What the hell is DAIM? Can I eat it?
„DAIM“ is an
abbreviation and stands for „more Determined AI Modification“. It is a
mod for Hearts of Iron 2 that changes the behaviour of the AIs of the
major powers and some minors in the scenarios starting in 1936, 1938
and 1939. It was developed primarily with 1936 in mind, but works also
in the other two mentioned scenarios.
Which countries‘ AIs are affected by DAIM?
Currently there are DAIM AI sets for Germany, Italy, Japan, Great
Britain, Soviet Union, U.S.A. and Nationalist China. Additionally some
minors have been adapted to help their corresponding major power more,
e.g. Canada for the UK or Manchukuo for Japan. We didn’t touch France or
Spain though.
How do I install your mod?
You download the installer of the latest version, usually available in
our subforum at the Paradox forum, and execute it. It will
automatically retrieve the path to your installation of HoI 2 (which
can be manually altered if necessary) and install DAIM there. Several
files of HoI will be overwritten, but an uninstall function is included
so there’s no need to do a manual backup by yourself. Once you start
your next game of HoI 2, the changed AIs will be active. Every AI
nation with DAIM installed will have a short event saying „DAIM
installed“ as a reminder for you and to confirm that everything went
right.
What is modified when I install DAIM?
First of all, we only change AI files and the events necessary to
switch between them. The other mechanisms of the game, like scenario
setups, leaders and ministers etc. remain unchanged. We don’t use gifts
like free divisions or other bonuses for the AI just to increase the
challenge. The AI plays with the same possibilities and restrictions as
in „vanilla“ HoI, our goal is to make the AI play more like a human
usually plays the game: Focussed on the really important issues in
production and research, anticipating the upcoming war.
Okay, but what is changed exactly?
Concerning the AI files: A lot. We rebuilt the production and research
sections of the AI files more or less from scratch and changed a lot of
other parameters dealing with placement and usage of the units. In
general the AI nations will build more land units and disregard the less
important parts of the research tree. For example: AI usage of
paratroopers isn’t that specific, so why spend a lot of money and
production on them? A German surface fleet is very likely to be sunk, so
why build a lot of it?
Playing with DAIM you’ll notice a different
buildup of the AI nations, especially the Soviet Union, the US and
Japan will field more land divisions. We also refrained from telling AI
Japan to stop its advance in China, so DAIM Japan will usually conquer
all of China relatively fast. These are just examples, the AI plays
quite different with DAIM overall.
There is a „Customized Events“ option when installing DAIM, what is it?
We changed a few events for various reasons: We changed the surrender
of China to Japan in order to prevent a supply convoy bug that happens
every once in a while. Now Japan gets the whole coast when China
surrenders (changed japan.txt and nationalist_china.txt). And we added
two events: „Mers-el-Kebir“ which gives Great Britain the option to
attack Vichy France (for historical reasons) and a „Slider Reminder
Event“ which fires within a few days whenever one of your domestic
policy sliders can be moved (we replaced the content of
japanmanpower.txt with them because the events there didn’t work
anyway).
If you uncheck the corresponding checkbox, no standard game events will be changed (except AI switches, of course).
How do I upgrade from one version of DAIM to another?
Quite simple: You uninstall the previous version and install the new
one. We recommend not to upgrade with ongoing games, so do it at your
own peril.
Hint: You can see which version is currently installed by the date at the beginning of the readme.
Your mod is crap, how do I get rid of it?
There’s a file called „DAIM-uninstall.exe“ in the main folder of HoI
when DAIM is installed, simply execute it to revert the AI back to the
standard settings. All changed files will be replaced with standard ones
and all additional DAIM files will be removed from your system. If
there’s any problem that slipped through our tests, please let us know
and we’ll try to help you out.
Is DAIM a „historical“ mod?
I consider it to be semi-historical at least. We didn’t change the
initial setups of the nations, and the AI will respect the historical
starting dates approximately. The results can vary, yes, e.g. Japan
usually conquers China successfully, but it’s the engine of the game
itself that allows these results to happen, it’s not our „fault“. A
human player would do the same: There’s no point in repeating the
historical course of events when playing the Axis, you’d have to loose
in the end every time. The DAIM AIs were developed with a human player
in mind who starts the war historically – but then tries to do better.
I saw the „Backup“ option in the installer, what’s it for?
First of all, the DAIM installer has an uninstall option included, so
the overwritten files can be reverted back to the standard files anyway.
But if you want, you can install a backup of the standard AI files
additionally, in this case a subfolder called „backup-daim“ will be
created upon installation in which you can find these files. It is meant
as an optional security measure for our users.
Please note that
the AI files of your installation will not be moved to the backup
folder, they’ll be overwritten and standard AI files will be copied to
the backup folder.
Is your mod compatible with other mods?
Yes and no. Only the AI behaviour is changed, so it can be used with
other mods. But the problem lies in the details: It can be difficult to
get several mods to work together, the work needed will be different
from case to case and is up to the ability of the user.
Why
do you mod the AI for yourselves, wouldn’t it be better to participate
actively in AI discussions, share your insights and help develop a
better AI for „vanilla“ HoI?
The problem with AI modding is
that it is very time intensive and results can be strongly dependent
on what happened in one specific game. It is difficult to compare the
results of different modding approaches. What you’ll like or dislike
with an AI modification depends on your expectations: Do you want a
perfectly historical AI or would you prefer a more „efficient“
approach? That’s what makes AI modding difficult to discuss: Nobody
would directly compare the Great War modification and C.O.R.E. either, I
think that’s right to a lesser extent for AI modifications. By the way
– there was a subforum for AI modifications of HoI 1, but there was
little action and it disappeared later.
We don’t claim to do
everything better in our versions of the AI, we simply make the AI act
in a different way which we consider more interesting and challenging
for the human player. We explicitly respect the work of Lothos, the
scripter of the standard HoI 2 AI, but we have a different philosophy
and – in contrast to him – as free modders we can afford to follow our
goals without having to keep in mind the interests of the whole
community of HoI players concerning historicity and such. We have the
luxury to do what we want with the AI and we use it to give ourselves
and everybody interested a more challenging AI.
Is DAIM for Doomsday compatible with the original HOI 2?
No, that’s why there is a separate version for it.
Does DAIM for Doomsday support the new Doomsday scenario?
No, DAIM still is for the 1936, 1938 and 1939 scenarios exclusively.
Does DAIM for Doomsday use new features like the spying system?
Yes, sure.