High regiment morale might be a liability if regiment damage output scales with Current Strength % while used Frontage does not.

[Crunbum]

If both sides have enough regiments to fill the Frontage multiple times over, due to interactions between the following :

- Damage dealt by engaged Regiments scales with their Current Strength %.
- The Frontage occupied by a Regiment in battle is always the same, regardless of its Current Strength %.

Higher morale regiments deal slightly more damage across the whole battle due to staying engaged for longer, thus "winning" otherwise even engagements.

However as a result, higher morale regiments also spend their engaged battle ticks being more damaged, on average, than their lower morale peers which retreat faster, to be replaced by full strength regiments fresh from the Reserves section, as the Frontage is freed up for them to join. This makes higher morale a potential liability, as the more damaged a regiment is relative to the enemy, the worse its ratio of damage dealt vs damage taken becomes, leading to substantially higher manpower/levy losses than the enemy in otherwise identical army battles, turning them Pyrrhic (outside Pursuit phase) and potentially losing the war because at the end of the day, it is manpower/levies that win wars, not a green "battle won" text on the screen.

Spoiler: Illustrating Scenario

Imagine Army A and Army B. Both consist of identical Regiments, except those in Army A have much higher morale and will rout after 80% Strength damage received, as opposed to 50% for Army B.

Average damage dealt per battle tick while engaged :
A regiments : (1+0.2)/2 = 60%
B regiments : (1+0.5)/2 = 75%

Damage ticks received until retreat :
A regiments : 80% strength damage to rout, 0.75x taken per tick fighting Army B. If x = 10%, 80/7.5 = 10.67 ticks till rout.
B regiments : 50% strength damage to rout, 0.6x taken per tick fighting Army A. If x = 10%, 50/6 = 8.33 ticks till rout.

Total damage done by each engaged regiment until retreat :
A regiments : 60% x 10.67 = 64%
B regiments : 75% x 8.33 = 62.5%

Kills to Deaths ratio :
A regiments = 0.64 / 0.8 = 0.8
B regiments = 0.625 / 0.5 = 1.25

To solve the problem, the actual combat power fighting on each side of a battle must remain constant while the Frontage is full, regardless of how damaged the individual engaged regiments become, consequently the simple solution would be to either scale the Frontage that regiments take up in frontline sections by their Current Strength %, or to make it so that damaged regiments no longer deal reduced damage.

 

[Pakth]

Not sure if this will be a huge issue as long as damaged units can be consolidated together similar to how it works in EU4. Then again, manpower is a lot more cheap in EU4 so that could explain why this isn't more of a concern there.

Scaling frontage, based on how damaged a unit is, would cut down on a bit of micro so that's still a good idea regardless if consolidation is available or not.

 

[Crunbum]

Not sure if this will be a huge issue as long as damaged units can be consolidated together similar to how it works in EU4. Then again, manpower is a lot more cheap in EU4 so that could explain why this isn't more of a concern there.

Scaling frontage, based on how damaged a unit is, would cut down on a bit of micro so that's still a good idea regardless if consolidation is available or not.

Are you talking about consolidating units after a battle, or during it? Because the lack of the latter is the problem basically.
As long as there is a "combat width" mechanic and it remains filled while unit damage scales with its current strength %, units with very high / infinite morale that dont retreat until completely wiped will lose 3 soldiers for every 2 they kill fighting otherwise identical units that rout at 50% strength lost.

I know for sure from EU4 multiplayer that I actively avoided stacking morale modifiers for this reason because it was better to have as little morale as possible as long as you had enough troops to rotate the frontline a few times over. It "lost" you fights but massively reduced the manpower drain so after a few battles the enemy would run out long before you did, all else being equal.

More morale should never be a bad thing but instead it always was and I'm worried EU5 will overlook this too, especially when it has Manpower/Levy pool as the main constraint, rather than being oriented more towards taking land and forts like EU4 because mercs there had pretty much infinite manpower, buying time for regulars to recover many times over and resulting in wars lasting 15-30 years. Which won't be possible anymore, losing more soldiers will just mean losing the war.

