Mercspam vs Manpower meta suggestions and discussion thread

[Zak Preston]

Let’s discuss EU4 gameplay aspects : mercenaries and recruits

Spoiler

Everything posted here is my personal opinion and is done in good faith with the only intent to make the game better =)
I actually have quite a large document (9+ pages of A4, text size is 11) with lots of EU4 game mechanics being questioned, but I feel that posting it in one thread will be an overkill (it’s also not finished yet).

Part I: Mercenaries vs recruits problem:

Current meta heavily relies on mixing mercenary and recruited regiments. Deciding factors here are your manpower (MP) pools and income. In early game most nations’ MP-pools vary from 10k to 25-30k, while your force limit (FL) may vary from 5k to 40k. In general (with some exceptions, ofc) the FL to max MP ratio is around 0.7-1 regiment to 1k.

Examples

• Castile: 28 FL, 28k max MP
• England: 34 FL, 27k max MP
• Poland: 27 FL, 23k max MP
• Mamluks: 41 FL, 33k max MP
• France: 37 FL, 44k max MP

I suppose that the concept behind current mercspam meta is something like this: “Players should mix their recruited regiments with mercenary regiments to conserve MP and to spend more funds on warfare (maintenance, reinforcement, hiring more mercs)”. Sounds good, but the implementation is really screwed

• Mercenary infantry is quite cheap
• Their limit is quite high
• They don’t drain manpower
• MP pools are really low, so after a couple of serious battles with recruited armies you are forced to hire mercs anyway.

The result of this meta players tend to hire mercenary infantry and recruited cavalry + artillery. This way infantry takes the most damage, but gets reinforcements from the Infinite Void, bypassing fragile MP reserves. Same problem is with attrition: your mercenary infantry (50% of the army) may be freezing to death in scorched Arctic mountainous fort in Norway, but it won’t really bother you, since your mercenaries still reinforce from the Void.

The results of this meta are really bad for the whole game balance:

1. Infinite mercenary reinforcements break the immersion and realism: in some early conflicts (Muscovy vs PLC, France vs Burgundy + England for example) number of casualties can reach millions. And it won’t have any effect on neighbouring countries.
2. Attrition wars are almost non-existent: if only Napoleon knew he could hire mercenaries from Russian provinces…
3. Some prolonged wars usually end when one of the sides bankrupts, 0 MP is not a sentence yet.
4. Mercenary infantry inflates the value of recruited cavalry. I’ll touch this topic a bit later.
5. Professionalism is almost useless in MP: the really good option is to “buy” MP. Your armies will never be able to train long enough to get any decent amount of professionalism and limited MP pools will force you to hire mercs anyway.
6. Everyone stacks FL buildings to increase merc limit as well over MP buildings, MP-related ideas are of much less value than they should be.

Now it’s time to touch a bit different topic: the (almost) useless cavalry.
In early game cavalry is significantly stronger than infantry: in general cavalry gets ~30%-50% more pips for almost 2.5x the value until tech 12-15, when the infantry gains more pips. I know that Cav has higher flanking range, which is a big deal when you outnumber your enemies (usually until midgame). Problem is that mercenary infantry cost is roughly on par with recruited cavalry, but has a blessing of the Void: the reinforcements come from nowhere. This means that you are can care less about attrition your armies suffer and you can save MP for reinforcing artillery. Just check your previous Dev-MP clashes: the majority of players didn’t use cavalry at all.


