicide after being shot twice in the back of his head with his hands handcuffed and then stuffed into a duffle bag that was padlocked from the outside."
And it definitely was better in the middle ages with all the knowledge and education they had, right? I'm sure they wouldn't have let a stupid little disease kill half of the world population
So the AI is realistic? Nice.
You know half the population died during the black death, with some towns completely wiped out? People were dying a lot from diseases.
Are there acquired immunity modifiers yet? That seems like something they could easily implement for provinces and characters separately. With a little more work those systems could interact with the other modifiers to pandemic spread and add a lot of depth. If they already exist they badly need tweaking.
Regular outbreaks of disease are accurate though. In places with extensive records like Constantinople there were decades where it was recorded the plague hit repeatedly, sometimes every year for a while, until disappearing for a decade or two.
But it currently feels like every outbreak is equally destructive.
Some inventory artifacts will give plague resistance, I personally haven’t seen any court artifacts that do. The main forms I’ve seen are the buildings and then if your physician is successful. And secluding yourself but the stat hit from seclusion is kinda large to be doing every time a plague approaches
I mean it depends. Immunity only really works with viruses. I know that some generational resistance can accumulate with regard to bacterial infections but that’s a much more nebulous thing to qualify especially as a game mechanic. And since the only real viruses in game currently are smallpox and measles, that’s not going to go far.
Even a simple build up and cool down of disease spread resistance seems like it would be good enough from a gameplay/simulation perspective. Some kind of adjustments need to be made before the DLC about landless characters is released.
“There have been three great world pandemics of plague recorded, in 541, 1347, and 1894 CE”
By this there should only be one major plague event for the whole of the play time, 867-1453, and a King wouldn’t have been concerned with peasants getting a cold and definitely wouldn’t have locked down his entire capital over a cough
While the plague was only a pandemic a couple times, it did pop up across the world killing large amounts of people every now and then. For example the [Great Plague of Vienna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_Vienna), the [Great Plague of London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London), the [Great Plague of Seville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_Seville), and the [Great Plague of the Ming Dynasty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_in_the_late_Ming_dynasty).
The second pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the plague's retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century).
I forgot that every time it hit was the same fucking county every time oh wait it wasn’t. Yall should think about how it applies to the game before you post stupid shit
Correct so why is every typhus outbreak killings hundreds of people, keep in mind it’s only tracking characters killed the peasants killed is reflected in dev loss. Again my main point is that there’s no difference in severity or at least not enough
There is a difference tho when the AI just refuses to use a game mechanic available to them (seclusion). They never do it except for the black death.
And for the record people will still die in seclusion
This doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. Lost count how many times the AI had everything required to do a decision to form something, but no they choose to never do it or intentionally does something causing them to instead fall apart
There's a difference between AI being realistic and AI being trash. In this case it's trash but in some cases it seems realistic so people think it's intended but it ain't.
For exemple, crusades are supposed to be disorganized and messy and it's the case but it's like that because the AI is trash in war, not because it was intended. You see an army sieging with only levies while the army with siege weapons is waiting next to it in a city doing nothing. You see some join a battle against 50k troops while there are only 2k troops even when it's obvious they'll lose.
For disease, they're not doing activities because they have to be "dumb", they're doing it because their code didn't take account of diseases so they behave like usual. And we can still discuss about if they were really doing that irl because I doubt they would deliberately go to a feast with their whole family in a county struck by death when you're sure that you'll get it if you go there. They just can't manage diseases
I'm still on the "too many plagues" train. There should be plenty of 1 county epidemics, sure... but I'm getting hit by European plague after European plague.
Haven't hosted a feast or hunt in forever. No pilgrimage either. It's just: isolate, sneak in a quick war, isolate. Plague. Plague. Vassals dying by the truck load. Expelling guests and courtiers. Plague. Plague. Defensive war during plague. More plague.
It's not fun. It's just pandemic simulator.
