Ideas on how to limit great wars over nothing

[Metz]

One issue that has persisted since the game was released is that of great powers getting involved in wars over nothing, especially distant wars. I think there are a few ways this could be solved:

1) Have wars reduce IG opinion of the government, the stronger the opponent the lower the IG opinion. Rivalry halves the decline in opinion. The opinion is restored post war if won and the negative opinion is halved if lost (not factoring in occupation hurting IG opinion).

2) Distance needs to be more of a thing in wars. Fighting a war in a strategic region that is not of your interest should further decrease IG opinion if you are involved in a diplomatic issue.

3) Wars over returning states should not grant a reduction in IG opinion once nationalism is researched.

4) Add a decree option to promote war propaganda (mass communication and radio help reduce the IG opinion decrease).

5) Censorship and especially Secret Police help reduce the IG opinion decrease penalty.

6) Disproportional over-mobilization (lets say over 300% the size of the enemy army) adds to IG opinion decrease, so you don't end up seeing the AI sending in 100,000 troops to fight an enemy with 10,000 troops. This should help slightly tilt the army focus into quality over quantity.

7) Conscription should also decrease IG opinion, only be used during emergencies such as direct wars with neighboring rivals.

8) Besides strategic interest, lets great powers have up to 3 vital interest allocation slots by the end game. These vital interests should take longer to be established than strategic interests. Wars over these vital interests cancel out most of the drop in IG opinion. Only states near your directly controlled states and states with goods you severely lack can have vital interests. Event chains can also grant you vital interests. This should allow Britain to justify war with the Boer republics, France to justify war in Algeria, and Italy to justify war in Tunisia without incurring large drops in IG opinion.

 

[GreyOgre]

Nice ideas, but mist of these won't dissuade the AI from starting or joining wars, they'll just tank their IG approval and have even more civil wars.

 

[Metz]

Nice ideas, but mist of these won't dissuade the AI from starting or joining wars, they'll just tank their IG approval and have even more civil wars.

The AI can be weighted towards avoiding a decrease in IG opinion if a possible revolt/cost of suppressing a revolt is not worth the war gains.

 

[Ilyasviel]

I think that one important component is the rivalry system. It needs to be toned down. If an AI rivals me, it's almost a guarantee that they're going to get into every war that I'm involved in, whether it makes sense or not. The AI have a crab in the bucket mentality and they're more interested in doing things that will ruin other countries than in doing things that will benefit their own. And just in general, they tend to be too aggressive, especially the British.

 

[Desseabar]

I tried to list out some thoughts on what's actually going wrong here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...thats-leading-to-constant-world-wars.1846615/

The big issues are 1) internal politics does not tie into warfare beyond a few lobbies, 2) there's no mechanism for powers to limit their involvement and distinguish all-in vs not, and 3) there's no friction to going all-in (eg risk of uprisings, surprise attacks, or radicalism).

 

[TitaniumMan91]

Logistics will probably be the best way so Russia can't send an massive army to Mexico to fight the US. The issue is it's a game and the player doesn't really care about lives lost so making the AI care is just an easy way for the player to abuse the AI.

 

[GreyOgre]

The AI can be weighted towards avoiding a decrease in IG opinion if a possible revolt/cost of suppressing a revolt is not worth the war gains.

True, but it isn't even weighted to avoid IG anger enough to avoid revolution as is (even though at least large, rich countries are much more stable than they used to).

Logistics will probably be the best way so Russia can't send an massive army to Mexico to fight the US. The issue is it's a game and the player doesn't really care about lives lost so making the AI care is just an easy way for the player to abuse the AI.

Yeah, I think so too.

 

[Desseabar]

Logistics will probably be the best way so Russia can't send an massive army to Mexico to fight the US. The issue is it's a game and the player doesn't really care about lives lost so making the AI care is just an easy way for the player to abuse the AI.

Yeah, and this fortunately is on the roadmap.

For the second point, I'd argue that's actually a big part of the issue. If we're going hands-off with moving men around on the map, we should get depth elsewhere. Plenty of prime ministers or kings were ousted thanks to unpopular wars. There should be more depth around maintaining your both domestic and international political support, as well as keeping your economy running. Getting a million men in uniforms necessarily means some crops are going to wilt in the fields and some factories will have labor shortages.