I expect pursuit phase to make high morale better but there is no reason to arbitrarily punish high morale regiments with worse KD ratios in the battle itself.

 

[Pakth]

Are you talking about consolidating units after a battle, or during it? Because the lack of the latter is the problem basically.
As long as there is a "combat width" mechanic and it remains filled while unit damage scales with its current strength %, units with very high / infinite morale that dont retreat until completely wiped will lose 3 soldiers for every 2 they kill fighting otherwise identical units that rout at 50% strength lost.

I know for sure from EU4 multiplayer that I actively avoided stacking morale modifiers for this reason because it was better to have as little morale as possible as long as you had enough troops to rotate the frontline a few times over. It "lost" you fights but massively reduced the manpower drain so after a few battles the enemy would run out long before you did, all else being equal.

More morale should never be a bad thing but instead it always was and I'm worried EU5 will overlook this too, especially when it has Manpower/Levy pool as the main constraint, rather than being oriented more towards taking land and forts like EU4 because mercs there had pretty much infinite manpower, buying time for regulars to recover many times over and resulting in wars lasting 15-30 years. Which won't be possible anymore, losing more soldiers will just mean losing the war.

I expect pursuit phase to make high morale better but there is no reason to arbitrarily punish high morale regiments with worse KD ratios in the battle itself.

Hmm, I can't say I have encountered the same issues as you but I haven't played in very competitive multiplayer lobbies.

In my experience more morale is always good because it wins you battles and it might have cost you more men but it allows you to occupy land which denies manpower/manpower recovery to your opponents. I've lost wars with very good k/ds simply because I kept losing out on morale and the occupations reducing my max manpower to barely anything.

I'd also argue that occupations should be more important in EU5 compared to EU4 because of how the economy functions, it didn't matter in 4 if you lost an iron mine or a city but in 5 that likely means you're short on goods for replenishment or that you lost one of your manpower buildings. This likely won't happen as often later on when players/ai have lots of cities with the matching infrastructure but early on it should be a viable strategy to win wars by sniping the single built up city in a country.

Obviously we will have to wait and see how this turns out but I expect it to resemble Vic2 demob/remob death wars where you repeatedly disband and call up your levies to replenish their numbers with new conscripts.

In any case scaling frontage based on damage would be a nice way to cut down on micro but not sure if it would have a massive effect on war outcomes. Ofc that's if you can consolidate, I can't remember if that's possible for levies and most of the footage shown in the early preview was focused on the economy/trade so couldn't tell. If you can't then I agree with your points fully that its a must for units' frontage to scale to their remaining strength.

 

[Crunbum]

Hmm, I can't say I have encountered the same issues as you but I haven't played in very competitive multiplayer lobbies.

In my experience more morale is always good because it wins you battles and it might have cost you more men but it allows you to occupy land which denies manpower/manpower recovery to your opponents. I've lost wars with very good k/ds simply because I kept losing out on morale and the occupations reducing my max manpower to barely anything.

I'd also argue that occupations should be more important in EU5 compared to EU4 because of how the economy functions, it didn't matter in 4 if you lost an iron mine or a city but in 5 that likely means you're short on goods for replenishment or that you lost one of your manpower buildings. This likely won't happen as often later on when players/ai have lots of cities with the matching infrastructure but early on it should be a viable strategy to win wars by sniping the single built up city in a country.

Obviously we will have to wait and see how this turns out but I expect it to resemble Vic2 demob/remob death wars where you repeatedly disband and call up your levies to replenish their numbers with new conscripts.

In any case scaling frontage based on damage would be a nice way to cut down on micro but not sure if it would have a massive effect on war outcomes. Ofc that's if you can consolidate, I can't remember if that's possible for levies and most of the footage shown in the early preview was focused on the economy/trade so couldn't tell. If you can't then I agree with your points fully that its a must for units' frontage to scale to their remaining strength.