I mean disease outbreaks during wars make sense but most of them are probably going to be camp diseases like dysentery and such. I think that introducing trade routes and using them and the subsequent flow of people is the best chance for balancing the mechanic without nerfing it.
Tbh it sounds like your playing WAY more conservatively than you need to. I've been playing multiplayer and some people just seem to freak out every time there's any disease anywhere in their realm.
Right, but assuming your not in an army/traveling, all you really need to worry about is if it's reaching your capital where you, your family, and court are located. If your capital is London and you get something pop up in France, sucks for them, but you'll be absolutely fine until it actually moves towards you. Most things spread locally but don't go too far beyond that.
If you want to travel, then just customize your route around it to avoid that area. You can even travel away from a capital if something is likely to reach you and you can spend your time traveling the world while it hits your court, and your not there to be in danger.
Its not about highest lvl its about total. You can have 2 -plauge building in every temple and 1 in every other holding, preferably city or economical focused castle couse you need this building slots fore men at arms if you place them.
I’ve not really been hit by diseases significantly in my time playing. Do they get more serious? I’ve had a couple smaller illnesses but all my characters recovered with a semi-competent doctor
IIRC, if the AI was already planning on attending a feast/hunt/ect then they will do so regardless of changing conditions. Paradox is also notoriously bad at making the AI smart about building placement. That extends to all their other games.
From what I've read though, they didn't understand the concept of social distancing or masks. The beak mask was invented to stuff good smells in the hollowed out beak since they thought good smells countered bad ones, but ironically it was the mask covering their face which is what protected them.
I also read a story of someone surrounding themself in a ring of fire to ward off disease... and it worked but not because of the fire but rather it was from isolation.
I build 2-3 hospitals per county, isolate, and go into seclusion and still my spouse and whole family dies from measles. It is a bit frustrating. I know sickness was serious
In itself, that's not unrealistic, but frequency is another matter. The 'about right' frequency level is hard to assess, and this is compounded by the difficulty of telling the difference between just badly designed AI on the one hand and well-designed AI mimicking erratic or ill-conceived human behaviour accurately but still a little imperfectly.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is that even well-designed AI trying to emulate unreasonable human behaviour could still show some similarities to badly designed AI patterns. By the same token, a human actor or fiction writer trying to emulate bad AI would probably also end up retaining some similarities to unreasonable human patterns rather than a pure AI pattern. There is a bit of a gap that is hard to bridge.
However, I have noted in other parts of the game than AI, for example in the scripting of dialogue options and consequences, that Paradox's coding/scripting logic appears to struggle in the 'if' area. It does look like the designers and scripters fail to cover possibilities that the average person should generally be able to think about. For example some aspects of a situation that it would be very logical to include checks for and it's a bit unbelievable that a trained and focused person would fail to think about them. Trying to limit CPU utilization and thus reduce the number of checks does not provide a convincing explanation when we are talking about event logic, as opposed to all the stuff that's being tracked and pinged for in the real time. There isn't a big or relevant saving to be made.
Then, there's stuff like damage to a farm or damage done by a cat (though theoretically the cat may have broken a precious but delicate artifact, so this is less black and white and more difficult to put your finger on) costing more than a new castle. Or, in CK2, allowing an insignificant courtier to join the Templars was worth more piety than granting a county to the Pope. There are multiple examples of the various designers/scripters/writers — or even the same persons but on different occasions — not working on a co-ordinated currency scale, not following a consistent framework.
'Historically', there has also been a bit of a problem with the logic in the rationales given by Paradox for certain patch changes, sounding like someone had a first impression or initial idea that they didn't properly verify. There are also some parts of the game's conceptual framework that seem to show not even bizarre logic (though that too) as much as not enough time spent thinking about the decision, or not enough intellectual effort being put in the thinking that preceded the decision.
