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MP Tactical Domination Guide

unmerged(5161) · 2004-02-26T04:38:05+00:00

Ryoken's MP Tactical Domination Guide: This guide is a focused essay on tactical warfare in the MP environment. Strategic warfare is the big picture. Should I ally with or against Poland? Should I invade Russia in winter? And so on. Tactical warfare is the down and dirty battlefield stuff. Should I move my army to Lorraine or Franche-Comte? Should I assault this fortress or not? These are questions of tactics, not strategy. I feel that despite Damo and Dukey's Guide there is a seriously lack of understanding in the community about tactical warfare. I divide tactical warfare into two components; positional warfare and war of manuever. Positional Warfare is the term often used to characterize the kind of warfare present most often during the EU2 timeframe; the warfare of sieges and fortifications. The last truly positional war in history was WWI. However, elements of positional warfare were present in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Positional warfare gets its name from the emphasis on position, geography, and location of troops and fortifications. Things like elevation, artillery, and fortified positions are more important than sheer numbers of troops. The goal of Positional Warfare is to take and hold enemy territory. War of Maneuver is the term often used to characterize the kind of warfare prevalent today and during brief periods of history; the warfare of cavalry, tanks, and aircraft. The Gulf War of 1991 is a classic example of War of Maneuver. Elements of War of Maneuver are present in virtually all wars, particularly at the beginning and end phases. Things like speed, flexibility, and adaptation are more important than holding any single position on the battlefield. The goal of War of Maneuver is to destroy the ability of your enemy to fight. Like the real world, warfare in EU2 consists of these two types. Pitched battles are elements of war of manuever and sieges are elements of positional warfare. Obviously, in many cases the two types overlap. This guide is seperated into two sections along these lines. BOTH elements are important and none is superior to the other. However, certain wars in EU2 may lean one way or the other; depending on the geography of the battlefield and the tactics of your enemy. Early wars tend to be wars of maneuver, later wars tend to be wars of position; though that is not an ironclad rule. Often, one side is conducting war of position and the other war of manuever to break their positions. POSITIONAL WARFARE: Positional Warfare is a conservative methodology. You lay siege to a province for a long time. If you want to succeed, you will need superb planning and intelligent application. Below is an example of a pre-war standoff between Austria and France. I will be using France as our country and Austria as the enemy. Austria has stationed their army in Zeeland; far enough away from France to not be in immediate danger but close enough to be a threat to French siege operations. Because of supply limits, you will need to divide your forces. Your enemy knows this and will probably wait until you do so and then attack your smaller armies. The key to winning a positional war is to avoid this problem. For purposes of this example, we will assume both sides have 50k in the area and no reinforcements inbound. Each side has 35k infantry and 15k cavalry. At the beginning of a war, it is not wise to commit to a long drawn out siege because the enemy army is usually large and concentrated. You will probably lose control of the siege and have to restart it all over again, so you might as well move to take some more lightly defended targets. In this scenario, Flandern has a medium fort, Artois has a minimal fort, and all other Netherlands provinces have small forts. Since we are going to focus on smaller forts in this early phase of the war, Luxembourg and Artois are going to be our targets. Later in the war, after these provinces fall to our control, we can focus on other targets, like Flandern. It is also unlikely that the enemy will give us Flandern at the peace table anyway, so it is really just a target for driving up war score. Hence, it can wait. We have 50 thousand troops (35I, 15C). First, we are going to divide them into two halves. Then we are going to divide one of those halves again to create three armies; one 25k army and two 12k armies. The former is our reinforcement army and the latter two are our siege forces. Once war is declared, we move the two smaller armies to siege their target provinces. The Austrians decided to move their army through Koln (since they are Emperor) to attack Luxembourg. Their decision is based on war of maneuver principles and will be analyzed later in this essay. Once the Austrian army is sighted moving from Koln to Luxembourg, the prudent commander will march his reserve army in Champagne to support Luxembourg. In this example, France has a superior positional advantage because the forests of Luxembourg give him a defensive edge. Even with a little under 40k to Austria's 50k (minus a little attrition in Koln), the French commander will probably carry the day. If the French commander is concerned, he could leave a siege or covering army in Artois and move even more reinforcements to Luxembourg. This condition represents a roughly 50-50 chance of success. Given that we are dealing with equal forces, this represents good generalship on both sides. Of course, this assumes generic leaders and relatively equal forces. In most cases, this will not be true. However, if you apply this principle in most conditions, you will be greatly