EU4 - Development Diary - 26th of March 2019

[Ruian]

@Stepkick hey I appreciate the respectful advice and the fact you wouldn't have any way of knowing my level of play. I am aware of the tips brother. I play small nations on VH, usually in Asia. I'm running a Norway campaign and to start the first war for independence you need at minimum 20k units. That's way over force limit, a bankruptcy will be required. This is because Denmark has 25k and Sweden has another 15k that you need to fight, even if you divide them up. It goes without saying how devastating that is to your pitiful 14k manpower pool. Just hiring the troops as regulars will deplete it to near zero. If you fight one battle you won't be able to reinforce.

I haven't hired any mercs since then because they are criminally expensive so I've been playing very carefully. And I'm in an exceedingly good node that most starts wouldn't get.

@Vulkandrache pretty much nailed it. Manpower should at least be tripled if not more. There's some wonderful micro you can do wherein you build manpower buildings in every province you own. Ironically if you can afford that you might as well just use mercs and skip the micro.

Building prices should be adjusted. I assume it's one value in the code so very easy to do. Courthouses, docks, barracks, training fields, shipyards should all be significantly cheaper. The AI will build them regardless, but a player would only build a few of those and usually only with really heavy bonuses.

 

[Balesir]

In the system I suggest, there would still be special mercenary units; they would be spawned like Streltsy or Banners or Rajputs. Having a war chest to spawn these units or go into a deficit paying for manpower would still be important.

In numbers determined by what? Isn't this just another manpower pool, effectively?

Another idea I had is having a regional bonus for controlling 75% of the mercenary contracts in a node. Are you hiring almost every soldier of fortune that ever steps off the Emerald Isles? Well your Wild Irish Geese have brought some wonderful new distillery technology and something called "Jameson". National unrest -1. This way the differences don't have to be strictly militaristic.

Potentially a nice 'add on' idea; maybe for number of units or something, otherwise some bonuses could be rather easy to get.

So what if I hire just a single regiment from the pool every year and never disband them? If they reinforce using magic money, it's exactly the same as the all merc armies we have now, but you have to plan ahead and buy the regiments a few at a time as the merc pool replenishes. If they draw manpower from the regional mercenary pool to reinforce, you cold still accrue a lot of units over time, but then you (or, let's be honest, the AI) could (let's be honest, definitely will) just park them on a jungle during a monsoon so that the attrition drains the mercenary pool and no one has mercenaries from the node anymore.

The most obvious way to deal with this is the same as for national pools, I think - mobilised units should be included in the pool number (and the pool would need to be bigger, obviously). It would look similar to now, but if you co over forcelimit then the manpower pool does not replenish the troops you took out (and with less than forcelimit you have a bigger pool)*. The mercenary pools would be easier to "hire out", but that would leave mercenaries with no replenishment capability - which would also give a downside to hiring all mercenaries to deny them to your enemy - you'd get a load of units, at great expense, with no replacement capacity.

*: Example - where now you have forcelimit of 12 regiments and 15,000 manpower cap, you get forcelimit 12 and 27,000 manpower cap. If you raise 12 regiments you still have 15,000 replacement manpower, but if you raise 15 regiments you only have 12,000 for reinforcement.

It is different from national manpower on the design end, but on the player's end the only difference is having to look at multiple different screens instead of one number to know how many potential units they have or how much they're able to reinforce. The only scenarios where a large difference is felt is when one manpower pool reaches 0 while the others are still above 0, and then you have some units reinforcing and others not, which is an annoying thing to keep looking at during the early life-or-death wars and causes tedious micromanagement.

It would require more management, sure, but that's because the resources you need to manage are really different. There should be real differences between the sources of mercenaries (otherwise why not just have them all come from the same font, as they do now?)

It's also not historical. Reinforcing standard regiments with mercenaries and mixing mercenaries and regulars was common in early modern armies, so that should be represented.

Do you have any sources for this? Most situations I know of tried to avoid this at all costs, as it caused morale problems and coordination problems within the unit.

The availability would change as a result of changes to trade. Generally, mercenaries were hired *from* peaceful regions and sent to warring regions, and since devastation, occupations, naval losses, etc. all effect the trade value in a region, mercenaries would be easier to find in peaceful, prosperous areas.