Reportedly EU5 wars are like 10 times shorter than in EU4 past the first age, because levies dont reinforce once raised, manpower is very scarce and forts are easy to assault, more a time/manpower sink than a real obstacle once you have cannons, while battles result in near-total losses (though that might change) so it really comes down to who runs out of troops first and most of the time all it takes is 1-2 real battles and the war is over. No near-infinite manpower mercs to hire either.

See I think it has an absolutely massive impact on outcomes, it was important even in EU4 where you could wage forever-wars for 30 years if you wanted to and the limit wasn't even manpower/mercs there per se but who got to 120ish loans first via funding 30 years of constant reinforcing while at 120-150% the force limit lol.

Consolidating out of battles barely matters when both sides will do it anyway, its the relative losses that are important. If you have 100k troops and the enemy has 100k troops, and you fight, and you "win" the fight purely because of higher morale, killing say 60% of the enemies while losing 75% yourself purely because of your higher morale, the next fight is going to be 25k vs 40k and you'll lose the war hard as a result. End of the day, more morale is logically a purely good thing. It should never, mechanically, be a bad thing. But it was in EU4 and I'm worried it will be in EU5 with the battle mechanics as presented.

 

[Monty is staring at me]

I think what is being suggested is that a 50% strength regiment uses 50% the frontline?
I would definitely support that.

 

[Crunbum]

I think what is being suggested is that a 50% strength regiment uses 50% the frontline?
I would definitely support that.

Yes, or to not complicate things, just have regiments do full damage while engaged, regardless of their current strength %. The frontage is the frontage, it represents the amount of stuff that can fight at the same time, if a regiment is still engaged, why should it be trading less effectively just because it took losses? The remainder of it is logically enough to occupy the same frontage/combat width, because it mechanically does occupy it, or else it would get reinforced and rotated out.

 

[Regaccio]

I like this idea, but I propose that an under-strength unit's ability to restrict its frontage should be influenced by commander skill and discipline. Since it's basically trying to "stay in formation". If a unit is undisciplined or poorly led, it won't be able to pull itself together and adjust its formation when it takes losses. It'll dissolve and get picked apart, which is what happens currently.

 

[Crunbum]

I like this idea, but I propose that an under-strength unit's ability to restrict its frontage should be influenced by commander skill and discipline. Since it's basically trying to "stay in formation". If a unit is undisciplined or poorly led, it won't be able to pull itself together and adjust its formation when it takes losses. It'll dissolve and get picked apart, which is what happens currently.

Keep in mind frontage does not represent the whole regiment fighting at the same time. 50 Knights and 100 men at arms and 1000 levies all have the same Frontage of 1, its less "space occupied by regiment" and more "frontline width across which the fighting takes place", likely 25-50 men wide per point of Frontage (2x each age), so a levy regiment could take like 95-97% attrition and still fill it just fine, there is nothing to "pick apart", not until the whole regiment routs.

Its why 100 regular infantry can fight 1000 levies, they are not fighting them all at the same time, but in a formation thats probably like 25 wide 4 deep, engaging enemies 25v25 at a time, and as long as they have a 91%+ duel winrate in formation, they win the combat, which is quite believable where 10v1 irl is not.

Commander skill also already affects actual battle frontage as is, so fixing the situation but only partially and depending on commander skill would imo be a bit weird, when the current abstraction unintuitively makes morale bonuses in big battles into combat ability debuffs and pretty bad ones.

 

[Pakth]

Reportedly EU5 wars are like 10 times shorter than in EU4 past the first age, because levies dont reinforce once raised, manpower is very scarce and forts are easy to assault, more a time/manpower sink than a real obstacle once you have cannons, while battles result in near-total losses (though that might change) so it really comes down to who runs out of troops first and most of the time all it takes is 1-2 real battles and the war is over. No near-infinite manpower mercs to hire either.

From what I've seen in the preview footage this is mostly just the case because of how early in the game most of the footage is but in Habibi or ThePlaymaker's videos you can see them starting to approach the EU4 manpower numbers as they got closer to 1444.

