How to survive as anyone other than France?

[TheDoctor46]

So I'm still trying to learn how this game works but it's not really happening.

I was playing as Prussia, I took over a few land objectives and then France attacked me and I gave up because there's no way to beat them with the army I had.

Can you actually win as anyone other than France? Have you got to start building loads and loads of armies as soon as the games starts so that you have the biggest army of all nations? Is that even possible with that cash you'd have and the available manpower? You would need to basically double your army size, and that is as Prussia. As a smaller country it wouldn't be possible.

I just don't understand what you can do other than attack smaller nations, but once those are exhausted you can't do anything if the other dominance objectives are held by a bigger country. That's why i don't see how you could possibly win unless you are playing as the biggest nation with the biggest army.

 

[roberttxx]

This isn't as hard as you think - unless you are up against a player France. The AI isn't too bright (none are).

For me, in single player, to win as a nation such as Prussia, I can follow a fairly easy formula -

1. Organise my army. i.e. get commanders assigned on every flank and select tactics for the troops. Up the Guard may be the best, but there are plenty of others that will win battles for you. But don't get carried away and rely heavily on cavalry (see point 3)
2. To make things better, I normally give the same orders for every flank. So that, when the Corps/Armies come together they can all fulfill the requirements for each flank
3. To optimize further, consider where the army will fight. The penalties on cavalry for anything other than clear or desert can be severe. Consider replacing a lot of cavalry with something else (e.g. light infantry)

Once you have an army you can fight with, then you can go pick a fight with a major power. Don't let yourself get massively outnumbered in battles (more than two to one against you - flee!) - note that if a fight isn't looking good, after one day you can voluntarily retreat (the little icon on the top barring retreat goes away, and you can issue a movement order to the Corps/Army).

Prussia is a good one to practice with. I suggest - Build your army to be ready to fight and declare war on France. Keep your army fairly concentrated and try to engage them on favorable terms. See what works and what does not in maneuvering. Treat it as a learning exercise, then go back and start a game to apply what has been learned and see things through.


March to the Guns is very useful for concentrating force, but isn't essential. You may find it easier to maneuver and concentrate with this.

The AI may have overwhelming force, but it won't use it properly. If necessary pull back and await an opportunity to strike at forces you can beat.

In MotE the army is everything (well, some will argue that maybe ships have a role for GB and Spain), so don't worry about economics (just take a loan if you get short), manpower is the only important resource. Don't get too bogged down with logisitics or anything else - maneuver the army and win. The rest will tend to look after itself or be fairly easy to pick up once you have the army winning battles.

DO follow up victory. Once you win a battle, the enemy will retreat. Follow them. Catch them if you can. It is a lot easier to defeat a beaten enemy than an intact one. Try not to let them get away, lick their wounds (i.e. recover morale) and come back at you for another go.


With Prussia, just practicing, I not only smashed France easily, but when Russia jumped me for a two front war, they were easily wiped out also. Then I spent 18 months bogged down getting further and further into Russia trying to win the war by capturing enough stuff. Horrible, one shouldn't get lured too deep into enemy territory in search of total victory.


And after all this massive success in practice with Prussia. Well, in multiplayer backed up by Austria we gave the French a hard time before being decisivly trashed. Then backed up by the Russians I tried again and got trashed. Now with the last 70000 Prussian troops I can scrape up by gutting every garrison, and the "new" Russian army (the old one ceased to exist), we are about to try again - and with probably similar results in the next session of that game.

 

[Wardok]

France and the UK are Heard to beat in my opinion due to the massive number of men and that they tend to get more Idea Points wich gives them an egde.

 

[TheDoctor46]

I just played another game of Prussia and the same thing happened again pretty much. After taking on some smaller countries and Denmark and Sweden, the French attack me along with their 50 coalition partners and move their 70K stack + 30K's in and steamroller my 20k's. I had zero manpower because I had purposely build as many troops as possible so my army couldn't have been any bigger.

This makes all the time spent playing beforehand a complete waste seeing as Prussia is always going to be smaller than France and won't have coalition help and the same thing is always going to happen.

I absolutely don't see what you are supposed to do in this game. Unless you have the biggest army you are going to lose. If you go into a war much less than even in army size with the enemy you are going to lose.

It all seems horribly flawed and the result of such encounters is completely inevitable given the disparity in army sizes. France might as well just attack me right at the start and save me the wasted hours spent getting to the same result. Without some sort of restriction on who can attack you there's just no way you can win unless you are the biggest country from the outset.

As it is both my playthroughs have been an utter waste of time because it's impossible to win if France is just going to attack whenever it feels like it.

 

[Wardok]

Not really. ive played as prussia and beaten 200k+ French with my 80k army i massed guards. Prussias National idea gives their guards 25+ defence wich makes them very tough to kill add fire ideas to that and you got a seriously beefed up defensive army.