If we're sticking with a months-long diplo play system, part of that buildup should be building domestic and international support: a lot more French citizens are willing to risk their lives to defend the nation from Prussian aggression than are willing to die to intervene in Mexico.

Lastly, on the Mexico note, I think it's worth exploring why France didn't allocate more than 15-20% of its army to the wars in Algeria and Mexico: these weren't super popular wars domestically, France had limited interest in these wars, and most importantly they needed troops elsewhere (namely, guarding colonial possessions and guarding the border against Prussia). None of these factors are well-modeled in the game now.

 

[exi123]

And the ai should also not tend to capure huge chunks of land all around the world. Subjection does not mean conquering. It is always insane when you look around the map in the 1920s and GB has taken 5 states in China, 3 in Indonesia, Japan is cut into peaces... Getting a nation into your sphere can be done by war, but should be done by fear. Conquering and pacifing very, very, very foreign lands is a brutal thing and should pump up radicals.

This would make cheesing by conquering very populous states much harder.

 

[GreyOgre]

Yeah, and this fortunately is on the roadmap.

For the second point, I'd argue that's actually a big part of the issue. If we're going hands-off with moving men around on the map, we should get depth elsewhere. Plenty of prime ministers or kings were ousted thanks to unpopular wars. There should be more depth around maintaining your both domestic and international political support, as well as keeping your economy running. Getting a million men in uniforms necessarily means some crops are going to wilt in the fields and some factories will have labor shortages.

If we're sticking with a months-long diplo play system, part of that buildup should be building domestic and international support: a lot more French citizens are willing to risk their lives to defend the nation from Prussian aggression than are willing to die to intervene in Mexico.

Lastly, on the Mexico note, I think it's worth exploring why France didn't allocate more than 15-20% of its army to the wars in Algeria and Mexico: these weren't super popular wars domestically, France had limited interest in these wars, and most importantly they needed troops elsewhere (namely, guarding colonial possessions and guarding the border against Prussia). None of these factors are well-modeled in the game now.

And if we or the AI want to fight wars in Africa, supply would be a reason to recruit low-texh local askaris instead of sending a bunch of tanks with chemical weapon support from the metropole whenever two and half regiments' worth of irregular conscripts don't want to be colonized.

 

[Desseabar]

And the ai should also not tend to capure huge chunks of land all around the world. Subjection does not mean conquering. It is always insane when you look around the map in the 1920s and GB has taken 5 states in China, 3 in Indonesia, Japan is cut into peaces... Getting a nation into your sphere can be done by war, but should be done by fear. Conquering and pacifing very, very, very foreign lands is a brutal thing and should pump up radicals.

This would make cheesing by conquering very populous states much harder.

It's a two-part issue: on the one hand, "turmoil" is used as a proxy for "control." This is mostly ok, but turmoil is generally too easy to reverse. You go in, modernize a couple PMs, and within a few years the population is nice and happy. I expect that the National Awakening update might change this, but who knows.

The other part is that putting down rebellions is too easy. You can occupy a state in just 4 battles and then you're done: this means that the Circassian War, US/Argentinian frontier wars, or colonial uprisings are all just minor nuisances rather than decades-long affairs. You can conquer Kyushu in Japan, delete all their barracks, and forget about it.

Beyond that, I think the "conquer state" war goal and diplo play should be seriously neutered. For one, it should just not be diplomatically feasible for Britain to say "we are declaring war on France because we want to take Brittany as our territory." That would be scandalous within Britain and such brazen conquest would not be internationally recognized. Most wars of conquest had some inciting event: protecting missionaries in Vietnam, banning slavery in West Africa, responding to an instigated skirmish in Burma or the Sikh Empire, or taking territory to which you have a claim (unification wars). Obviously Britain wanted to provoke a war with eg Burma to take territory, but there should be diplomatic ways for Burma to resist.

And if we or the AI want to fight wars in Africa, supply would be a reason to recruit low-texh local askaris instead of sending a bunch of tanks with chemical weapon support from the metropole whenever two and half regiments' worth of irregular conscripts don't want to be colonized.

I think there's two different things here: 1, supply lines are difficult to maintain in the interior of Africa, so it should be hard to source the munitions and parts needed for later-era tech. 2, the "high-level" unit types are optimized for land war in Europe but not skirmishes in mountains or jungles.

I'd love a world where there's more strategy in unit composition beyond "next unit better." A colonial regiment should be better at establishing control in the jungle than a tank regiment, for example.