See I think it has an absolutely massive impact on outcomes, it was important even in EU4 where you could wage forever-wars for 30 years if you wanted to and the limit wasn't even manpower/mercs there per se but who got to 120ish loans first via funding 30 years of constant reinforcing while at 120-150% the force limit lol.

Those 120 loans are exactly why winning battles and occupying provinces is so important. Each occupation reduces the loan size and gets your opponent closer to bankruptcy. I have fought wars to bankruptcy and if it wasn't for half my country being occupied I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have hit the loan cap at all. EU 4 wars do last very long but if both sides agreed not to occupy each other and just chained battles they would go on forever rather than "just" lasting 30 years.

Consolidating out of battles barely matters when both sides will do it anyway, its the relative losses that are important. If you have 100k troops and the enemy has 100k troops, and you fight, and you "win" the fight purely because of higher morale, killing say 60% of the enemies while losing 75% yourself purely because of your higher morale, the next fight is going to be 25k vs 40k and you'll lose the war hard as a result. End of the day, more morale is logically a purely good thing. It should never, mechanically, be a bad thing. But it was in EU4 and I'm worried it will be in EU5 with the battle mechanics as presented.

This is assuming that neither side reinforces and that the battle had no effect on either sides ability to reinforce. I think you're underestimating the effects of occupation by a large degree.

 

[Regaccio]

Keep in mind frontage isn't representing the whole regiment fighting at the same time. 50 Knights and 100 men at arms and 1000 levies all have the same Frontage of 1, its less "space occupied" and more "frontline width across which the fighting takes place", probably around 50-100 men wide per point of Frontage, conceptually, so a levy regiment could take like 90-95% attrition and still fill it just fine, there is nothing to "pick apart", the hole in formation only happens once the whole regiment routs,

Commander skill also already affects actual battle frontage as is, so fixing the situation but only partially and depending on commander skill would imo be a bit weird, when the current abstraction makes morale bonuses into actual combat maluses and pretty bad ones.

Oh I see, I misunderstood about frontage.
So if you scale frontage by current strength %, in theory reserve units can move in faster even if damaged units haven't routed yet. If, say, two units of 1 frontage take 50% strength damage each, that leaves 1 open frontage for a fresh reserve unit to fill, even if they haven't retreated. So the loss in damage dealt from the 50% strength units is made up for by the fresh reserve unit (assuming you have one). Kind of makes sense, but I'm curious if it'd lead to strange situations where you purposely under-strength a bunch of units to cram more into the same frontage.

I think that's preferable to the other solution, where under-strength units deal full damage. If under-strength units do full damage when engaged, that may lead to situations where you build a bunch of units you can't maintain, then send a doomstack of these 1%-strength "paper units" to obliterate your enemy in a blitz attack. For example building way more cavalry than you have horses/elephants, not caring that their strength dropped because that doesn't affect their ability to engage fast and run the enemy over.

 

[Crunbum]

From what I've seen in the preview footage this is mostly just the case because of how early in the game most of the footage is but in Habibi or ThePlaymaker's videos you can see them starting to approach the EU4 manpower numbers as they got closer to 1444.

Those 120 loans are exactly why winning battles and occupying provinces is so important. Each occupation reduces the loan size and gets your opponent closer to bankruptcy. I have fought wars to bankruptcy and if it wasn't for half my country being occupied I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have hit the loan cap at all. EU 4 wars do last very long but if both sides agreed not to occupy each other and just chained battles they would go on forever rather than "just" lasting 30 years.

This is assuming that neither side reinforces and that the battle had no effect on either sides ability to reinforce. I think you're underestimating the effects of occupation by a large degree.

- You can get a bunch of manpower sure, the sources double each age alongside regiment sizes. For example 60 regular regiments to fill the Frontage twice over on open terrain is 6000 manpower (infantry) in the first age but 192k in the last. However, there is no absurd modifier stacking like in EU4 and regiment manpower upkeep exists, so for professional armies if you field them large you won't have a second pool to reinforce losses, recovery is slow, and there are no infinite mercs.