Mercenaries were generally drawn from trained soldiers; they were most numerous where ther had recently been wars or where wars were raging nearby - you basically take deserters who might otherwise turn to banditry, disbanded troops who know no trade but soldiering and defeated rebels or soldiers of a defeated state. The reason you might need to look to peaceful regions to get mercenaries is that all the ones in a war zone will likely already be hired!

Right, but adding manpower for things that aren't countries and don't own provinces is different and difficult. Or, at least, significantly more difficult.

Well, I don't really see why it should be difficult, to be honest, given that there are registers (of trade value, associated provinces, trade power...) for the trade nodes already, and trade nodes do "control" provinces, albeit in a different way to countires.

So how the event would work as I imagine it is that someone either disinherits an heir with a certain level of military skill or fires a general with a certain tradition, and then a nearby country gets an event saying that this general has raised a free company of mercenaries and offers their service, then the country has the opportunity to pay, and then the army appears with the general. The army would act like condottieri in the sense they aren't actually controlled by the nation that hired them, so if the player got the event the army would be under the AI, would not count against force limit, would not count against leader limit, and will definitely waste time occupying Siberia.

Hmm, OK. I'm afraid if it becomes a(nother) wayward AI "ally" I don't see much utility to it. Generals don't cost manpower in any case - is this just another "general not included in your upkeep total", like the monarch and heir?

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

The European Expansion and its update will, in all likelihood, feature a completely different mercenary mechanic from what we know today. We have established several key aspects of how we want to handle mercenaries:

• We still want them to exist as a way to supplement one's army strength for ducats.
• Province-level recruitment will probably have to go. Reducing click-fatigue while we're at it should be a priority.
• The system should respect geopolitics: Mercs in India should be functionally different from Germanic ones.
• Mercs must be finite to some degree. As an example, a prolonged 30 years war should drain Central Europe of available mercenaries, and said merc units should find themselves no longer able to reinforce.
• Player involvement in the system must be greater than it is today
• Late game multiplayer must be diversified from all out merc-on-merc warfare.
• The system should be robust, feel alive, and enjoyable

What are your thoughts on the existing mercenary system and what would you like to see in a new update?

My thoughts after reading these aspects for the future mercenary mechanics:

1. If mercs respect geopolitics, what happens if you order mercs far away from their home region? Would it even be possible to order mercs hired from Germanic lands to march all the way to China? Would they accept being shipped to the Americas?
2. If reducing click-fatigue is a priority, I will assume one option is a 'bulk buy' for mercs - several merc regiments or nothing at the click of a button (signing of one contract). In that case, can condottieri work with this new system? If a nation doesn't care who it rents out its army to, can it put an army it owns into the 'finite merc pool'?
3. Can nations form 'good business relations' with a meaningful subset of the possible merc contractors? Is it feasible for there to be events tied to specific groupings of mercs, e.g. "my favourite merc company offered me a sweet deal in exchange for ..."
4. Can nations 'snipe' mercs with bags of ducats? Specifically, can an outside nation meddle with someone else's war by buying out the mercs one side was reliant on? To keep it fair, there'd need to be a way for the merc's employer to defend against this kind of bid-snipe, perhaps with intrigue instead of just paying more ducats.
5. Following points 2 and 4, could condottieri get 'sniped' with ducats - possibly with a penalty to prestige or some other variable? I have not thought through how to make this fair from a gameplay perspective.
   
6. Can mercs bring their own generals?
7. If a merc company finds it has hired out regiments to both sides of the same war, can they undermine their efforts rather than kill their colleagues?

While we're on the topic of 'things I'd like to see in a new update', I'd like cavalry to be made more relevant once they defeat their original target regiments. The whole point of cavalry was mobility, incongruent with the current system where they stand around idle after running out of initially-designated opponents.

 

[Huseyin1453tr]

May Mercanies Have Special Bonus According To Their Culture/Religion

 

[TargaryenBlood]

Perhaps certain regions should have different "Mercenary Zones", a pretty large group of provinces with:
Certain modifiers on the units
It's own manpower pool, perhaps based on the total military development of the zone and any modifiers based on mercenary traditions (Swiss, German, and Italian Mercs come to mind, while England and France just aren't known for it to the same degree, for example)
Possibly even their own tech level

Which types of mercenaries you can hire should be based on where you are, but not totally limited by it. My thought is you can hire mercs at base price from any zone you own a province in, but you can still hire mercs from farther abroad, it just costs more based on the distance.