You could probably even go further: local diseases made it very hard to recruit and maintain European troops in Africa, and the local administration in practice was a patchwork of local tribes and kings swearing allegiance to the European powers. The latter especially seems like the clearest fix: France should find it nearly impossible to actually control Futa Toro and should instead keep a puppet king there, for example.

 

[Metz]

And the ai should also not tend to capure huge chunks of land all around the world. Subjection does not mean conquering. It is always insane when you look around the map in the 1920s and GB has taken 5 states in China, 3 in Indonesia, Japan is cut into peaces... Getting a nation into your sphere can be done by war, but should be done by fear. Conquering and pacifing very, very, very foreign lands is a brutal thing and should pump up radicals.

This would make cheesing by conquering very populous states much harder.

Empire was expensive. A lot of empire building was done to create buffer zones around key assets, have more living space, or for prestige/deprive others of prestige.

Having massive swathes of land around the world that you own directly should cost a lot in terms of military equipment and bureaucracy. Something could be done here with the state homeland trait and citizenship laws. Maybe the concept of pluricontinentalism (as a late game journal entry) could be explored here so that those who want to conquer large parts of the world directly have a tool to do so.

 

[Pendables]

I think for starters all of the totally pointless wargoals just need to be disabled for the AI. There's no scenario where going to war for "regime change in Tahiti" makes sense so the AI should just not be allowed to do it.

 

[FinlayMcNally]

I think for starters all of the totally pointless wargoals just need to be disabled for the AI. There's no scenario where going to war for "regime change in Tahiti" makes sense so the AI should just not be allowed to do it.

I love that "regime change in Tahiti" is happening to everyone, it's insane

 

[Desseabar]

Empire was expensive. A lot of empire building was done to create buffer zones around key assets, have more living space, or for prestige/deprive others of prestige.

Having massive swathes of land around the world that you own directly should cost a lot in terms of military equipment and bureaucracy. Something could be done here with the state homeland trait and citizenship laws. Maybe the concept of pluricontinentalism (as a late game journal entry) could be explored here so that those who want to conquer large parts of the world directly have a tool to do so.

One thing the AI is missing: I wish there was a trigger to identify border states and make the AI be neutral. There's already a trigger to be aware if a country borders you; there should be another layer that identifies if it borders both you and a rival/GP and prefers to be neutral. That way you an dynamically get the independent Persias, Switzerlands, Afghanistans and Siams of the world.
Otherwise, yes, strongly agree. Colonization needs to be more costly, but also more vulnerable: America got Alaska and the Louisiana Purchase because Russia/France were worried about being unable to project power to keep them.

 

[GreyOgre]

I love that "regime change in Tahiti" is happening to everyone, it's insane

It's always either Tahiti, or the Ionian Islands. I assume the AI would always pick the cheapest wargoal?

 

[Shiny Dog]

It's always either Tahiti, or the Ionian Islands. I assume the AI would always pick the cheapest wargoal?

Probably also "cheap" for Infamy too.

 

[Blaze86420]

Political lobbies were implemented poorly and feel arbitrary. IGs should support or oppose wars based on the wars objectives, not solely based on the enemy country. Industrialists should support wars to enforce investment rights, opening markets, and so on. The devout should oppose wars on same religion countries. The military IG should support most wars, particularly wars of conquest.

In addition to military logistics barely existing in the game currently, I also think the diplomatic play system is awful and needs a major overhaul. As it currently functions it’s basically declaring war with a few extra steps. Diplo plays should work as a negotiation between various countries that could take up to years, and they should only escalate when a country involved in the play decides to make threats (ex. Mobilization, expelling diplomats, amassing a naval presence close to the border etc.) and then finally a party can declare war.

 

[Jamey]

None of this solves the problem that when Spain declares war on the UK for transfer of some colonial Protectorate (to use an example that just happened in my current game), it should not turn into having to invade mainland Spain to get them to give up on a wargoal they can never achieve.

I joined after Russia turned it into a World War for that sweet Baku oil. If I remember right, it was UK, Germany, and me (USA) versus Spain, France, and Russia. I owned Persia, so I got involved in a land war in Asia, but then I also had to help take Spain’s capital before they’d capitulate…

It was entertaining, but it was also silly because it should have just been a minor colonial skirmish.