My proposed solution:

• Make mercenary infantry much less affordable
• Second obvious solution is to increase the value on manpower and reintroduce MP-related meta:
  1. Increase MP pools by roughly 75-100% and add additional MP-regen modifiers.
     In this case players will still have to use mercenaries, buch on much lower scale and will have to take in consideration attrition modifiers. The other parameter to watch after is a positive MP regen. This option is much closer to current meta with rapid MP regen.
  2. Dramatically increase MP pools (2x-3x of current value), but tone MP-regen percentage a bit down.
     In this case MP becomes a much more valuable resource. Mercenaries become more of an emergency option, but attrition wars will become a really valid option. Warfare becomes a much riskier affair (you can run out of MP much sooner than you might have expected) and the defender gets an upperhand. This solution is closer to pre-1.12 meta introduced in Common Sense.
• Make Cavalry cheaper, something like 1.5x-1.8x of infantry cost (and maintenance). Coupled with mercenaries cost increase and reintroduction of manpower meta this should revitalize cavalry-related builds, make hordes great again and add variety to army composition

Both proposed changes to merc vs MP meta should also make professionalism feature much more valuable. As the result, defensive wars tactics with high attrition, scorched earth, strategically placed forts becomes more viable. Infinite mercspam will be toned down to a more sensible degree and manpower-related ideas also become great again.

Part II: Improved mercenaries suggestion:

But what about mercenaries? Their cost and maintenance nerf won’t affect their true magical power of infinite reinforcements and rich nations will still be able to use them but not on full scale as they do now, (while for minors mercs will be hidden behind a huge paywall. Anyway, the most troublesome feature mercenaries have is an infinite reinforcement pool out of nowhere (I did mention it before, didn’t I). Players use mercenary infantry as a cannon fodder, merging regiments after every battle to advance as fast as possible or hiring new regiments in a provinces near the battle to reinforce it. From a gameplay perspective I see no problems, but from historic and realistic one it’s extremely deliberate

To solve this particular issue I suggest to introduce mercenary manpower resource. It may be a derivative of nation’s maximum manpower value or of nation’s force limit, for example. Furthermore, mercenary manpower pool should be much smaller than manpower pool itself (something like 20%-35%) but regenerate much quicker: as a result, merging mercenaries after each battle and rehiring new regiments should not be possible on a really large scale (but still possible as an emergency action under certain circumstances).

The proposed changes to mercenaries look like a big nerf, so let’s try to counterbalance the increased cost, maintenance and limitations to mercenary meta.

Some rich plutocratic and highly mercantile nations like Genoa, Venice or Switzerland were famous for having extremely potent mercenary armies; German Landsknechts are also a phenomenon of the Renaissance era. Crimean Tatars were often hired by Eastern European local magnates, monarchs and even Zaporozhian Cossacks (who themselves were quite famous on mercenary scene). My suggestion is to allow players to hire region-specific mercenaries that inherit and override some of the military quality modifiers:

• + Discipline (only NIs and idea groups, no policies and events)
• + Combat ability (only NIs and idea groups, no policies and events)
• + Shock\Fire modifiers (only NIs and idea groups, no policies and events)
• - Morale shouldn’t be inherited, because it’s a function of NIs, Idea groups, events, Prestige, Army traditions and Power projection.

In this case players will try to hire Polish Winged Hussars, Swedish infantry or Prussian space marines, while Swiss Reisläufer or Genoese Balestrieri will be completely overshadowed. To fix this possible issue some administrative idea groups should have their own mercenary military modifiers (much like plutocratic ideas):

• Mercenary Inf\Cav\Art Combat ability
• Mercenary Shock\Fire damage dealt\received
• Mercenary cost\maintenance, manpower or manpower regen modifier

Also, the proposed cavalry cost change to 1.5-1.8x cost of infantry should make mercenary cavalry regiments more affordable in general.


Conclusion:
As a result of my proposal, EU4 warfare should improve significantly: mindless mercspam should be replaced by manpower meta, that brings to the table careful campaign planning, meaningful defensive wars (finally, attrition is not useless) strategy and improved mercenaries, to say nothing of realism.

Spoiler

My next posts will be about totally dominant military modifiers, mindless expansion meta and how “tall” gameplay is unviable.