 

[Dasmani]

In numbers determined by what? Isn't this just another manpower pool, effectively?

Total trade value modified by share of trade power.

The most obvious way to deal with this is the same as for national pools, I think - mobilised units should be included in the pool number (and the pool would need to be bigger, obviously). It would look similar to now, but if you co over forcelimit then the manpower pool does not replenish the troops you took out (and with less than forcelimit you have a bigger pool)*. The mercenary pools would be easier to "hire out", but that would leave mercenaries with no replenishment capability - which would also give a downside to hiring all mercenaries to deny them to your enemy - you'd get a load of units, at great expense, with no replacement capacity.

*: Example - where now you have forcelimit of 12 regiments and 15,000 manpower cap, you get forcelimit 12 and 27,000 manpower cap. If you raise 12 regiments you still have 15,000 replacement manpower, but if you raise 15 regiments you only have 12,000 for reinforcement.

I think I've explained myself badly. So let's have a concrete example. Let's say the mercenary pool is 10,000. I recruit 2 units, leaving it with 8,000. Over time it builds back up to 10,000, but I still have 2 units. I recruit 2 more. Now I have 4 units, etc. As long as I don't disband the mercenaries, I can use them forever, and when I have a large enough stack of mercenaries the reinforcement will continuously drain the mercenary pool so that other countries can't hire them.

It would require more management, sure, but that's because the resources you need to manage are really different. There should be real differences between the sources of mercenaries (otherwise why not just have them all come from the same font, as they do now?)

There isn't really an effective difference between limiting the special regional mercenary units by a manpower pool and limiting them by a unit cap in the same vein as Rajput or Banner regiments. It also ties the modifier for the mercenaries to extant tags so that it can be modified by national ideas or events in the nation. Venice, for instance, could have a national idea that gives them a 50% greater unit cap for mercenaries, or an event granting a penalty could fire if a nation's ruler has a certain trait. Using the mercenary pools, these modifiers would have to be applied to the country and calculated again by the phantom tag that holds and distributes the merc manpower.

Mercenaries were generally drawn from trained soldiers; they were most numerous where ther had recently been wars or where wars were raging nearby - you basically take deserters who might otherwise turn to banditry, disbanded troops who know no trade but soldiering and defeated rebels or soldiers of a defeated state. The reason you might need to look to peaceful regions to get mercenaries is that all the ones in a war zone will likely already be hired!

This was true in the earlier medieval ages, however, in the late medieval and early modern era mercenaries were mostly recruited from subjugated (and therefore, peaceful) regions that had a highly regarded military tradition (or had a lot of military age men who were unemployed). For instance, in the 18th century, many of the mercenaries in continental Europe came from Scotland and Ireland, which had established their military traditions in the wars of the late 17th century and were relatively peaceful regions being united under a single crown. These Irish and Scotsmen migrated to French, Italian, and Spanish lands, where they were hired and sent to war. Likewise, when Germany had stabilized, its youth was recruited by Great Britain to fight in the American Revolution. It wasn't possible to hire, say, French mercenaries during the French Revolution because all of the Frenchmen were already fighting each other. One would need to wait until a former war zone was relatively stable so that the former soldiers became restless, and that's why peace time increases available mercenaries.

 

[Stratagyfan101]

Conserving manpower is not a difficult thing to do. Manpower isn't horribly broken. Allow me to help you, don't take offense. You need to try to play the game on a slower speed and ensure you do everything in your power to preserve manpower. I have played campaigns without hiring a single mercenary, and better players have done World Conquests without a single mercenary hired. These are a few tips I learnt to conserve manpower, mistakes I used to make earlier without realising the impact of it.

