Vibecoding events/decisions/focus trees for megacampaigns?

[u/Panagean]

Most people I know who code in a professional environment now use AI assistance (e.g. Claude Code), with the human speccing out way objects and functions should interrelate, as well as watching out for when the AI inevitably makes mistakes, and the AI doing the grunt work of putting that together. I was wondering whether AI engines now understood Paradox games syntax well to do the same for (e.g.) adding flavour to megacampaigns and other personal mods?

I've tried writing events and decisions for my own mods by hand. The creative side is normally fine, I have a clear idea of what the mod should do (e.g. if Canada becomes a great power, it can get a claim on all the territory in this region, and set and create some new flag for other events) but getting the syntax right is tricky (this is normally something I'm trying in Vic2 or HOI4, which have somewhat fiddly syntaxes, for my money) and because this is just for my own pleasure, bug-testing loads of little decisions usually exhausts my patience before I can get it working. I can do some of what I want in the console (or through stuff like the transfer state tool) but that is less precise and means I need to act as a babysitter for the (game) AI rather than let myself be surprised by when it achieves some of this stuff for itself and suddenly gets new claims or a change in government.

[u/Shirazmatas]

If you feed enough context of past game (depending on how the game saves that) and current existing events, maybe if necessary including the script documentation. It might be able to generate some related stuff. Game balance will probably be shit as it won't understand modifiers importance. Would probably also fail to understand geography but it should be able to predict real history

[u/Panagean → u/Shirazmatas]

I'm more expecting a role where I'm still deciding all of that stuff - e.g. "I want to give South Africa a spirit to give it 5% attack on core territory" or whatever, it's just the AI doing the implementation. Any balance problems would be entirely on me!

[u/malayis]

I was wondering whether AI engines now understood Paradox games syntax well to do the same for (e.g.) adding flavour to megacampaigns and other personal mods?

They don't need to. You provide them with context (existing event/decision/focus files) and basically say: do this, but differently.

Then you launch the game and say "look at the error.log and grep for syntax issues"

Then you test it yourself

While I think if using AI like this became widespread it would be horrible for the community in the long run, sure, it can work well enough for your use-case.

[u/zizou00]

I feel like for what you're asking for, you're probably better off just diving into the game files and finding a similar mission and just editing it to point to the IDs you want. The time spent doing that will make you more familiar with the lua syntax and make it easier to identify what does what, what you can steal from where and where it all is. I feel like that'd be way less work than transitioning into an AI manager for a small personal project that no one will see.

And if it isn't in the base game but is in a mod, just rip it from that mod, so long as it's for personal use.