- Well yes they wouldn't end because to end a war you need to force a peace treaty and in EU4 taking provinces is what gives you enough warscore to force peace. Weakening the enemy is fine and dandy, but its a side-effect, little stops them from taking 120 loans before they are occupied and funding an army out of that forever. EU5 has higher warscore limits from battles and limited, costly loans, while sieges in it more resemble speedbumps and assault manpower taxes than multi-year affairs, at least once artillery comes around.

- You cant reinforce if you dont have manpower/levies remaining and both sides are intensely throwing battles at each other to make sure one runs out, which is an inevitability without infinite-ish manpower mercs and with battles lasting hours or at most a few days, rather than like half a year each. So the rate at which you trade kills to deaths is of vital importance. With the mechanics as they are, it seems that once both sides field enough troops to field combat width several times over, a +100% morale modifier would be equivalent to... -33% Combat Ability, instead of something positive lol.

 

[Crunbum]

Oh I see, I misunderstood about frontage.
So if you scale frontage by current strength %, in theory reserve units can move in faster even if damaged units haven't routed yet. If, say, two units of 1 frontage take 50% strength damage each, that leaves 1 open frontage for a fresh reserve unit to fill, even if they haven't retreated. So the loss in damage dealt from the 50% strength units is made up for by the fresh reserve unit (assuming you have one). Kind of makes sense, but I'm curious if it'd lead to strange situations where you purposely under-strength a bunch of units to cram more into the same frontage.

I think that's preferable to the other solution, where under-strength units deal full damage. If under-strength units do full damage when engaged, that may lead to situations where you build a bunch of units you can't maintain, then send a doomstack of these 1%-strength "paper units" to obliterate your enemy in a blitz attack. For example building way more cavalry than you have horses/elephants, not caring that their strength dropped because that doesn't affect their ability to engage fast and run the enemy over.

- Fractional frontage exists actually! So there's no need to get a full point free, regiments in reserves can instantly fill in if any amount is missing at all, and fight with effects scaled to that frontage. Its why stuff like +5% frontage from 50 general admin does anything, as that'd be +0.1 to+0.5 frontage depending on location haha.

- You actually cant recruit more regulars than your buildings can maintain, not usually! Its not just about money/goods, regiments have constant manpower upkeep, typically that of 2.5 regiments equals the output of a same-age building (mostly only buildable in towns+) before modifiers. Still, I guess something like what you mention could cause issues if fielding armies under Frontage indeed by frontloading damage output to an extent your enemy cant, but it would hardly be easy to do.

 

[Pakth]

- You can get a bunch of manpower sure, the sources double each age alongside regiment sizes. For example 60 regular regiments to fill the Frontage twice over on open terrain is 6000 manpower (infantry) in the first age but 192k in the last. However, there is no absurd modifier stacking like in EU4 and regiment manpower upkeep exists, so for professional armies if you field them large you won't have a second pool to reinforce losses, recovery is slow, and there are no infinite mercs.

Unfortunately we can't see in the footage how much the manpower was min/maxed by each player but we do see that Zlewikk managed to get 12k manpower on Poland and Habibi 16k on the Ottomans. These are definitely large countries so should be taken with a grain of salt but it does look as if it won't be too difficult to field a full combat width/frontage of professionals by the EU4 start date as well as have enough manpower to fully reinforce at least once if not more. Wars won't be as much of a slog as EU4 for sure and that's definitely a good thing but I don't think they will be as instant as seen once your opponent is another player rather than AI.

- Well yes they wouldn't end because to end a war you need to force a peace treaty and in EU4 taking provinces is what gives you enough warscore to force peace. Weakening the enemy is fine and dandy, but its a side-effect, little stops them from taking 120 loans before they are occupied and funding an army out of that forever. EU5 has higher warscore limits from battles and limited, costly loans, while sieges in it more resemble speedbumps and assault manpower taxes than multi-year affairs, at least once artillery comes around.