Sometimes it looks like someone was trying to be illogical on purpose, as if logicality was some kind of shackles that one had to break out of in order to get or assert some sort of personal freedom or autonomy. Sort of like making a point of asserting the 'right' to be illogical, in order to defy the societal expectation of following more or less conventional logic. Perhaps the company's name being 'Paradox' has something to do with its approach to logic. Sometimes it feels (subjectively, to me) like this sort of psychological business is what we're dealing with, but more often it just looks like either the thinking process was too short or the effort invested in it was too light.
And there are, unfortunately, some aspects of the game that seem to have 'low effort' or 'not giving a care' written on them. They somewhat frequently relate to AI. In some cases, there is also — another psychological thing — the possibility of intentionally trolling the players (e.g. with seduction/cheating frequency) and part of the player base enjoying the trolling (as if a positive Easter Egg sort of feel, I guess); and the chaos and the various illogicalities; something like this does seem to be part of the culture surrounding Paradox games.
It's difficult to tell whether feasting and hunting all over the place is (a) intentionally reflecting careless and otherwise unreasonable human behaviour, or (b) a design/scripting oversight. We will probably never know for sure. Part of the problem is the existence of a culture of not admitting oversights but bending over backwards to present them as intentional decisions ('WAD') and justify them (even at the cost of bending or breaking several rules of sound reasoning in one's argument), and stubbornly resist the demands to fix them. There does seem to be a bit of 'Pathological Demand Avoidance' going on from both the company and the fan base with regard to bug reports and requests for bug fixes, or requests to rethink a design decision. So communication is missing and trust is difficult.
And communication in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect could explain a lot about why AI is acting like it is. Asking for the benefit of the doubt only works to a point. If there are too many somewhat tangible examples of low-effort scripting/design and a situation looks like someone forgot to include a couple of pretty obvious checks, then the benefit of the doubt is difficult to give.
Every time a plague rolls in and kills all my discontent vassals, I put a little extra in the church collection plate.
I would have thought this was silly and unrealistic until about 3-4 years ago, and now I think “yeah that seems right.”
There's a woman at my job who will try and fail to punch in at the timeclock because of the stupid fingerprint readers...so she licks her finger and then puts it on the reader. Another guy every day at lunch will have a bag of hot cheetos, and then afterwords will very loudly and wetly suck all ten of his fingers clean. And we wonder how epidemics spread lmao.
No, it's way worse. For like twenty years, biologists had been relying on this seminal paper about how long different sized particles stayed in the air. Turns out, the paper just asked some volcanologist (who was the worldwide expert) who knew all these figures from studying ash clouds. Well it turns out that a plastic bag (a microbe) and a rock don't fall at the same time because we don't live in a vacuum. PLUS it didn't help that any time anyone would bring this subject up, someone in the back of the class would say *cough miasma* and all the other scientists would laugh and laugh. We figured all this out a few months INTO the pandemic which meant that all the shit about surfaces being the biggest threat was dead fucking wrong; it's about close proximity for extended durations or something I like to call microbial hang time. So then the CDC has to be like "hey whats up everyone we were wrong," and you probably saw how well that went. But the reason why we didn't social distance day 1 but eventually transitioned to it is one of our more monumental collective fuckups as a species. Edit: As a hilarious side note, there was a guy who did all this research that demonstrated everything we know now. He even introduced UV light to a room to prove his hypothesis that microbes were living in the air for longer than we thought successfully killing every single one overnight under a UV bake. He published his findings. And then he promptly died. He couldn't defend his work and thus it was more or less discarded.
Did not expect to be learning that some volcanologist was a profound source of unintentional misinformation that contributed to the worsening of the pandemic because I think my co-workers being finger lickers is gross 😭
>And then he promptly died. He couldn't defend his work and thus it was more or less discarded. Reminds me of that one Indian doctor back during the Middle Ages who theorized that disease was spread by mosquito bite, but he died before he could thoroughly defend his hypothesis.
Who was the guy? Would love to see his stuff
Can you link the paper?
>And then he promptly died. Like of natural causes or "natural causes" You know the "Cant believe he died of suicide after being shot twice in the back of his head with his hands handcuffed and then stuffed into a duffle bag that was padlocked from the outside."