 

[Seelmeister]

I just played another game of Prussia and the same thing happened again pretty much. After taking on some smaller countries and Denmark and Sweden, the French attack me along with their 50 coalition partners and move their 70K stack + 30K's in and steamroller my 20k's. I had zero manpower because I had purposely build as many troops as possible so my army couldn't have been any bigger.

This makes all the time spent playing beforehand a complete waste seeing as Prussia is always going to be smaller than France and won't have coalition help and the same thing is always going to happen.

I absolutely don't see what you are supposed to do in this game. Unless you have the biggest army you are going to lose. If you go into a war much less than even in army size with the enemy you are going to lose.

It all seems horribly flawed and the result of such encounters is completely inevitable given the disparity in army sizes. France might as well just attack me right at the start and save me the wasted hours spent getting to the same result. Without some sort of restriction on who can attack you there's just no way you can win unless you are the biggest country from the outset.

As it is both my playthroughs have been an utter waste of time because it's impossible to win if France is just going to attack whenever it feels like it.

I'm sorry you've had a bad experience. I played Prussia in my first game, and certainly France is to be feared. When you expand into the smaller countries, be careful not to capture too many of the French dominance objectives - this can make you seem an even more appealing target.

Think about this from the French point of view. Were you playing them, and Prussia was alone, with no manpower, you'd be tempted to attack as well.

While France are bogged down in their war against Britain and the coalition, they are extremely unlikely to attack. This is when you should expand. If France begin to lose their war, that is the ideal time to strike directly as Prussia. You will have to fight them one day if you want to win, so far better to make it on your own terms when France is weak(er).

Prussia is one of the weaker great powers, and is in a vulnerable position sandwiched between France and Russia who have vastly more resources and both of whom are keen to expand into your territory. Russia are actually a very good power to play as while getting used to the game, as they have the capability to dominate anyone (including France, whose manpower and army pales in comparison by mid game).

 

[TheDoctor46]

I had the +25% guard, level 1 or level 2 fire ideas, infantry initiative, decent army composition, mainly guard infantry + artillary. Good leaders all assigned manually... none of that was a match for a 70k stack that takes virtually zero casualties per battle against your 25k's, but even if you wiped that one out there's thousands more following up behind it; more troops that you even had in the first place let alone after you have lost half of them to a massive stack.

The only strategy I can see in this game so far is to make sure you select France on the title screen because anything else just seems as though you are playing until France attacks, and then you lose.

I assume this is why games like CK2 actually work. Because you can't be attacked for no reason at all, you always have some protection against the bigger countries and can go about your business (however big or small) without being threatened by impossible battles that you simply cannot win.

If you play as a tiny country in MotE do you tend to get left alone? maybe that will work better because Prussia isn't big enough to take on France but it obviously big enough to be a target.

Edit: doesn't everyone have the same dominance targets? Are you saying that different countries have different targets? How can I tell if a province is a dominance target for another country?

 

[Seelmeister]

I had the +25% guard, level 1 or level 2 fire ideas, infantry initiative, decent army composition, mainly guard infantry + artillary. Good leaders all assigned manually... none of that was a match for a 70k stack that takes virtually zero casualties per battle against your 25k's, but even if you wiped that one out there's thousands more following up behind it; more troops that you even had in the first place let alone after you have lost half of them to a massive stack.

The only strategy I can see in this game so far is to make sure you select France on the title screen because anything else just seems as though you are playing until France attacks, and then you lose.

I assume this is why games like CK2 actually work. Because you can't be attacked for no reason at all, you always have some protection against the bigger countries and can go about your business (however big or small) without being threatened by impossible battles that you simply cannot win.

If you play as a tiny country in MotE do you tend to get left alone? maybe that will work better because Prussia isn't big enough to take on France but it obviously big enough to be a target.

Edit: doesn't everyone have the same dominance targets? Are you saying that different countries have different targets? How can I tell if a province is a dominance target for another country?

All the great powers have individual, and different, dominance targets. Simply select the dominance map, which will show your own, then click on one of France's provinces, and you will see their targets.

France is tough to fight, no disagreement there, but then any game set in 1805 will pit you against a pre-eminent France. It is possible to beat them as a smaller country, but you need to play an excellent diplomatic game, choose the right moments to strike, and crucially have some very good fortune. If you end up fighting France and her satellites alone, then you will get stomped.

There are only two countries who at the start stand any chance against France along; Russia (who have huge manpower reserves of their own to draw on), and Great Britain, who France cannot reach.

France also start with a good lead in ideas, representing how effective they were in the early/ mid stages of the revolutionary war.

As Prussia, you will have to fight France. One defeat may not be a bad thing – sure you’ll lose some land, but you will gain many idea points from the defeat. If you aren’t beaten, you stand little chance of catching up to France due to the lead they enjoy from the start.