victorious with superior numbers or leadership. A battle you will probably win normally will turn into a sure thing. Conversely, you will take fewer losses than usual against superior forces or leadership by the enemy. A catastrophic loss may be less costly. However, since I am giving generic advice, I cannot assume those conditions apply. Additionally, however, your enemy may fail to seek his optimal outcome thus giving victory to the opponent that does. If Austria tried to march across the river into Luxembourg instead of through Koln, for example, you would almost assuredly win the engagement. Of course, we have to assume good leadership on the other side when we make OUR decisions. The principles to draw from this example are two-fold. First, avoid attrition by sending small sieges armies forward and support them with reserve forces stationed in higher supply provinces. Second, do not over extend your forces by sending out lots of small armies for your enemy to isolate and destroy. Concentrate your forces within a handful of provinces so they can reinforce one another against an incoming enemy army. WAR OF MANEUVER: War of Manuever is a risk-taking methodology. You try to force the enemy into decisive battles where you can defeat their army and therefore their ability to wage war. Success requires delicate timing, feints, and complex maneuvers to trap or trick your enemy onto the battlefield of your choice. Failure often results in terrible attrition losses and potential defeat in the entire war. Most wars are decided by war of maneuver. Destroying an enemy's army allows you to run roughshod over their country with impunity. This often encourages generous peace offers. To illustrate war of manuever, I will discuss briefly the "simple" tactical maneuver for the Austrians in the above example. Then I will move on to a more risky, but perhaps more successful, tactical maneuver. The simple manuever for the Austrians in the above example is to march through Koln to Luxembourg. The reasons for this are fairly simple. The Austrian general does not know the composition of the opposing armies. If the reserve army in Champagne has extra cavalry, a march on Artois will end in disaster. If the reserve army in Champagne has extra infantry, a march on Artois will be a success. Thus there are two outcomes; terrible failure and success. In Luxembourg, by contrast, a cavarly reserve army will bring success to the balanced Austrian army. If the reserve is infantry, the battle outcome is only slightly in favor of France. Thus there are two outcomes; success or small failure. Obviously, the second set of outcomes is preferable. If you are going to lose, at least lose small. Losing big is a terrible outcome. If the Austrian player is feeling lucky and willing to take some risks, he can pursue an alternate strategy. First, he should divide his army into cavalry and infantry. Then, he should march his army to Flandern. By dividing his army, he creates two armies of different speeds. He can then order both armies to move to Artois. The cavarly portion will arrive first. Because Artois is a plain, he will severely damage the enemy morale and numbers. When your infantry arrives days later (along with his reinforcement army), the enemy will be outclassed. However, the risk is that you dont know what is in the reinforcement army. If the French reserve is pure cavarly, your cavalry will be destroyed almost completely before your infantry arrives and then you will be massacred. If the French reserve has extra cavalry, you may be able to retreat before suffering too many losses. However, if the reinforcement army is balanced or has extra infantry, you will succeed, perhaps overwhelmingly. For these reasons, I advise only the true risk-takers to pursue this strategy. In the new beta patch, morale changes may make this strategy VERY risky. Use with caution. The principles to draw from this example are two-fold. First, keep your forces concentrated into a strong column and press against the point most likely to generate victory. Second, minimize your enemy's terrain and position advantages and maximize your own. The easiest way to defeat an enemy siege deployment is to attack the reinforcement army itself. In this example, the reinforcement army is protected by geography, but in a different case, the reinforcement army may be exposed to flanking manuevers. If you can attack the reinforcement army, it is usually the best strategy because the enemy may cancel his sieges to retreat, thus creating the outcome you want even if you lose the battle. Terrain and Troop Composition: Using the two above methods of war-fighting, you should seek to control the location of battles. This is central to success in BOTH positional warfare and war of maneuver. The above example, however, cannot make assumptions about the differential composition of your enemy's forces or your own. I assume that you will be fighting equally balanced forces. If you want to turn decent odds of success into very good ones, you can use terrain and troop composition to give you additional advantages. If possible, you should lure your enemy into battles on provinces of maximum advantage to your forces. There are certain provinces in the game that greatly favor the defender. You should seek to lay a trap on these provinces for your enemy. For simplicity, I will call this effect Maximum Tactical Advantage or MTA. These provinces are mountain, plains, or desert provinces that border a river. When the enemy crosses the river into the province and encounters your army, you will have MTA. MTA is the result of the convergence of three factors; the river penalty, the terrain modifier, and the troop composition