@DDRJake I'm really glad that you have started adjusting combat system, but since 1.12 (CS) patch the balance between manpower and mercenaries has been changed: manpower pools have been cut at least twice, so most wars are won by mercspam. This creates an extremely awkward situations when the early conflicts (like France + England vs Burgundy + Castile + Austria) can take millions of mercenaries lives in mid XV century, which is absurd from historical demography point of view. On the other hand, manpower pools are jokingly low, which almost completely deflates attrition and attrition wars (just place a stack of mercs on that scorched mountain fort and don't worry about anything). In general, players have no choice but to build as strong as possible economy and rely on mercspam.
Edit: I know that lower manpower pools have been somewhat compensated by increased manpower recovery (like Nobility estate loyalty, for example), but it still doesn't fix the current situation's awkwardness. Also, unlike pre-1.12 where you could build any building in any province, now the buildings slots are limited, therefore it's irrational to construct barracks in hypothetical 2/2/1 province with 3 slots.
Looks good! But shouldn't Professionalism also depend on Army Tradition or vice versa? Both mechanics seem quite closely related.
After thinking I think that discipline should go, absolutism and army tradition should stay but lose their direct effect on combat instead begin used to drive up professionalism.
Prussia was in DLC so I wouldn't count on it much.
Maybe not but then on the other hand we did nag them to making ages dependent on institutions. Quite why those mechanics weren't just one better made one is beyond em though.
Kinda like Prestige should be connected to Power Projection and Diplomatic Reputation, or Russian Boyars should be connected to Boyar estate, or Corruption to Inflation, or dozen other not connected systems?..
EU4 despite being newer than ck2 is suffering a terrible mechanics bloat. And most of them seems to be targeted at fixing multiplayer exploits.
@DDRJake my two cents on this issue: why not simply bring back the flat percentage increase to manpower per mil tech level that was patched out at 1.12 (IIRC)? Never understood why that was abandoned in the first place.
Because they can't slap a shiny screenshot of that and use it to sell us yet another half assed DLC. They don't think simple solutions sells... They should give us more credit.
Wish all disbanded units went back to your manpower or at least half of it. Why do they just disappear into thin air?
Disband unit in your own territory - Full manpower value restored.
Disband in allied territory - Half manpower value restored.
Disband in enemy territory - Quarter of manpower value restored.
They don't? Heck you get manpower back when you get stackwipes.
Mercenaries are a problem, but for single player quantity is the best mil idea group anyway, and now its just going to be absurd.
Yeah it's sort of odd.
Because mercs are currently way better then normal Infantry in most circumstances
Because they were for the first half of the game's period. A mercenary is worth three, one man who can keep plowing his field, one more solider in my armies and one less in my enemies.
Mercs are unrealistic. Huge bands of mercs just sitting around in your land waiting to get hired.
Wish they refined it to be more dynamic with merc bands traveling around Europe and you can offer to hire them like a
Condottieri and have them arrive in a few days if they are nearby.
Maybe something similar to CK2's merc mechanics.
It's an effects of numbers being to large for the period to start with. And mercenaries made up the majority if all armies up until the TYW.
shouldn't fully professional army be composed 100% of mercs? i mean those are people who do war for living vs bunch of drafted peasants
Yes you sort of have a point. A professional army is more of a modification on the idea of mercenaries than on levies. A professional soldier is essentially a mercenery who will only fight for one employer.
Machiavelli warned about mercenaries and if we look in the modern world his warning ring pretty true for professional armies too, you rarely see a military coup in countries with an army based on mandatory military service of it's citizens.
This is just not nearly true. The low countries have the smallest provinces in the game and have had since release. If you compare what those Persian provinces cover with what the ones in the low country ones do it's not even close. Europe is also larger than it ought to be to give space for more provinces.
Perhaps but there is a reason the low countries region has small provinces. It has as much population and more wealth in 1444 as all of England. Yet for some reason far fewer provinces and much less development. And provinces matter because there are a ton of buildings which give a static bonus and until you change those to be development affected it matters (or one per state).
For reference, in that screenshot the smallest province, Fasa, is 398 pixels which you might compare to Gelre (280 pixels) or Holland (273 pixels) which are among the largest provinces in the low countries. The smaller ones such as Utrecht (79 pixels) and Zeeland (81 pixels) only have their likes among islands in the rest of the world.
Not really the point though.
Nice! Sweden starts at 10 confirmed!
Hardly Sweden used mercenary armies almost exclusively up until the first indelningsverk in the reign of Gustavus Adolphus. Even that didn't truly take of until the military reforms of Carl XI.
Sweden starts at 0 actually
But in some later start dates they do have an edge.
As it should be. Also, you're updating later start dates?
In 1450 you could regard an army as being based on:
1. Mercenaries - high experience, low professionalism (we just want the money!!)
2. Standing armies - small in number, basically tied to a city or lord, medium professionalism and experience (??)
3. Raised armies - loaded when needed, low professionalism and low experience, low quality
By 1800, in Europe, I would expect that most of the mercenary armies have closed or effectively merged into standing armies at the national level, which are now capable of high professionalism and experience. There will still be a raised army when needed, with a better quality, but that need was gradually dying.
Modelling that in detail would be difficult, but the ability to gain professionalism over time would effectively mirror that change. Perhaps there should be limits on are fast you can get the steps, by date or having knowledge of certain skill sets, like printing press.
Except we have no raised armies in the game which is pretty much the problem, or well no way to differentiate them from the standing armies. And these aren't static, usually raised soldiers would become mercenaries when the wars ended finding themselves unable to return home after what they had experienced.
Why do we now have 2 different scales buffing scales, army tradition and professionalism?
Will Prussian army become even more insane?