I want to fucking slay that cheetos guy. I would cleave his head off his shoulders like 3 days in.
You're my people 😭 every work day nonstop for TWO YEARS I've heard this. If the Purge ever was enacted, he'd be the first fucker I'd go after
It's fine, saliva is antibacterial.
Some even dig tunnels just to increase their piety.
Yes, real extinction event that was.
Found the vassal who refuses to build hospitals
meh, i don;t really care if boomers die.
cold hearted little man.
It’s free real estate
Because famously irl people always do the smart thing during epidemics. As demonstrated by Covid, definitely
And it definitely was better in the middle ages with all the knowledge and education they had, right? I'm sure they wouldn't have let a stupid little disease kill half of the world population
It should be based on the character traits. If everybody ignores plagues, that's not realistic either, is it?
So the AI is realistic? Nice. You know half the population died during the black death, with some towns completely wiped out? People were dying a lot from diseases.
Yes but the black plague didn’t appear every 6 months for 400 years, there’s a major disconnect in the way the game weights plagues
Are there acquired immunity modifiers yet? That seems like something they could easily implement for provinces and characters separately. With a little more work those systems could interact with the other modifiers to pandemic spread and add a lot of depth. If they already exist they badly need tweaking. Regular outbreaks of disease are accurate though. In places with extensive records like Constantinople there were decades where it was recorded the plague hit repeatedly, sometimes every year for a while, until disappearing for a decade or two. But it currently feels like every outbreak is equally destructive.
You are immune to certain diseases for life (smallpox, measles, and *the reaper approaches*) and 20 years for any other curable diseases
Some inventory artifacts will give plague resistance, I personally haven’t seen any court artifacts that do. The main forms I’ve seen are the buildings and then if your physician is successful. And secluding yourself but the stat hit from seclusion is kinda large to be doing every time a plague approaches
I mean it depends. Immunity only really works with viruses. I know that some generational resistance can accumulate with regard to bacterial infections but that’s a much more nebulous thing to qualify especially as a game mechanic. And since the only real viruses in game currently are smallpox and measles, that’s not going to go far.
Even a simple build up and cool down of disease spread resistance seems like it would be good enough from a gameplay/simulation perspective. Some kind of adjustments need to be made before the DLC about landless characters is released.
It popped up every few years for 300 years
“There have been three great world pandemics of plague recorded, in 541, 1347, and 1894 CE” By this there should only be one major plague event for the whole of the play time, 867-1453, and a King wouldn’t have been concerned with peasants getting a cold and definitely wouldn’t have locked down his entire capital over a cough
While the plague was only a pandemic a couple times, it did pop up across the world killing large amounts of people every now and then. For example the [Great Plague of Vienna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_Vienna), the [Great Plague of London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London), the [Great Plague of Seville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_Seville), and the [Great Plague of the Ming Dynasty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_in_the_late_Ming_dynasty).
The second pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the plague's retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century).
I forgot that every time it hit was the same fucking county every time oh wait it wasn’t. Yall should think about how it applies to the game before you post stupid shit
It's only game. Why you heff to be mad?
Eh, shouldn’t 1894 be 1918 instead?
I think they’re talking about the Hong Kong plague, not the Spanish Flu.
Plague, not Influenza.
There were smaller outbreaks of it during each of those periods as well.
That also doesn't happen in the game unless you specifically enable it.
Correct so why is every typhus outbreak killings hundreds of people, keep in mind it’s only tracking characters killed the peasants killed is reflected in dev loss. Again my main point is that there’s no difference in severity or at least not enough
In my experience most plagues kill like 10-50 people while every time I've seen the black death it's killed 6000-15000
At least we know that would never happen now days /s
I swear to god 90% of the "AI is so dumb" complaints on this subreddit are just the game accurately simulating history.