of the enemy. An example MTA province is Milan when attacked from the south or Salzburg when attacked from the north. Armies composed of primarily infantry stationed in mountain provinces that encounter an enemy army moving across a river gain three bonuses; any cavalry in the enemy army have greatly reduced effectiveness, the mountain province defense bonus, and the river crossing penalty to the attacking army. Armies composed of primarily cavalry stationed in plains or desert provinces that encounter an enemy army moving across a river gain three bonuses as well; the cavarly shock value against an enemy with less cavarly, the cavalry bonus for plains or desert, and the river crossing penalty to the attacking army. This kind of battle synergy will almost assuredly result in victory. However, your enemy will be weary of fighting you on this terrain. You have two ways to lure him in. The first is to place your advance siege armies in provinces with MTA and the enemy could be drawn to attack. The second is a more rare case; when the enemy is crossing into a province with MTA in your territory and you move an army into the province just before he does. This is a case of information advantage; you can see your provinces and he cant. Because the MTA province is on the border and empty when he orders the crossing, the enemy is caught unaware when your army arrives before he can cancel his movement order. This situation can occur by accident, but it can be engineered if you can see the enemy army moving into HIS border province before he orders the crossing. That way, you can time your movement better. However, it is unlikely that you can achieve this in most circumstances; your best bet is to try to lure the enemy to attack your siege army. These examples are, of course, optimal situations. You should try to maximize your advantages in any situation, regardless of terrain features and the presence or absence of MTA. Ambushing an infantry army on a plains or desert regardless of river crossings is a good idea. Ambushing cavarly armies in swamps and forests is too. I present the optimal case, but you will probably encounter that case rarely, if ever. Information and Intelligence: The key to running a successful military operation is intelligence. There are two methods of acquiring intelligence on the enemy; informants and inference. You should try to create intelligence assets by cooperation or collusion with nations that can spy on your enemy through a royal marriage. The best candidates are those far away from your battlefields. While it may be tempting to rely on your allies, during times of allied warfare your ally will have that royal marriage broken. You should choose countries that are rarely involved in wars with your enemies so the RM stays intact nearly all the time. The Ottoman Empire possesses a great disadvantage in the intelligence community. They cannot RM any Europeans. However, they can recieve information from European nations about Austrian, Russian, or Spanish troop movements during wartime. I shall use France as an example country. Russia is the best intelligence asset for France. Russia rarely fights against England, Austria, or Spain. France almost always fights these countries. During times of war, Russia will often be able to feed information to France about enemy troop movements. Poland and Denmark could also be very valuable; though Denmark will be unable to provide information on Catholics while they are Protestant and Poland may end up fighting Austria sometimes. Other countries may be useful to varying degrees, but probably not as much as those three. The other, more difficult, method of acquiring intelligence is through inference. This involves putting together clues to get information you desire. For example, if the enemy marches an army into your territory and leaves a siege force, that siege force will represent the infantry/cavalry distribution of their army because of the way the computer determines what composition to give the siege army. Thus, if the enemy sieges a province with a minimal fort and leave 4000 infantry and 1000 cavalry, you can be sure that the army that siege force was drawn from is roughly 80 percent infantry. This would make it vulnerable to cavalry ambush on a plains or desert. You can also send a small army to get massacred by a superior enemy, but when the battle is joined you will get a brief glimpse at the composition of the enemy army. Another method involves switching to the political map to see sieges you normally cannot due to fog of war. All this will tell you is whether or not a siege is underway, but that information is sometimes valuable. If you want to get information on where the enemy army might be hiding, you can form several small armies (preferably cavarly) and send them out to find the enemy force and reveal its location and perhaps composition before you march into their territory. These armies can also loot provinces and thus severely damage your enemy's income. Additionally, it is sometimes possible to hide a small army within a convenient province to monitor enemy movements. Military access with small nations (sometimes you can even hide an army in the territory of an enemy's vassal) can allow you to place a tiny army in a forward position to give you intelligence. In naval warfare, intelligence is very hard to come by. However, there are some strategies. If you build a few galleys and place one in each sea zone off the coast of your nation, they can act as cheap "tripwires" to detect enemy fleets. Yes, you will lose the galley against almost any enemy fleet, but that will reveal the location of a possible invasion army in time for you to possibly intercept