Overall EU5 wars seem to be better although sieges seem like they should last longer than they currently do or at least be more difficult to assault if we're trying to emphasise manpower as a limited resource that should be maintained.

- You cant reinforce if you dont have manpower/levies remaining and both sides are intensely throwing battles at each other to make sure one runs out, which is an inevitability without infinite-ish manpower mercs and with battles lasting hours or at most a few days, rather than like half a year each. So the rate at which you trade kills to deaths is of vital importance. With the mechanics as they are, it seems that once both sides field enough troops to field combat width several times over, a +100% morale modifier would be equivalent to... -33% Combat Ability, instead of something positive lol.

I think this is another symptom of seeing experienced players bullying the AI. I'm not so sure that two players will be intensely throwing battles at each other especially when the aggressing armies are having to extend their supply lines just to even reach the defending side. Another thing we haven't discussed yet is that reinforcement, during a battle, is no longer instant so having a high morale and routing the enemy units quickly and potentially opening a gap for flanking is more valuable. Also, there is a ticking morale penalty during battles even to the reserves so if cycling in armies is no longer an option then you're forced into having as high morale as possible or there won't be any point to having reserves. If we end up with double frontage army roadblocks spread out in every location to maximise kill to death ratio while defending it would be pretty funny but not very accurate I think.

TBH it's making me less skeptical about the game the more we talk as the mechanics seem to be not very straight forward and I hope that remains even after some more direct, hands-on testing

 

[Crunbum]

Unfortunately we can't see in the footage how much the manpower was min/maxed by each player but we do see that Zlewikk managed to get 12k manpower on Poland and Habibi 16k on the Ottomans. These are definitely large countries so should be taken with a grain of salt but it does look as if it won't be too difficult to field a full combat width/frontage of professionals by the EU4 start date as well as have enough manpower to fully reinforce at least once if not more. Wars won't be as much of a slog as EU4 for sure and that's definitely a good thing but I don't think they will be as instant as seen once your opponent is another player rather than AI.

Overall EU5 wars seem to be better although sieges seem like they should last longer than they currently do or at least be more difficult to assault if we're trying to emphasise manpower as a limited resource that should be maintained.

I think this is another symptom of seeing experienced players bullying the AI. I'm not so sure that two players will be intensely throwing battles at each other especially when the aggressing armies are having to extend their supply lines just to even reach the defending side. Another thing we haven't discussed yet is that reinforcement, during a battle, is no longer instant so having a high morale and routing the enemy units quickly and potentially opening a gap for flanking is more valuable. Also, there is a ticking morale penalty during battles even to the reserves so if cycling in armies is no longer an option then you're forced into having as high morale as possible or there won't be any point to having reserves. If we end up with double frontage army roadblocks spread out in every location to maximise kill to death ratio while defending it would be pretty funny but not very accurate I think.

TBH it's making me less skeptical about the game the more we talk as the mechanics seem to be not very straight forward and I hope that remains even after some more direct, hands-on testing

Keep in mind Trade Income was utterly broken, generating 5+ times the income that it will now that its been changed to scale with crown power that usually starts at 20% and obsoleting taxes entirely. Of course its gonna be easy to spam buildings and towns when you have infinite money and can blob with ease. Thats putting aside the AI always agreeing to be annexed in PUs and them being trivial to form. Some youtubers did things like both PU&Annex France+Castille+Aragon+Portugal as England by 1347, 10 years into the game. Forts had 0 upkeep because of a typo. Annexed locations kept their former owner's control, meaning you could annex 100 Control land and it would take a while to turn bad. Population growth was so absurd you could have a billion+ people in any large kingdom by the 1700-1800s. Many managed to triple their starting populations in the first 100 years alone, despite the Black Death halving them, 600% the pops in a century. And other such.

The state of what the players could afford goldwise and the rate of snowballing in the March Beta in no way resembles the reality of the game on release, is what I'm saying basically, so I'm witholding any number/balance-related judgements for now but I highly, highly doubt things stay that way.