1. Take favourable terrain battles only - this is obvious if you want to win, but also more obvious if you want to conserve manpower. Stacking bonuses to stack wipe the enemy is crucial to saving your manpower, you take far less losses wiping the AI regiments, than you would if you were to fight an entire duration battle.
2. Use the minimum stack + 1 regiment requirement for sieges. Keeping an entire army over a siege can lead to unnecessary draining of manpower. You can further ease the pressure on your manpower pool by making vassals perform the sieges for you.
3. While carpet sieging requires heavy micro, it is worth the effort than moving a stack from province to province and taking them one by one. Attrition ticks at the end of the month. Having 30 regiments on 30 provinces (1 each) means they take the 30 provinces in 1 month for 1 tick of attrition. Rather than having a stack of 30 move and take each individual province for 30 ticks overall. (This was my main mistake, which is often the case when playing on high speeds).
4. Use the supply limit mapmode to determine the size of your stacks. You do not want to be taking unnecessary attrition. I often found out that my attrition equaled or in some campaigns even surpassed the casualties I incurred. This is where I realised that I am being callous with my manpower.
5. When fighting small wars, "Train to offset the drain." I usually realise the more I implement the above 4 points, the less I have to actually offer to acquire my objectives, and the more I have armies sitting in my own territory doing nothing during a war. This is where I train (drill) them to build up that professionalism. Professionalism can be traded in for manpower, but more importantly professionalism gives you a better army, which in turn also serves to conserve your manpower, as your troops hit harder and take less losses.
6. End wars early. It is often an easy habit to want that 100 War Score in every possible war. But the truth is, to allow yourself to slowly increase the War Score requirement in your campaign. This allows for faster expansion, shorter truces, and easier truce cycling to avoid coalitions, and steady growth. Take what you need in a war, and don't over commit to the war. It makes no sense to siege down all of a country for reparations and ducats, and two provinces, when you can just as easily get the same peace deal for far less War Score.

My only quarrel with the whole mercenary system is that it is too overpowered at the moment. Yes I can implement the top 6 points and enjoy micro managing my armies, but it is far, FAR easier spam entire mercenary armies and never have to worry about the manpower resource in game (rendering the whole mechanic pointless). If you play your cards right and built a solid economy, you can build entire mercenary armies at the end game and never have to worry about manpower, and wage endless wars.

This is all well and dandy, but it doesn't fix the problem that the AI is terrible at managing its own manpower, and thus if we cripple its infinite merc armies, we may as well cripple the AI. Secondly, for smaller starting countries the game still has a a system where one battle could drain one's manpower but only gives 3% warscore, and this is immediately followed by the AI's merc spam.

Thirdly, it is mostly all about working around bad design. If I am fighting a defensive war against say the Ottomans. Lets say I control the Bosporus and I've sieged Constantinople, as well as control mountain forts controlling both passes across the Caucusus mountains. The AI, if it declared a control land war, rather than a win battles war, will throw a damn near infinite amount of manpower and merc spam into those mountains over a five year span which will not drain their war enthusiasm much, or give me much warscore to force a quick peace.

So in short, yes the human player can manage their manpower, but the AI is dumb as bricks, and even if one does manage to play smart with their manpower, it can still be dragged down because the AI doesn't understand how to take a limited victory or defeat, and will send endless stacks on armies to their death until the arbitrary war enthusiasm mechanic finally ticks down far enough that they'll accept a small victory, white peace, limited defeat.

 

[Balesir]

Total trade value modified by share of trade power.

So every country has its own separate manpower pool in each trade node, in effect?

I think I've explained myself badly. So let's have a concrete example. Let's say the mercenary pool is 10,000. I recruit 2 units, leaving it with 8,000. Over time it builds back up to 10,000, but I still have 2 units. I recruit 2 more. Now I have 4 units, etc. As long as I don't disband the mercenaries, I can use them forever, and when I have a large enough stack of mercenaries the reinforcement will continuously drain the mercenary pool so that other countries can't hire them.

Yes, I understand that, but the problem is that it's effectively an infinite manpower pool - every time you take troops out to recruit a regiment, 1,000 more are generated. If the men in regiments are counted in the manpower pool, the cap becomes hard - once all are recruited to regiments, there is no pool left (and it won't regenerate until regiments take casualties or are disbanded) and the regiments become brittle (= have no replacements except feed through casualties and disbandments).

There isn't really an effective difference between limiting the special regional mercenary units by a manpower pool and limiting them by a unit cap in the same vein as Rajput or Banner regiments. It also ties the modifier for the mercenaries to extant tags so that it can be modified by national ideas or events in the nation. Venice, for instance, could have a national idea that gives them a 50% greater unit cap for mercenaries, or an event granting a penalty could fire if a nation's ruler has a certain trait. Using the mercenary pools, these modifiers would have to be applied to the country and calculated again by the phantom tag that holds and distributes the merc manpower.

