The thing I like to call "penalty quests" are events that debuff everyone in the game, until some quest is completed.



Like those rabid minor factions with +50% stats or rust quests when all items have higher strategic cost.



I call them "penalty quests" because they essentially penalize everyone. Yet from all my playing, I do not think that AI bothers completing them at all.



Is this per design, or a bug?



Usually, to solve those quests you need to go to remote unsettled area, which is very time consuming (or downright dangerous is rabid minor factions are active). Often, for nearby AI factions it would be much easier to resolve them, yet they do not bother with them for some reason.



This makes these quests essentially all game penalty, since often going for away with army is too risky, or even impossible due to closed borders etc...



My main problem with them, is that penalties as game mechanic are generally unfun, especially when coupled together with random quest location. While spicing the game a bit with random event, even penalizing one, can sometimes be fun, giving unrealistic quests to solve them is not.



Thoughts?

I had the rust quest for nearly all the game, I think the AI did one step? Or maybe that was me. The tricky one in my last game was the luxury booster version; playing Allayi I had over 30 turns between activations. Fortunately the AI helped out with that.

In my experience, the AI indeed doesnt bother about this and you have to do everything yourself

From my experience, up to Hard difficuty AI rarely cares about "From Dust to rust", but happens to complete "Plague of Savagery" when they come accross the marked villages.



Up from Serious difficulty AI tends to participate in the "From Dust to rust" donations but very scarcely. 2 donations in total was the maximum amount I experienced, when I was struggling with Dust and internal extraction for a long time. Sometimes the rewards for biggest donation fit perfectly the "Market Alchemist" deed when you receive 80 Adamantium/Palladian OR gives you a hefty amount of resource that is missing from your regions and Market OR it is a strong trade of, say, 100 Adamantian for 100 Mithrite. Definitely AI should be more active about pursuing these quests. Even if it means donating 3 times and keeping the penaty up, to ensure the reward and keep screwing other empires over.



The occurrence rate of "Lack of luxury", another competitive "penalizing" quest, is abysmal so no feedback about AI participation here - maybe the rare (AND very late) occurrence of it is a bug itself. I expected it to happen as often as "From Dust to rust" the first time I saw it, TBH.

Interesting. Just today, for a first time, I got AI faction contribute to Dust for Rust quest.

Yeah I had one contribution out of 5 for the quest in my last game on Normal from the AI. I did the rest easily enough because well...Skyfins. But if I was playing another faction I'd have been really ticked off.