As for the limits, You get 1 manpower building per Town, and 2.5 same-era regiments upkeep in manpower per such. Typically it will not make sense to have more than one Town/City per Province because you need the RGOs and other stuff that rural locations produce to sustain them. If you have 500ish Locations like say all of Italy, you might have 100 Towns/Cities at most, meaning up to 250 regiments, realistically 200 because you need some excess for recovery too. Maybe 300 with manpower modifier stacking. Lower than EU4 which was in the thousands, and its with everything built up to the absolute limits and 100 control etc everywhere, so not reasonable to expect that by the Age of Discovery or such where 80 regiments might be good already, let alone by Renaissance a decade into the game. Keep in mind Italy is a lot bigger than Poland in location size and value, more comparable to the whole Commonwealth at its peak territorial extent.

For Poland, which for reference starts with 11 levy regiments, before the Black Death halves everyone's population, I doubt you'll end up fielding more than 20 regular regiments towards the end of the Renaissance Age a century into the game, aka 10 towns with armories, 4000 regulars, 5000 manpower, and that'd already be high. Unless you heavily blob about rather than just conquering the Teutons and parts of Ukraine, but control and primary culture pops are quite a brake on that.

 

[Pakth]

Keep in mind that Trade was utterly broken, generating 5-10 times the income that it will now that its been changed and obsoleting taxes entirely. Of course its gonna be easy to spam buildings and towns when you have infinite money. Thats putting aside the AI always agreeing to be annexed in PUs and them being trivial to form so some of the youtubers did things like annex France and Castille, Aragon and Portugal as England in 10 years (thats also changing). And forts had 0 upkeep because of a typo. And population growth being so absurd you could have a literal billion+ people in any large kingdom by the 1800s. Many managed to triple their starting populations in the first 100 years alone, despite the Black Death halving them, 600% the pops in a century. And other such.

The state of what the players could afford goldwise and the rate of snowballing in the March Beta in no way resembles the reality of the game on release, is what I'm saying basically, so I'm witholding any number/balance-related judgements for now but I highly, highly doubt things stay that way.

While knowing it isn't perfect or finished I am going to take things as presented rather than assumed to be like at release whoknows how many months from now (hopefully a lot). If shown newer patches in preview I'll change my mind accordingly but unfortunately PDX has shown that they can ignore reported problems up until release although Tinto seems to be doing better with EU5. I am trying to judge the wars based on what we've seen and it looks like the barriers to build decently sized standing armies just isn't there. Even if we account for lowered income from trade the things that are likelier to get cut are stability spending and the like rather the economy, infrastructure and manpower buildings.

As for the limits, You get 1 manpower building per Town, and 2.5 same-era regiments upkeep in manpower per such. Typically it will not make sense to have more than one Town/City per Province because you need the RGOs and other stuff that rural locations produce to sustain them. If you have 500ish Locations like say all of Italy, you might have 100 Towns/Cities at most, meaning up to 250 regiments, realistically 200 because you need some excess for recovery too. Maybe 300 with manpower modifier stacking. Lower than EU4 which was in the thousands, and its with everything built up to the absolute limits and 100 control etc everywhere, probably not reasonable to expect that by the Age of Discovery or such where 60 regiments might be good already, let alone by Renaissance a decade into the game. Keep in mind Italy is a lot bigger than Poland in location size and value, more comparable to the whole Commonwealth at its peak territorial extent.

Was this limit discussed in a TT? In ThePlaymaker's video at least, there are multiple armories per location. This is ignoring rural manpower buildings which I remember were shown in a Saturday Buildings post. Yes, there will be less income on launch but players will get better and there's a hundred extra years to scale. While the manpower will be less than in EU4 I don't think the changes as is make a big enough difference to result in the 1-2 battle wars you're describing unless we're talking about the first 30 odd years.