 

[KRBLACK]

Mercs are so patch 1.22 XD

Tip 1: Train up to your forcelimit in regular infantry and let them drill constantly during peace for the early game (when you have like <50 forcelimit) this will grant you at least 20 army professionalism

Tip 2: Hire generals, a lot of generals. In the previous patch there wasnt really a military point sink (like reduce inflation and stability for admin points). There is now, and oh boy is it good. For a measly 50 military points you get a general AND 1% army professionalism. If you spend a decent amount of military points this way you will pretty much always have at least one good general.

Tip 3: If you can get army professionalism from an event, do so.

I managed to get to 80% army professionalism around 1500/1520, and this is when the fun starts. When you are at 80 or more you can get generals for 25 military power and therefor very cheap army professionalism. Now take a look at the slacken recruitment standards button, a good long look. It gives you 20-25% of your complete manpower pool back at the cost of 5% professionalism.

Hire 5 generals (when over 80 AP) --> costs 125 military points
Slacken standards --> 25% manpower back

So for 500 military point you could theoretically refill your entire manpower pool AND have good generals all the time, let that sink in for a minute.
Combine that with the holy trinity of Innovative+Aristocratic+Offensive
Innovative+Offensive policy = +1 leader siege (and 10% siege ability)
Offensive = +1 shock and +1 fire
Aristocratic= +1 siege
You will have a guaranteed 2 siege general with decent stats every time you roll, and since you will roll about 5 times after every war....you get the point.

Also note that the 20% siege ability from offensive + 10% from inno+off policy + (about) 20% from army professionalism will make sieges go incredibly fast (paied with the +2 land leader siege).
I am talking about taking Constantinople in under 100 days...

Edit: innovative also gives you -25% advisor cost for a total of -62,5% if you pair it with a discounted advisor, because advisors go up to level 5 now this is incredibly powerful since you can afford level 5 advisors pretty much all the time when you blob enough.

 

[Zak Preston]

for singleplayer this might work, but in MP none will ever spend any tiny bit of military points on Aristocratic ideas or anything but tech and useful NIs like offensive or quality.
More over, in MP professionalism is almost useless for most playable nations (unless you are England) maybe until lategame and mass-conversion to manpower.

 

[KRBLACK]

I was playing as Florence, and was ahead of tech 95% of the time. I had quantity, offensive and aristicratic all completed. I spent a ton of military points on generals and still had so much I had to poor it into development at times. I know multiplayer will be different, but you should really try this.
Besides, aristocratic isnt as bad as everyone makes it out to be (at least not with this strategy).

+1 leaders without upkeep --> immensely helpful since you would otherwise have to throw away even more 20-pip generals (not kidding), and in late game I always have to micro manage generals in order to not suffer 5% attrition all the time.

+1 land leader siege --> you can get a minimum of 2 siege, do I need to say more?

+33% manpower --> pairs very well with the +50% from quantity and the above manpower scumming strategy

-10% military tech cost --> saves you 60 mp every 13 to 15 years --> 60:15 = 4 --> 4 : 12 = 0.33 So in essence this makes you 0.33 military power each month for the entire game.

+/-10% cavalry combat ability and cost --> very situational, but can be worth it for horde countries (and poland maybe)

-1% army and navy tradition decay is something you don't notice, but does help out to give those precious 6 siege generals (that I actually got for the first time in 1300 hours playtime)


Pair this with innovative that grants you -10% technology cost in general (so technically 1 monarch point per month spread over all three categories) for dirt cheap mil tech (under 300 points was very common)

-10% from aristocratic
-10% from innovative
-5% neighbor bonus
-14% per comleted military idea group (in my case this added up to -42%)

temporay/ situational ones:
-5% national ideas
-5% papal controller
-10% byzantine refugees or innovative idea group events

 

[Zak Preston]

@KRBLACK I don't get your point: how does your successful Florence playthrough has anything in common with ugly mercspam meta?

 

[MiniaAr]

My current experience of CoC MP meta is that @Zak Preston is right. Very few nations can afford to non-stop drill during peace time, because they're either too poor for it, or they're blobbing and thus the army is fighting. During player v player wars, same thing and also Manpower is always toast much earlier than the war is finished, with mercs recruited non stop by both sides.
The actual stop to wars is money, with players only agreeing to defeat once totally stackwiped or in debt by the thousands of ducats.