If you make the qualities of mercenaries dependant on the hiring country, instead of on the node from which they are raised, why have them tied to nodes at all? They are effectively tied to the countries anyway, so why not just have them as a pool of regiments by country - i.e. what they already are, now?

This was true in the earlier medieval ages, however, in the late medieval and early modern era mercenaries were mostly recruited from subjugated (and therefore, peaceful) regions that had a highly regarded military tradition (or had a lot of military age men who were unemployed). For instance, in the 18th century, many of the mercenaries in continental Europe came from Scotland and Ireland, which had established their military traditions in the wars of the late 17th century and were relatively peaceful regions being united under a single crown. These Irish and Scotsmen migrated to French, Italian, and Spanish lands, where they were hired and sent to war. Likewise, when Germany had stabilized, its youth was recruited by Great Britain to fight in the American Revolution. It wasn't possible to hire, say, French mercenaries during the French Revolution because all of the Frenchmen were already fighting each other. One would need to wait until a former war zone was relatively stable so that the former soldiers became restless, and that's why peace time increases available mercenaries.

I don't think that stands scrutiny. The '15 and the '45 in Scotland, the rebellions in Ireland and the service of both Scots and Irish in the British army gave a pool of seasoned fighters throughout the 18th century and most of the 19th. The Napoleonic system largely altered that by creating, therough the Levee en Masse, a system that took a much higher proportion of the manpower that might otherwise feed the mercenary pool. Even then, large numbers of emigre Royalists fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars, mainly as mercenaries. The entire Brunswick army did likewise - with its Duke.

 

[Deleted user]

having a mechanic for merc companies, with different tech levels and/or unit pips might be good. For example, a German mercenary company fighting in Italy might get a shock bonus but a movement speed mallus during the warmer southern months, as they are less acclimated to the southern European heat.

Having fun events like an Indian or Persian merc company becomes available to hire in China, or an Iberian merc company becomes available for Mesoamerican nations, made up of Christian deserters.

Also: merc warships please!

 

[Thorfinn98]

Hello ! Any plans for an upcoming update that would fix some UI problems ? I currently can't play the game on my computer because of that, so I can't wait for an improvment...

 

[Dasmani]

So every country has its own separate manpower pool in each trade node, in effect?

No, each country has it's own cap for special regiments recruited from the node. Like Banners. You click a button, a number of regiment are created, and there's a cap on the total number of regiments a country can have at once.

Yes, I understand that, but the problem is that it's effectively an infinite manpower pool - every time you take troops out to recruit a regiment, 1,000 more are generated. If the men in regiments are counted in the manpower pool, the cap becomes hard - once all are recruited to regiments, there is no pool left (and it won't regenerate until regiments take casualties or are disbanded) and the regiments become brittle (= have no replacements except feed through casualties and disbandments).

This is about 5,000 extra lines of coding to replicate a unit cap that already exists for units like Manchu Banners and Rajput.

If you make the qualities of mercenaries dependant on the hiring country, instead of on the node from which they are raised, why have them tied to nodes at all? They are effectively tied to the countries anyway, so why not just have them as a pool of regiments by country - i.e. what they already are, now?

The unique units would be regional, not national. I feel like you're misunderstanding the differences.

I'm proposing two different systems: one that let's a country recruit special units from trade nodes, and one that gives a nation extra manpower and manpower recovery which are both tied to trade value and percent of trade power.

This represents both the free companies of mercenaries, but also the practice of nations hiring and organizing foreign recruits into their standing national armies.

The French Foreign Legion is not a mercenary group that offered services to France. It's a group of foreign recruits that are trained, equipped, and organized by the French.

Regiments and battalions like the French Foreign Legion were much more common in the 17th and 18th than free mercenary companies of the late middle ages.

Spain recruited, trained, and equipped several regiments of Irish and Italian soldiers.

These were not war veterans bringing their own traditions, equipment, and training. These were "Spanish" regulars recruited from the military-age youth of another country out of foreign ports.

The later period of the game's timeline did not see much use of Landsknecht, or Gallowglass, or the Swiss Guard, or any similar form of mercenary unit. Foreign recruits were mostly organized by the country that recruited them.