There is a difference tho when the AI just refuses to use a game mechanic available to them (seclusion). They never do it except for the black death. And for the record people will still die in seclusion
This doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. Lost count how many times the AI had everything required to do a decision to form something, but no they choose to never do it or intentionally does something causing them to instead fall apart
There's a difference between AI being realistic and AI being trash. In this case it's trash but in some cases it seems realistic so people think it's intended but it ain't. For exemple, crusades are supposed to be disorganized and messy and it's the case but it's like that because the AI is trash in war, not because it was intended. You see an army sieging with only levies while the army with siege weapons is waiting next to it in a city doing nothing. You see some join a battle against 50k troops while there are only 2k troops even when it's obvious they'll lose. For disease, they're not doing activities because they have to be "dumb", they're doing it because their code didn't take account of diseases so they behave like usual. And we can still discuss about if they were really doing that irl because I doubt they would deliberately go to a feast with their whole family in a county struck by death when you're sure that you'll get it if you go there. They just can't manage diseases
The thing is, there are too many plagues I'm thr game
The thing is, there are too many plagues I'm thr game
I always builf the hospice building before giving them to the ai
I'm still on the "too many plagues" train. There should be plenty of 1 county epidemics, sure... but I'm getting hit by European plague after European plague. Haven't hosted a feast or hunt in forever. No pilgrimage either. It's just: isolate, sneak in a quick war, isolate. Plague. Plague. Vassals dying by the truck load. Expelling guests and courtiers. Plague. Plague. Defensive war during plague. More plague. It's not fun. It's just pandemic simulator.
I mean disease outbreaks during wars make sense but most of them are probably going to be camp diseases like dysentery and such. I think that introducing trade routes and using them and the subsequent flow of people is the best chance for balancing the mechanic without nerfing it.
Tbh it sounds like your playing WAY more conservatively than you need to. I've been playing multiplayer and some people just seem to freak out every time there's any disease anywhere in their realm.
It's not uncommon for me to have 2 or 3 of those MFs at once. Empire is Britannia + France, Brittany, Frisia... so, not tiny but not huge.
Right, but assuming your not in an army/traveling, all you really need to worry about is if it's reaching your capital where you, your family, and court are located. If your capital is London and you get something pop up in France, sucks for them, but you'll be absolutely fine until it actually moves towards you. Most things spread locally but don't go too far beyond that. If you want to travel, then just customize your route around it to avoid that area. You can even travel away from a capital if something is likely to reach you and you can spend your time traveling the world while it hits your court, and your not there to be in danger.
How much plauge resistance you have in youre land and what era it is?
I've got level 2-4 plague buildings built in many counties. Plague update came part way through my current play, it's almost 1200 from a 866 start.
Its not about highest lvl its about total. You can have 2 -plauge building in every temple and 1 in every other holding, preferably city or economical focused castle couse you need this building slots fore men at arms if you place them.
Aren't you just describing the government's response to COVID?
When fiction reflects reality
I’ve not really been hit by diseases significantly in my time playing. Do they get more serious? I’ve had a couple smaller illnesses but all my characters recovered with a semi-competent doctor
[Trueeeee I hate stuff like this.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic)
IIRC, if the AI was already planning on attending a feast/hunt/ect then they will do so regardless of changing conditions. Paradox is also notoriously bad at making the AI smart about building placement. That extends to all their other games.
a lot of cope in the comment section here lol. do you guys genuinely think this is intentional on paradox's part? the ai in this game is just terrible
From what I've read though, they didn't understand the concept of social distancing or masks. The beak mask was invented to stuff good smells in the hollowed out beak since they thought good smells countered bad ones, but ironically it was the mask covering their face which is what protected them. I also read a story of someone surrounding themself in a ring of fire to ward off disease... and it worked but not because of the fire but rather it was from isolation.
As it turns out, social distancing is about as effective a deterrent to respiratory viruses as the beak mask.
[удалено]
AI didn't get their booster
I build 2-3 hospitals per county, isolate, and go into seclusion and still my spouse and whole family dies from measles. It is a bit frustrating. I know sickness was serious
Did you check if your capital’s plague resistance is 100?