Thus, I think his proposal has many merits. Making mercs less of a non-brainer to recruit, as well as creating specific builds to make mercenary armies viable for dedicated countries, is a good way forward in my opinion.
There are already combat ability modifiers only for mercs, like the +5% merc discipline from the age bonus during Reformation. This could be expanded and Admin ideas/Plutocratic could get similar bonuses.

 

[KRBLACK]

@KRBLACK I don't get your point: how does your successful Florence playthrough has anything in common with ugly mercspam meta?

Well if you can be that succesful as Florence, Brandenburg and he like won't be a problem at all. My second post was about the fact aristocratic ideas aren't that bad at all.

 

[KRBLACK]

My current experience of CoC MP meta is that @Zak Preston is right. Very few nations can afford to non-stop drill during peace time, because they're either too poor for it, or they're blobbing and thus the army is fighting. During player v player wars, same thing and also Manpower is always toast much earlier than the war is finished, with mercs recruited non stop by both sides.
The actual stop to wars is money, with players only agreeing to defeat once totally stackwiped or in debt by the thousands of ducats.

Thus, I think his proposal has many merits. Making mercs less of a non-brainer to recruit, as well as creating specific builds to make mercenary armies viable for dedicated countries, is a good way forward in my opinion.
There are already combat ability modifiers only for mercs, like the +5% merc discipline from the age bonus during Reformation. This could be expanded and Admin ideas/Plutocratic could get similar bonuses.

The thing is you shouldn't drill when you have a forcelimit higher than 30. You should raise the AP by buying generals and through events. Drilling is slow and too expensive.

 

[Zak Preston]

My current experience of CoC MP meta is that @Zak Preston is right. Very few nations can afford to non-stop drill during peace time, because they're either too poor for it, or they're blobbing and thus the army is fighting. During player v player wars, same thing and also Manpower is always toast much earlier than the war is finished, with mercs recruited non stop by both sides.
The actual stop to wars is money, with players only agreeing to defeat once totally stackwiped or in debt by the thousands of ducats.

Thus, I think his proposal has many merits. Making mercs less of a non-brainer to recruit, as well as creating specific builds to make mercenary armies viable for dedicated countries, is a good way forward in my opinion.
There are already combat ability modifiers only for mercs, like the +5% merc discipline from the age bonus during Reformation. This could be expanded and Admin ideas/Plutocratic could get similar bonuses.

Plutocratic ideas already have +2.5% mercenary discipline (nerfed from 5% iirc?). Literally any admin-based ideagroup could have some evenly spread merc-related combat, cost or maintenance ideas.

Well if you can be that succesful as Florence, Brandenburg and he like won't be a problem at all. My second post was about the fact aristocratic ideas aren't that bad at all.

Oh, thank you for your input, I was too slow to get it =)

The thing is you shouldn't drill when you have a forcelimit higher than 30. You should raise the AP by buying generals and through events. Drilling is slow and too expensive.

Professionalism (and drill) is a good concept with lacking implementation: you don't get any when you are at war... This alone says enough

 

[Voigt]

Drilling is okish fast, if you take the decision for 40% faster drilling for 15% more expansive Army. Drilling is incredibly fast if you have 100% ArmyProf, since it combines with your decision. Drilled Infantry is crap, since after only one battle they lost their drill completly (so alteast for one battle they are good).
But drilled Artillery will never loose their drill, and drilled Cav is also pretty good.

You should have the money to always drill your army, atleast after the first few years, since there is so much money in the game now. How much fighting occurs is part of the MP. For my MP bigger wars more or less start after the Religious HRE War. So lot of time to get to 100% AP.

If you lost your Inf in Battle, or fight in High Attrition area, just hire Merc Inf once, but never disband them. You can't drill them, but this doesn't matter, because Inf dies so fast. They don't get Army Prof, but this is ok, because of the endless reinforcing. Since you don't disband and rehire, you don't loose ArmyProf from rehiring.