Anyway, manpower tangents aside, I think morale will still be beneficial as it will help rout the enemy sections faster and opening flanks as well as reinforcing battles becoming more difficult with the fast hour/couple day battles because moving between locations can take 5+ days therefore you will need your reserves in the battle ahead of time and they need morale to combat the ticking penalty

 

[Crunbum]

While knowing it isn't perfect or finished I am going to take things as presented rather than assumed to be like at release whoknows how many months from now (hopefully a lot). If shown newer patches in preview I'll change my mind accordingly but unfortunately PDX has shown that they can ignore reported problems up until release although Tinto seems to be doing better with EU5. I am trying to judge the wars based on what we've seen and it looks like the barriers to build decently sized standing armies just isn't there. Even if we account for lowered income from trade the things that are likelier to get cut are stability spending and the like rather the economy, infrastructure and manpower buildings.

Was this limit discussed in a TT? In ThePlaymaker's video at least, there are multiple armories per location. This is ignoring rural manpower buildings which I remember were shown in a Saturday Buildings post. Yes, there will be less income on launch but players will get better and there's a hundred extra years to scale. While less than EU4 I don't think the changes as is make a big enough difference to result in the 1-2 battle wars you're describing unless we're talking about the first 30 odd years.

Anyway, manpower tangents aside, I think morale will still be beneficial as it will help rout the enemy sections faster and opening flanks as well as reinforcing battles becoming more difficult with the fast hour/couple day battles because moving between locations can take 5+ days therefore you will need your reserves in the battle ahead of time and they need morale to combat the ticking penalty

The game is pretty much finished and feature complete other than balancing and UI which are always done dead last in the development cycle and take very little time to do, honestly they could release it in a month if they wanted to and it would already be a much better and more polished game on release than many of their new-ish titles, like Imperator or Vic 3. I think most likely release date is just before Christmas because they probably want to focus on optimization so it runs on 10y old PCs that belong in a museum and doesn't crash, plus add more flavor & content to later ages, but I wouldn't be one bit surprised if they do a summer release.

- Well I only mentioned things that have already been confirmed as changed. Trade has been nerfed to scale with crown power, meaning 5 times less trade income in the early years - and literally every youtuber was spamming marketplaces like crazy and making 90% of their income from them because they were 5 times more efficient than tax stuff, while the AI was not. In the videos you could PU anyone at will and integrate-annex them in 7 years at will as the AI would always agree, that is no longer the case so no free snowball. Control no longer gets inherited on conquest. Forts have upkeep as they were meant to. Pop growth is not going to be calibrated such that you can grow it by a factor of 6 per century. There is no point in "judging the wars based on what we've seen and concluding that the barriers to build decently sized standing armies aren't there" because all the reasons one could field what you call a "decently sized standing army" in the early private beta build of the game we've been shown have already been fixed or nerfed hard and on purpose. The trade nerf alone, if you have five times less gold you can afford less than a fifth as many buildings/troops (because it reduces your net income by more than that). And that doesn't even factor in snowball effects. Realistically the Poland that got to 12k manpower in 100 years, would be at more like 2000 off of that change alone, add in PU nerfs so you dont get +50% pop for free, pop growth nerfs, no free control etc, and its more like 1000-1500, maybe 10 regiments or a tenth as much.

- Possible you can get more but in the end population will be the limit anyway. By historical populations which the game will aim at, large kingdoms like Italy or the Commonwealth only had 15 million people each in 1750 and when every 300 regiments are 1 million people (3200 each in the Age of Revolutions), you are not going to field more than that at the size, its already 6.4% of the population, it'd be impossible to wage wars at the attrition rates and economic burden involved.

- The ticking penalty is 1% per hour. It doesnt matter how much morale you have for it. Flanking is never gonna happen under current mechanics before the whole section runs out of reinforcements. And I do mean never. Units engage from reserves a lot faster than the time between the first and the last unit in each section routing, and thats without the many advances that help them do it even faster. Flanking is only ever going to be relevant in tiny fights and towards the very end of close ones when one section has collapsed but not yet the others. Routing the enemy sections faster is a bad thing, not a good thing, it means they preserve more manpower while you lose more, and again, the goal is not to "win" the battle, its to maximize damage dealt vs damage taken across the whole fight.