Why is the difference between drilled troops, profesionalism and National ideas so little?
Yeah army tradition needs to change now. in a way it's a pity I like army tradition, I especially like that you get more of it by losing battles than winning. Maybee high army traditon could help drive up professionalism.
Hmm, I assume England starts with some professionalism? I can provide a source if it's needed.
Apart from that... Ming, Ashikaga, Castille, Aragon, Portugal?
LO, TO, the Knights, Granada, Athens.
Why would they? They're feudal in 1444. Also England does not need more buffs they need to be nerfed really really badly. They start out as a greatpower in 1444 when really they were a backwater up until at least the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and only a regional power until the Napoleonic wars.
A proper update to the trade system would have me reinstall EU4 instantly. It's one of the few mechanics in the game that actively ruin my immersion.
Yeah, EU4 is far more fun outside of Europe but that damn trade system makes you want to want to bash your head into the wall.
We're all fine about adding new provinces, but this upset balances. More provinces means more buildings slots. Now, if buildings' bonuses scaled with development it would be fine but there are buildings that gives flat amount of X. Manufactories and Force limit buildings being the main problem.
So yes, within a few years in the game, you've got region like Anatolia that produces more Cloth than Italy because there are more provinces, easier to develop, and more manufactories available.
Yeah they really need to move more stuff to state level. Also now the bonus to army professionalism is per building too so say hello to large countries (by province) spamming them to get super large professional armies.
I'm not going to lie, my heart sank when I saw that there's going to be another variable ending in -ism...
Well at least army tradition is not army traditionalism.
So what now, I am gonna get Penalized if I destroy the stupid AI's FL building spam?!
Yeah so it would seem.
Does anyone know whether the army professionalism and the drill system come on top of the current discipline mechanism or whether they will replace discipline? With the ever increasing number of boni I feel like the warfare (and the game as a whole to be honest) loses some kind of "well definedness": instead of the boni being abstractions of certain well-defined elements of warfare (or other aspects of country management) providing immersion, they start to look more like "just numbers" you try to optimize without any real role-playing in mind. What will the game concept of discipline correspond to with the new systems added?
Maybe rebrand it to something else. Maybe make discipline -> officer education and drill -> combined arms training? For generic competence, we already have combat ability.
Won't replace it, they have to keep it aroudn for those who don't get the DLC. And I doubt it will be disabled for those with the DLC.
How much professionalism do the Orders (Knights, Teutons, Livonians) start with?
Should be high. But perhaps not to high, they all got their asses handed to them pretty quickly in reality.
Considering introduction of conscription in 18 century and continuation into 19 and 20th century, the need for raised armies only grew.
What exactly is backwards? EU period starts with feudal levies and knights, which are profecional troops(at least mostly), then followed a period of 15-16 century of religious wars and mercenary armies. Merks also fought a lot in 100 years war and similar. Mercenaries were mostly employed by large empires and wealthy small states, because small poor state has no way to accumulate cash to pay merks.
It is not exactly unhistorical, it is abstraction, which works badly for edge cases.
Cost and ability to rewolt are the only real downsides of using mercenaries.
Should Merks benefit from combat ideas is highly debatable, because you have to establish who are your "regular" troops and how they differ from mercenaries in terms of training and such. If your regular troops are just conscripts from local villages and they then get trained at expence of the state, then mercenaries serving for long enought tenure would be indistinguishable from local troops.
Merks didn`t become less effective, they have seen action for most of the time period, they just became economically unsustainable in Europe, where there became only a dosen of large states, that waged war on relativly rare ocasions, so one couldn`t just switch employers constantly, expirienced people became profecional parts of European armies.
Well the thing is that when pikes and crossbows make the knights less effective than much cheaper troop types the old warrior cast becomes obsolete, in a way the knights were themselves mercenaries, fighting for the price of being allowed to tax certain lands.
Anyway then those become obsolete and are replaced by huge levy armies and more classic mercenaries (who were themselves usually the levies from some other war who kept on using the one skill they did have). The professional armies grew out of new methods of using new weapons requiring more skill and suddenly keeping on to those veterans rather than allowing them to wander of and become mercenaries became a priority. Army professionalism didn't replace the need for mercenaries it replaced the availability of them. Oh also the thirty years war killed of pretty much all the old ones.
But with the world war era the sheer number of causalities made professional soldiers not viable for total war. The only reason there are still professional armies today is that we very rarely see total war any more.
The game should really structure the units diffrently, there shoudl be barely any standing armies at the onset of the game instead there should be CK2 stil levies, a percentage of the ones used should be returned to the manpower pool a the end of the war and a percentage should be added to a global (or regional) mercenary pool. Over time we should be given the ability to rise standing armies reducing the number of raised troops and as such the manpower to the merc pool.
@DDRJake Here's some more food for thought: how to do you justify Professionalism (currently) being unrelated to Army Tradition?
By not being able to keep to many DLC configurations balanced.
I agree, they represent two very and tightly related similar things. IMO, they should remove AT now.
No At is great since it represent learning from your mistakes. It should be made to affect professionalism instead of combat directly though.
Everyone's talkin bout Prussia, but how about Revolutionary Republics and Empires? Will they get a Professionalism bonus to emulate the Grande Armée?
Well was the Grande armée a professional army? I thought it's ability came from removing all the old stupid entrenched elites and promoting people who actually knew how to do their job in their stead.
will Black Army be changed once again? these changes make the units essentially worthless
They really need to look over both Prussia and Hungary now.
This makes the Quantity idea more interesting. Not sure how much of an effect Professionalism will have if manpower remains unchanged though. You run out of bodies fairly quickly with most small/medium nations.
Quantity really doesn't need a buff though.