After a while you have a mix of a standing Merc Army supplemented with strong Regular Artillery and Cavelery.

Edit: You get Army Prof when in war. Altough not directly, but I get a pretty good amount of Events, which raise Army Prof by like 5% while in war. I don't really need to fight, just helping out allies.

 

[Sybot]

I've been thinking about how to improve mercenaries as well, and I think I've been going down one of the same tracks as you. to go into more detail on my thoughts.

Mercenary Regions
Mercenaries will be hired entirely on a regional basis. I'm not sure how this would look on the UI, but essentially when hiring mercenaries you don't hire them from some mysterious pool, but instead select which region you want to hire them from. This is where specialties that you mentioned can come in, so you have better infantry from the region where Prussia's capital is, better cavalry from the steppes, etc.

Now here is the most important part of my idea. The number of mercenaries available is based entirely on the situation of the region. This number also includes a regional mercenary manpower pool, from which reinforcements are drawn.
The number of mercenaries in a region is increased by:

• Devastation
• Wars declared within the region
• Ideas

The number of mercenaries in a region is decreased by:

• Prosperity
• Long periods of peace (in terms of wars fought by nations within the region, for example GB invading Bengal would still count as 'peace' for the British region, but not for India)
• Technology (representing the rise of national armies - perhaps professionalism plays a part in this too)

The price of mercenaries will be affected by distance from the capital, so it will be much more expensive to import some steppe cavalry into Western Europe than hire some local knights.

The idea here is that large blobs will find it increasingly hard to find mercenaries, as their core regions become more politically stable and the areas where they can hire adequate numbers get further and further away, and thus more expensive. Conversely, it can also serve as a catch-up mechanic as a nation that has been devastated by war will find that it can hire much cheaper mercenaries from close to home.

The main thing I'm not certain about with this idea is how to prevent one rich nation from just buying up all the good mercenaries from a given region. Maybe some kind of cap on how many you can buy from any one region?

Any thoughts?

 

[Zak Preston]

The main thing I'm not certain about with this idea is how to prevent one rich nation from just buying up all the good mercenaries from a given region. Maybe some kind of cap on how many you can buy from any one region?

This is an extremely toxic move, but solution seems to be quite simple: the mercenary pool from each nation\region is individual and is based on player's own "available mercenaries" value. For example, Scotland with 20 FL will be able to hire ~10 mercenary regiments from Italy, but if Italy is ravaged by war, the number of mercenaries is reduced to 6.

 

[Novacat]

The problem with Aristocratic is not that its bad, it is that Defensive/Offensive/Quality/Quantity are such strong picks that Aristocratic is just mediocre. The loss of any of those four idea groups is not worth the gains of picking up Aristocratic, and you can only have four military idea groups.

On top of that, Innovative pretty much fills much of the same role, but has even better bonuses (-10% technology cost > -10% military technology cost) in some areas and a LOT of strong policies (including +20% infantry combat ability). The only thing you will miss from Aristocratic is the -1% Army tradition decay and the diplomat (maybe).

I just came back to EU4 after many years of hiatus, and one of the big things I noticed is how the idea group balance is even worse than before, you probably already know from the beginning of the game what eight idea groups you will have and the only hard thinking is which order to take them in.

PS: As for the OP, my experiences of manpower is early game drought, late game deluge. Given, it seems like Manpower was nerfed to the point where you actually can run out late game, but manpower, if you stack enough and get enough buildings, can be turned into an virtually limitless resource to the point where Mercenaries are both unnecessary and detrimental.

 

[Zak Preston]

The problem with Aristocratic is not that its bad, it is that Defensive/Offensive/Quality/Quantity are such strong picks that Aristocratic is just mediocre. The loss of any of those four idea groups is not worth the gains of picking up Aristocratic, and you can only have four military idea groups.