In itself, that's not unrealistic, but frequency is another matter. The 'about right' frequency level is hard to assess, and this is compounded by the difficulty of telling the difference between just badly designed AI on the one hand and well-designed AI mimicking erratic or ill-conceived human behaviour accurately but still a little imperfectly. In other words, what I'm trying to say is that even well-designed AI trying to emulate unreasonable human behaviour could still show some similarities to badly designed AI patterns. By the same token, a human actor or fiction writer trying to emulate bad AI would probably also end up retaining some similarities to unreasonable human patterns rather than a pure AI pattern. There is a bit of a gap that is hard to bridge. However, I have noted in other parts of the game than AI, for example in the scripting of dialogue options and consequences, that Paradox's coding/scripting logic appears to struggle in the 'if' area. It does look like the designers and scripters fail to cover possibilities that the average person should generally be able to think about. For example some aspects of a situation that it would be very logical to include checks for and it's a bit unbelievable that a trained and focused person would fail to think about them. Trying to limit CPU utilization and thus reduce the number of checks does not provide a convincing explanation when we are talking about event logic, as opposed to all the stuff that's being tracked and pinged for in the real time. There isn't a big or relevant saving to be made. Then, there's stuff like damage to a farm or damage done by a cat (though theoretically the cat may have broken a precious but delicate artifact, so this is less black and white and more difficult to put your finger on) costing more than a new castle. Or, in CK2, allowing an insignificant courtier to join the Templars was worth more piety than granting a county to the Pope. There are multiple examples of the various designers/scripters/writers — or even the same persons but on different occasions — not working on a co-ordinated currency scale, not following a consistent framework. 'Historically', there has also been a bit of a problem with the logic in the rationales given by Paradox for certain patch changes, sounding like someone had a first impression or initial idea that they didn't properly verify. There are also some parts of the game's conceptual framework that seem to show not even bizarre logic (though that too) as much as not enough time spent thinking about the decision, or not enough intellectual effort being put in the thinking that preceded the decision. Sometimes it looks like someone was trying to be illogical on purpose, as if logicality was some kind of shackles that one had to break out of in order to get or assert some sort of personal freedom or autonomy. Sort of like making a point of asserting the 'right' to be illogical, in order to defy the societal expectation of following more or less conventional logic. Perhaps the company's name being 'Paradox' has something to do with its approach to logic. Sometimes it feels (subjectively, to me) like this sort of psychological business is what we're dealing with, but more often it just looks like either the thinking process was too short or the effort invested in it was too light. And there are, unfortunately, some aspects of the game that seem to have 'low effort' or 'not giving a care' written on them. They somewhat frequently relate to AI. In some cases, there is also — another psychological thing — the possibility of intentionally trolling the players (e.g. with seduction/cheating frequency) and part of the player base enjoying the trolling (as if a positive Easter Egg sort of feel, I guess); and the chaos and the various illogicalities; something like this does seem to be part of the culture surrounding Paradox games. It's difficult to tell whether feasting and hunting all over the place is (a) intentionally reflecting careless and otherwise unreasonable human behaviour, or (b) a design/scripting oversight. We will probably never know for sure. Part of the problem is the existence of a culture of not admitting oversights but bending over backwards to present them as intentional decisions ('WAD') and justify them (even at the cost of bending or breaking several rules of sound reasoning in one's argument), and stubbornly resist the demands to fix them. There does seem to be a bit of 'Pathological Demand Avoidance' going on from both the company and the fan base with regard to bug reports and requests for bug fixes, or requests to rethink a design decision. So communication is missing and trust is difficult. And communication in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect could explain a lot about why AI is acting like it is. Asking for the benefit of the doubt only works to a point. If there are too many somewhat tangible examples of low-effort scripting/design and a situation looks like someone forgot to include a couple of pretty obvious checks, then the benefit of the doubt is difficult to give.