I don't think that stands scrutiny. The '15 and the '45 in Scotland, the rebellions in Ireland and the service of both Scots and Irish in the British army gave a pool of seasoned fighters throughout the 18th century and most of the 19th.

The Irish rebelled in 1641, then fought in the War of the Grand Alliance. The next time the Irish rebelled was in 1798, nearly 100 years later. For at least three generations, young Irishmen who had never served were being recruited, trained, and equipped by Catholic powers like Spain and France. Or in game terms, France, Spain, and at one point, Poland were supplementing their national manpower with Irish Catholics.

The British attempted to stop the exodus of military aged Irishmen in 1745 and this led to the recruitment of German and Italian recruits. Now, if you look at the timeline of Germany, you see that there were no major conflicts between the Great Northern War (which mainly involved Prussia, not all of the German states) in 1700 and the Seven Year's War in 1756, meaning there were two generations of Germans by 1745 that had not fought any major conflicts that were being recruited in 1745 (the Germans who fought in the Great Northern War would have been too old by then.) So clearly the idea that mercenaries always came from veterans of war-ravaged, devestated populations is just not supported.

 

[Thucydides7]

... I have not long returned from a short trip to Lithuania. The country is a bit smaller than I remember, but Vilnius was a delightful place to spend the long weekend.

Was Memel square?

 

[_karl_]

Mercs must be finite to some degree. As an example, a prolonged 30 years war should drain Central Europe of available mercenaries, and said merc units should find themselves no longer able to reinforce.

I would kind of say the opposite: in case of endless wars the availability of mercenaries should snowball.
It would make sense to make them less available when very bloody wars happen (how do we consider that a war is bloody, this is not so obvious and might require some deep rethinking of the combat/manpower system, maybe splitting losses between actual death and desertion). But it also make sense that in regions with "italian-like" situations with tons of low-intensity conflicts happening all the time, where they are tons of opportunities for a mercenary to make a lot of money with little risk, the number of candidates should increase. Also, in a politically unstable country, or a devastated country in which being a peasant victim of regular pillaging becomes more dangerous than being a soldier, here too we should expect more mercenaries.
During a long peace nobody will choose to invest into military training if there are no opportunities of hiring.
BUT we should make it so that having more and more mercenaries is not necessarily a good thing. Mercenaries were not only a financial cost, they were a major source of unstability.

 

[Balesir]

No, each country has it's own cap for special regiments recruited from the node. Like Banners. You click a button, a number of regiment are created, and there's a cap on the total number of regiments a country can have at once.

Right - so they are tied to the country, not really the node, as mercenaries are now. So why not just keep the system there now?

This is about 5,000 extra lines of coding to replicate a unit cap that already exists for units like Manchu Banners and Rajput.

Well, I'll leave it to those who actually know the coding to say whether or not that might be true, but I soo no reason it would have to be. All of the systems we are discussing already exist.

The unique units would be regional, not national. I feel like you're misunderstanding the differences.

I'm proposing two different systems: one that let's a country recruit special units from trade nodes, and one that gives a nation extra manpower and manpower recovery which are both tied to trade value and percent of trade power.

This represents both the free companies of mercenaries, but also the practice of nations hiring and organizing foreign recruits into their standing national armies.

Right - but my point is that I don't see these as different to what is already there. You can pay money to get higher rates of manpower recovery now (the slider for army expenditure affects manpower pool growth rate). Every nation already has a pool of available mercenaries. Adding in a link to the trade nodes with no real game effect seems to be superfluous - what effect of the link am I missing?

The French Foreign Legion is not a mercenary group that offered services to France. It's a group of foreign recruits that are trained, equipped, and organized by the French.

Regiments and battalions like the French Foreign Legion were much more common in the 17th and 18th than free mercenary companies of the late middle ages.

Spain recruited, trained, and equipped several regiments of Irish and Italian soldiers.

These were not war veterans bringing their own traditions, equipment, and training. These were "Spanish" regulars recruited from the military-age youth of another country out of foreign ports.

According to the current rules of war, neither the Gurkhas nor the French Foreign Legion are really mercenaries at all. They are foreign nationals forming part of the regular forces of Britain, India or France. So, yes, representing such as additional manpower from disaffected areas might be useful, but even here most of this recruitment started out with the disbandments/casualties at the conclusion of a war.

