A version of Consolidate Regiments that doesn't disband 0 strength regiments.

[swm]

I think the title mostly speaks for itself, but because the wiki justifies this as a gameplay trade off, I'll throw out my rationale for why the trade off shouldn't exist.

Due to the lower cost of reinforced soldiers, the choice to consolidate regiments can be seen as a trade off between short term combat ability versus long term financial costs. Consolidated regiments will fight better than depleted ones, but refilling your force limit with new regiments will also cost twice as much as reinforcing your existing regiments.

But it's... incredibly easy to avoid the trade off by simply splitting off sub-stacks so that FLOOR(Total Men / Regiment Count) = Regiment Count. It's just slightly more tedious micromanagement to have to split apart an army after each battle to consolidate without losing regiments.

Take a stack of 9000 infantry and 10 regiments, split like this:

Army 0:
RegimentsxStrength
10x900
Reinforce Rate: 1000 Men/Month (Base - ignoring any potential modifiers, which would affect all proportionally)

While simply pressing consolidate regiments would destroy one regiment, resulting in this:
Army 1:
9x1000
Reinforcement Rate: 0 Men/Month

Dividing the stack in half, pressing consolidate on each half, and merge them back together:
Army 2:
8x1000,
2x500
Reinforcement Rate: 200 Men/Month

Or, splitting off one regiment:
Army 3:
8x1000,
1x900,
1x100
Reinforcement Rate: 200 Men/Month

Though theoretically Army 1 is the strongest of these, the difference in combat abilities between it and Armies 2 and 3 are sufficiently minor that it isn't worth losing 1 Regiment, since:

Each reinforced soldier will cost half as much as a newly recruited soldier. This reinforcement cost is added to the regiment's listed maintenance value for that month.

The actual trade off with consolidate regiments is reinforcement speed, since each regiment reinforces separately, Army 0 will reinforce back to full strength far faster than armies 2 or 3. This is the real strategic trade off with regards to consolidating regiments, and the reason why this button wouldn't become just a mindless click after every battle. There's no need to force micro this tedious.

Source for quotes: http://www.eu4wiki.com/Infantry_cost#Reinforcements

 

[Johan]

Could add that behaviour to shift-click on it.

 

[Denkt]

Also if you add this in also add in an option for auto consilidation that do this at the start of each month after reforcements.