On top of that, Innovative pretty much fills much of the same role, but has even better bonuses (-10% technology cost > -10% military technology cost) in some areas and a LOT of strong policies (including +20% infantry combat ability). The only thing you will miss from Aristocratic is the -1% Army tradition decay and the diplomat (maybe).

The general game imbalance will be my next thread, if this one brings any devs' attention and insight.

I just came back to EU4 after many years of hiatus, and one of the big things I noticed is how the idea group balance is even worse than before, you probably already know from the beginning of the game what eight idea groups you will have and the only hard thinking is which order to take them in.

It's a bit better, actually, but not by far: instead of quality + religious + quantity combo came quality + economic + offensive; if you nerf it, another combo will rise (for example, quality + innovative + defensive). The problem is that current NI design leaves almost no choice, but follow the only viable meta.

 

[al.gb]

Some additional proposals:
1) Change grain province bonus from 0.5 force limit to 250 manpower;
2) Make separate force limits for mercenaries and regular army.

Another thing, may be too radical - change role of cavalry and their deployment logic to simulate heavy cavalry. With decreased cavalry cost and higher cavalry-to-infantry ratio it should allow to use cavalry armies at the game start.

 

[FleetingRain]

Two crapshoots:

1) the 5% manpower modifier for MIL tech should come back. If it's already in the game (which means the current MP reduction comes only from the other adjustments), make it 10% or whatever.

2) Cavalry should be able to flank the backrow too, so they keep their usefulness once Artillery starts getting too strong.

About Part I, increasing MP and reducing MP regen are what I'd go with.

About Part II, I have a feeling the mercenary pools could work as the mercs' manpower.

 

[Mortheim]

I agree with all but this

how “tall” gameplay is unviable.

There is two sides on this point:
First one is - historically, "tall" countries were weaker than "blobs". Lands and what comes with them is too good.
Second one is - gameplay, any and all playstyles should be supported.

I prefer first, cause, you know, most succesull countries were blobbing: either through colonies, or through conquering neighbours.

 

[magni.]

Well the main problem atm is that by having 40% of your army not using man power u can bloob at a rate where u increase your income by more than 4% per year
so it is always with it to take loans if u can bloob by using them, as long as u don't have something like AE holding you back

So yes mercenary support is the way to go

lately I have started doing some high cavalry stratagys (up to 40%) in combination with mercy an loans and they are really really strong (gp n3 before 1500 as a under 100 dev nation)


oh and bankruptcy is no longer the end of the game, so even if u mess up u can just go bankrupt and your still fine after since a bankrupcy won't lose u more than 100dev normally (most painful part is the 400 admin)

 

[bebrst]

I really like the idea of regional mercenary armies. Adds nice flavor and could open a door for events for historic merc countries like Switzerland to give up manpower to fill the regional mercenary manpower pool in exchange for money. If you limit the regional mercenary availability as a percentage of the absolute regional manpower of all countries you can also nicely simulate that war torn regions might not be able to provide many mercenaries after some time anymore. That could help to limit the number of mercenaries available. A distance limit or price modifier to wherefrom you can hire mercenary armies could further impact this mechanism.
Just some thoughts, not really thought through yet

 

[Zak Preston]

There is two sides on this point:
First one is - historically, "tall" countries were weaker than "blobs". Lands and what comes with them is too good.
Second one is - gameplay, any and all playstyles should be supported.

I prefer first, cause, you know, most succesull countries were blobbing: either through colonies, or through conquering neighbours.

It highly depends on where you draw the line between "tall" and "blob": if a player on France stayed in historical borders through the whole of campaign, many would consider it a "tall" gameplay. If a players manages to assemble Germany in 1550, he is a blob and warmonger, but if that same player decides to stay in borders of German culture until 1821, then he's switched to "tall". In my opinion, extreme blobbers and extreme "stay tiny" ideologies should have some extreme disadvantages, but the first one doesn't have any =)

Anyway, it's a topic for the (hopefully) next discussion =)