I fought France in my game very late, by which point I had absorbed most of the smaller German states and taken several large chunks out of Austria. Only then did I have the manpower to make me a realistic contender. Even then, I needed France to be distracted by a war against Great Britain, as they likely would have taken me if I stood alone.

So while I can understand your frustration, it is to be expected that France will prove very difficult to beat on land in March of the Eagles. However, the longer the game goes on, the smaller their advantages will become.

 

[coando]

Against a human-controlled France... get other human-controlled players to help you out. France may outnumber Prussia, but it's unlikely they outnumber you plus Great Britain plus Russia plus Austria. I do hope you aren't playing Prussia in a 2-player MP game against a human France, because you deserve what you get if you try that.

Against an AI-controlled France, it's the same basic strategy for any reasonably-sized country defending against a much larger opponent. You need to be large enough that you can't easily be cornered and forced to defend a strong point; you need to be broad enough that your opponent can't sweep your entire country lengthwise with just a couple stacks. If so... fight defensively at first. Bait their armies into your territory until you've got a good headcount and they're a reasonable distance away from their borders; they'll be taking heavy attritional losses the whole way. Keep your armies together (1-3 stacks), pick off any French forces you can manage to get a 3-to-1 advantage against or more locally (keeping in mind March to the Sound of Guns); 2-to-1 if you're in pretty good shape in terms of manpower. If/when they start pushing very deep, cut in behind their troops and retake your border. The AI will pull back to re-secure supply lines, and you can reset the whole war pretty much to day 1 off this - except they're far shorter on troops. The main goal of this strategy is simply to not lose the war, not lose many troops of your own, and bleed the enemy of manpower.

Sooner or later even France's forces will run out, at which point you're clear to take the offensive (cautiously). Probe with cavalry to spot for large enemy forces heading your way once you're off friendly territory. If you see a force comparable to your stack headed your way, it's time to take peace out for whatever you can get. Use the truce period to beat up on someone smaller, so you can come back at them with a larger manpower base a few years down the line.

 

[TheDoctor46]

I guess another problem I have is that I sort of understand some of the concepts of the game in theory but don't really see what they do in practical terms. I think I understand frontage, but I don't understand what I am meant to do with that knowledge. How to organise my brigades etc. I don't understand the little frontage indicator bar for each brigade. It tells you the sum total of your frontage for all the units in that brigade, tells you that 50 is usually ok unless modifiers apply.. great.. what am I supposed to do with that knowledge?

That just one example of a larger problem. You might understand something in theory, but without someone to practically show you what to do for all the various situations etc.. for all you know you could be making the same mistakes over and over again and not know you are doing it.

I just had a look at playing as Russia and I don't think that's really going to work for me either. There's too much land to manage and you've got so many armies, so much manpower to build with and so much to keep track of that it's overwhelming. The problem is that when you zoom out to a level where you might be able to get some sort of overview of what the hell is going on, you can't see anything because all the markers disappear. I've no doubt that I could easily be attacked playing as Russia and probably be unable to find where the invading forces are, such is the huge amount of land you need to tend to.

I certainly don't understand how anyone learns how to play these games. If I hadn't watched a 20 hour step by step guide about CK2 then there's no way I'd have ever been able to learn any of that and I think it's a similar situation with this game. Some of the basic stuff from CK2 is common to this game, but the specifics aren't and without someone to show you in a practical sense what all of it means the game never really makes much sense.

I can move the armies around in MotE, build depots, take small countries and build units etc but I'm never really satisfied that I'm doing things right because your only feedback is win or fail, and that doesn't really tell you anything about what led to that conclusion.

 

[unmerged(703992)]

Hi, I learnt by throwing myself into the game and missing a lot out. The more you play and read the posts here the more you pick up. I was halfyway through my second game before I knew you could set tactics for flanks if you had generals
I personally think Russia is a good place to start, lots of land sure, lots of armies but it gives you lots of recovery options should things go wrong.
Frontage I know it's good to have it reduced but other than that I rely on numbers and good generals with tactics set in place. I'm not sure I've ever bothered about supply, certainly I never bother building supply units unless I'm stacking a mega army.

 

[Wardok]

Russia is kind of easy aswell. they have so much Manpower they will NEVER run out, not to mention inorder to seize their Capitol you need to occupy EVERY other city/Fort in russia and as said russia is HUUUUUGE!!!

 

[marat271]

I've won as Egypt and Denmark, you can win as Prussia <_<

 

[Kensai7]

Both Prussia and Austria were steamrolled in real life, so to get in the game the historical result is pretty much... a SUCCESS for the game. Of course you can stop France but you have to dedicate yourself into doing this. Most players I've been reading tend to play as France in MotE (ie aggressively) early on which should NOT be the case. Make your alliances and wait for them before taking territory of your own.

 

[donkixot]

Prussia is one of the harder states to play. In my game they were attacked by Swedes, Russians, Austrians, French and even by Brits, sometimes at the same time.