The later period of the game's timeline did not see much use of Landsknecht, or Gallowglass, or the Swiss Guard, or any similar form of mercenary unit. Foreign recruits were mostly organized by the country that recruited them.

Possibly not widespread, but Freikorps, Stradiots, and the likes of the Black Brunswickers, French Emigre regiments (Army of the Conde, Hussards de Saxe) were reasonably common.

The Irish rebelled in 1641, then fought in the War of the Grand Alliance. The next time the Irish rebelled was in 1798, nearly 100 years later. For at least three generations, young Irishmen who had never served were being recruited, trained, and equipped by Catholic powers like Spain and France. Or in game terms, France, Spain, and at one point, Poland were supplementing their national manpower with Irish Catholics.

Look at the origins of those regiments, though. The "Wild Geese" fleeing Ireland after the 1688, 1715 and 1745 episodes of attempted Catholic seizure of the British crown were the core of the regiments. 1715 and 1745 - and the subsequent chasing off of the highland clans - were what added Scots to the mercenary ranks. Almost every well recorded mercenary I check started their military career in a national army before leaving or being kicked out for some reason or another. Wars create mercenaries; political supression may sustain their numbers, but in almost all cases the genesis is a defeated (or, in a few cases, even a victorious but disbanded) army.

The British attempted to stop the exodus of military aged Irishmen in 1745 and this led to the recruitment of German and Italian recruits. Now, if you look at the timeline of Germany, you see that there were no major conflicts between the Great Northern War (which mainly involved Prussia, not all of the German states) in 1700 and the Seven Year's War in 1756, meaning there were two generations of Germans by 1745 that had not fought any major conflicts that were being recruited in 1745 (the Germans who fought in the Great Northern War would have been too old by then.) So clearly the idea that mercenaries always came from veterans of war-ravaged, devestated populations is just not supported.

Frederick the Great invaded Silesia in 1740, beginning the War of the Austrian Succession. So by 1745 there were plenty of soldiers with experience...

The Second/Great Northern War ended in 1721, so veterans would likely still have been around (a 16 year old drummer boy of 1721 would have been 35 in 1740). The Battle of Dettingen in 1743 involved Hannoverian and Hessian troops, so it was far from just Prussia involved.

Most of the Germans who supported Britain in the American Revolutionary War were "Condottieri" by the EUIV definitions, and most Germans on the Continental side were colonists who joined the Continental Army, but a few Freikorps were also involved, some of whom volunteered with a view to getting their passage to the Americas paid for and then staying as colonists!

In conclusion - "condottieri" as represented in EUIV, foreign manpower enlistment in national armies and units of contracted mercenary soldiers with prior experience all had a place in history up to and through the 18th century and the Napoleonic Wars. In the latter, national armies became very much larger, while mercenary units and their numbers did not. Mercenary units were generally generated by war; they were generally formed from disbanded armies after war, or from deserters and stranded soldiers during or after wars. Thier numbers could be maintained by recruits from defeated or occupied areas - in game terms "non-accepted cultures" - but were seldom formed initially just from these.*

In game terms, I think having units associated with trade nodes, acquiring technology, traits and abilities from the nations that hire them or from whom they spring, available to hire to all comers, would be a fine adornment to the game. These units should be formed from disbanded regiments and war casualties, especially regiments of a defeated or annexed side at a war's end, and sustained by a flow of recruits to the node from "non-accepted cultures" and war casualties. An additional wrinkle might be that such units will refuse outright to serve the country/countries that annexed or occupy their homeland, if they are formed from defeated army units? This might prevent an aggressive nation from buying up all the mercenaries in a node - if they were the original enemy of the mercenaries, maybe the mercenaries will fight against but not for them? Instead of being for a specific country, mercenaries are against a specific country.

Maybe there could also be covert missions to recruit from non-accepted cultures in foreign lands for your national army?

*: Edit to add: maybe it could be useful to have a way to transition a "mercenary" regiment to a "regular" one? After war is over, mercenary recruits should dry up. To keep the disciplined, trained and experienced troops, it would make sense to start replacing from your own regular recruiting pool, reflecting how units raised from defeated emigres gradually became just another regular unit of the army.

