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.

 

[cub298]

While i usually play for efficency from a roleplay standpoint i dont like using mercs. But with the way wars a fought in this game anything short of sitting on your hands is unsustainable without them.
If the dire and underwhelming manpower situation gets improved, so that a single battle doenst eat most of you manpower pool even late in the game
and that sieging down a handful of forts at once dosnet drain you dry, then we can talk about that.

About making mercs a one-time deal. You pay good money to hire them but they dont reinforce and have not monthly upkeep.
Instead they are an emergency tool which you consolidate down until there not enough men left to form a full regiment.

Then we can give them somewhat severe penaltys (WE, devastation) to make them unsustainable during peacetime.

Then they would have to increase the base amount of manpower a nation gets. Bring to about 2 times your force limit. Right now you are lucky to get it to be able to reinforce your whole army once. It should be to at least 1.5 the amount to the base force limit since to make it so if you want to expand your manpower, do it with buildings and development.

 

[Vulkandrache]

Right now you are lucky to get it to be able to reinforce your whole army once.

That sounds about right yes.
Nations would have to start with twice the current max manpower thus also twice regen.
This would then go to 10 times over the course of the game.

If you control a large part of the world you can currently gain about 4k men a month.
Just a basic siege with 25/0/25 costs 500 men a month in attrition wht 2500 for a bad role.
Expect to siege down atleast 10 forts per lategame war and add a few battles and 40k manpower a month doenst sound so utopian.

 

[cub298]

This would then go to 10 times over the course of the game.

If you control a large part of the world you can currently gain about 4k men a month.
Just a basic siege with 25/0/25 costs 500 men a month in attrition wht 2500 for a bad role.
Expect to siege down atleast 10 forts per lategame war and add a few battles and 40k manpower a month doenst sound so utopian.

yea, I don't make it much to the late game, so you are more knowledgeable about that than I am.

It is why I usually just see what others say in popular topics and only chime in on a point or two. This is if they are a great and simple ideas that may change the game, but won't be like "wow this game is completely different now. The end game actually allows people to have manpower, not money, funded armies." (I am going to lurk on this topic again for a while and watch).

 

[creativitypersonified]

I'm all up for an increase in overall manpower but if that does happen we would need to remove that stupid attrition cap and make attrition more prevelant overall. I would really like to see the state of the game with these two changes.

 

[Klausewitz]

Given that professional armies are actually post 1648 and before that basically ALL forces were mercenaries I do not really see the issue.

 

[Zak Preston]

Given that professional armies are actually post 1648 and before that basically ALL forces were mercenaries I do not really see the issue.

No vassals' levies no personal retinues, just mercenaries?

 

[Zak Preston]

I really hope this post won't be considered as necromancy...

Current mercspam meta is simple, effective and crude:

• 1. Increase your Force Limit as much as you can: build regimental camp in every province you see, take Offensive and Quantity.
• 2. Stack Available Mercenaries modifier from Administrative, Quantity, Plutocratic and Aristocratic (usually pick 2 or 3).
• 3. Ignore building Barracks unless the province gives you more than 750 MP.

This way an empire of ~1k development can easily field 300k army at the beginning of the Age of Absolutism. At least 50% of that army would be mercenaries and 1-2 full fronts of cannons.

 

[Klausewitz]

No vassals' levies no personal retinues, just mercenaries?

I left an important word out. My bad.
Given that professional armies are actually post 1648 and before that basically ALL professional forces were mercenaries I do not really see the issue.
As for 'retinues' those tended to number in the hundreds if they were large.
As such any professional army of any size was mostly mercenaries.

 

[Kaige]

Professionalism was mostly a good step in the right direction towards reducing mercenary reliance, but I feel the ball was really dropped by giving bonuses to using mercenaries when below 50 professionalism; less professional armies shouldn't be more adept at using mercs, rather an unprofessional army is simply the symptom of over-reliance on mercenaries. Cost in particular is an odd discount; shouldn't a nation having a professional army give them a leg up in negotiations with mercenaries if anything? (Note, I do not think high professionalism should give mercenary discounts for gameplay reasons)

Also I like the idea of mercenaries being tied to regions, but more specifically I would use trade nodes. So every trade node can have x many mercenaries hired out of it, based on y development in the trade node. Every nation pays the normal mercenary gold cost for hiring mercenaries in a trade node up to x multiplied by their trade power; e.g the Genoa trade node can suppory a maximum of 40 mercenaries being hired from it; Aragon owns 50% of the node so they can hire up to 20 without increasing costs, every mercenary afterwards costs additional gold and increases the maintenance cost of all mercenaries from the genoa node in a manner similar to going over forcelimit.

 

[Pat Casey]

Professionalism was mostly a good step in the right direction towards reducing mercenary reliance, but I feel the ball was really dropped by giving bonuses to using mercenaries when below 50 professionalism; less professional armies shouldn't be more adept at using mercs, rather an unprofessional army is simply the symptom of over-reliance on mercenaries. Cost in particular is an odd discount; shouldn't a nation having a professional army give them a leg up in negotiations with mercenaries if anything? (Note, I do not think high professionalism should give mercenary discounts for gameplay reasons)
<snip>

If you want people to pick a finite resource (professional army) instead of an infinite resource (mercenaries), that finite resource has to be a *lot* better.

So much better, in fact, that its objectively better than having near infinite mercenaries.

A full manpower limit of professionals would need to be able to beat a full cashflow limit of mercenaries in a standup fight for that kind of balancing to make sense.

Currently the bonus's for professional army aren't close to good enough to give that outcome so a rational player is going to opt for mercenaries every time since all they cost is money and late game there is a LOT of money.

I'm all for a mixed solution that involves steps both to make manpower armies stronger and mercenary availability lower, but I don't think there's any practical buff to manpower armies that would, in isolation, make them viable from a pure min/max standpoint.

 

[Zak Preston]

I left an important word out. My bad.
Given that professional armies are actually post 1648 and before that basically ALL professional forces were mercenaries I do not really see the issue.
As for 'retinues' those tended to number in the hundreds if they were large.
As such any professional army of any size was mostly mercenaries.

We have Professionalism mechanics now, which is obviously a decent indicator of how professional your armies are. In EU4 recruited regiments may be counted as local levies, for example.

 

[Klausewitz]

We have Professionalism mechanics now, which is obviously a decent indicator of how professional your armies are. In EU4 recruited regiments may be counted as local levies, for example.

Local Levies had a limited time of service, often less than two month. So not really.