 

[Snootch]

I think that mercenaries should be designed in EU4 in the same way that they were used historically: the nations that needed them budgeted for them, while those who didn't... didn't. Mercenary armies were usually not complementary units. Either the nation had grand armies and very few (or no) mercenaries; or the nation had almost entirely mercenary armies (with a special guard at home).

Therefore, I think trying to figure-out how mercenaries and armies should co-exist is going to make the game harder to program for and could jeopardize balance due to compromising, etc. Perhaps we should be looking at what a mercenary army looks like in comparison to a national army. Perhaps we will see that these two brands operate under very different dynamics, and civilizations build around one or the other - not both.

That is, by spending money on private armies from various nationalities (typically comprised of criminals, sponsored immigrants, vagabonds, slaves, and others), then a nation better be economically advanced and focused on things that would enable such a decision. (Think Carthage.) But if the nation wants to home-grow its troops from among its own population, then there are issues concerning conscription, population matters (births, deaths, hospitals, the number of child-bearing women, etc.), and domestic politics.

So if one decides to send "someone else's kids out for our wars," then what would that look like in EU4? Otherwise, what would it look like to send "our own kids out for our wars" in EU4?

I think the problems with the mercenary system (international or private armies) nowadays is that they are being treated the same as national (or public sector) armies. Now we are trying to figure-out how to treat them more realistically, which therefore requires a different consideration.

 

[Stepkick]

@Ruian Hey thank you for taking the advice in a positive way. Even though you are a well experienced player, my intention was to help and I am glad you acknowledged it.

I see your point of view as well. Yes manpower is abysmal, but so are mechanics of mercenaries. The way the game is currently set up makes mercenaries equivalent to an expensive standing army, and that is my main quarrel. Also as you mentioned, I agree with the fact that it is simpler to avoid the micro to save manpower and stack mercenaries, especially if you play your cards right economically, you can have 100% mercenary armies 100% of the time, without having to worry about manpower ever again. But this is obviously something that needs a look at right?

I mean what is even the point of a standing army if mercenaries are just so easy to maintain, as they are right now that choosing to run with standard armies is rather crippling? That's my point, yes mercenaries need to nerfs, but standing armies need to be buffed, especially late game. The very fact that mercenaries outshine standing armies in every aspect of the game right now save for reinforcement and recruitment costs, renders many potentially fun mechanics like drilling and professionalism, useless.

 

[Ruian]

@Ruian Hey thank you for taking the advice in a positive way. Even though you are a well experienced player, my intention was to help and I am glad you acknowledged it.

I see your point of view as well. Yes manpower is abysmal, but so are mechanics of mercenaries. The way the game is currently set up makes mercenaries equivalent to an expensive standing army, and that is my main quarrel. Also as you mentioned, I agree with the fact that it is simpler to avoid the micro to save manpower and stack mercenaries, especially if you play your cards right economically, you can have 100% mercenary armies 100% of the time, without having to worry about manpower ever again. But this is obviously something that needs a look at right?

I mean what is even the point of a standing army if mercenaries are just so easy to maintain, as they are right now that choosing to run with standard armies is rather crippling? That's my point, yes mercenaries need to nerfs, but standing armies need to be buffed, especially late game. The very fact that mercenaries outshine standing armies in every aspect of the game right now save for reinforcement and recruitment costs, renders many potentially fun mechanics like drilling and professionalism, useless.

We are in agreement. If manpower weren't so horribly underpowered I would never hire a single mercenary except for in a pinch (which is supposed to be what they are for, I think). Yeah why drill when you can lower maintenance and save your money for mercs. Pretty much.

 

[schnizzle]

This sounds great, but for me, the thing that needs to be introduced into EUIV warfare mechanisms is some sort of notion of supply train

Great Idea! And if distance from capital or being disconnected from it, is implemented it could be used for other mechanics like autonomy or drill. I think unit drill should increase when fighting on enemy ground or own land that is disconnected from your capital. This way drill would simulate army experience and acclimatisation

 

[RL0323]

On the topic of mercenaries could there be a third option added in the Ambrosian republic event that sees Francesco Sforza take over

 

[grommile]

Building prices should be adjusted. I assume it's one value in the code so very easy to do.

One value per building Individual buildings have their own prices, and EU4's script interpreter doesn't appear to have Stellaris's system of defining constants prefixed with an '@' which can be used to set reference values to be used by large numbers of buildings.