it. This is a particularly useful strategy for England because they can detect enemy fleets in time to prevent invasion completely if this strategy is used effectively. Even during peacetime, this deployment is very useful because you can see the shorelines of all coastal provinces for those sea zones. England could see the French loading a large army in the Channel and move their fleet to intercept if France declares war. England, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Venice, and the Ottomans benefit greatly from this strategy. You should also keep an eye on any fleet that is in port. When it leaves port, the icon of the port will change back to an anchor. This may help you track enemy fleet movements even through the fog of war. Whether you use inference or informants to give you information, pay attention to it! Watch every war you can pay attention to because watching how your future enemy fights today will leave you better prepared to fight him in the future. Establish RMs with as many nations as you can and observe how they play the game. This provides crucial insights on how the enemy behaves so that if the RM is cancelled you can make educated guesses about information you dont have access to. Cultivate intelligence sharing relationships with other countries. A player who provides information to a friend can usually expect his efforts to be repaid later. Above all, remember that information is crucial. Most catastrophic defeats are the results of intelligence failure. Assaults: Assaults must be done with great care. A failed assault can cost you dearly. As a rule of thumb, I would recommend assaulting only when you outnumber to enemy defenders by at least a factor of four (20k for a minimal fort, 40k for a small, and so on). Only count infantry in this calculation, because cavarly is not used during an assault except as casualties. Additionally, only assault after at least 3 months of siege work or if you possess an overwhelming advantage (5 or more times the number of defenders, a superior leader, a huge morale advantage, etc). However, in most cases assaults are a waste of men and morale. First, the assault action will greatly reduce the morale of your forces and increase the danger of a counter attack. You may not have enough reserves to offset the morale loss and/or you could lose the assault. An enemy within marching distance could force you to abandon the siege altogether and this could be problematic. Assaults are risky, perhaps the most risky of any act of war. Undertake them only with great care and precaution. NOTE: Under the new beta patches, Assaults appear to be more risky. Since the data on this is spotty and not tested thoroughly, I hesitate to make firm conclusions. There are some debates on this issue in other threads. Cannons: I have never found cannons to be useful. They slow your army down and they are very expensive. However, recent patches have made cannons less expensive and more powerful in pitched battles, particularly in the very high land tech levels. The jury is out on this change and some veteran players have been experimenting with cannon use. However, since there is not a good data set to look at here, I have to advise a conservative approach. If you are going to use cannons, use them carefully. Cannons are most useful in sieges, obviously, because they provide you with increased chance of success at breaking the enemy walls down. If you are going to use cannons, bring at least 10 per level of fortification you are sieging. Obviously more is better, but lots of artillery makes a tempting target for your enemy. That can be good or bad for you, depending on the situation. Additionally, cannons can provide a huge "fire" bonus at the high land tech levels. If you bring very large numbers of cannons to the battlefield, you can cause catastrophic casualties to the enemy. However, you are placing a lot of money in that particular army and you need to be ABSOLUTELY SURE that you protect it. Unprotected by an army, cannons will be annihilated. Use with caution! General Rules of Army Composition: As a general rule, I tend to keep my armies roughly two-thirds to three-quarters infantry and the remainder cavarly. That is a balanced peacetime distribution. During wartime, you should adjust the army composition to reflect the terrain you expect to fight on. Build more cavalry if you expect a plains or desert engagement. If you are fighting in mountains, forests, and swamps, keep your percentage of infantry high. However, despite all this, never let either cavalry or infantry constitute less than an eighth of your army. I would try to keep at least a quarter at all times just to be safe. Otherwise, you may be ambushed and lose a substantial number of troops before you can retreat. Naval Support for Land Invasions: Besides the obvious role of ferrying troops to the battlefield, navies can constitute vital forces in a ground war. The most obvious use is as a blockader. Naval blockades increase siege performance against provinces with a port, increases the support limit for you in adjacent enemy provinces, and lowers the support limits for your enemy. Thus you take less attrition damage and your enemy takes more, while your sieges run faster. Additionally, naval blockades damage income and reduce build capacity. Another role is as a phantom province. A fleet can provide a safe-haven to retreat to, rebuild morale, and redeploy (either in the same place or elsewhere). It can also provide instant reinforcement to a coastal province. If you land a large army in a coastal province under siege by a small enemy force, his reinforcement army will probably not be able to respond in time and you will gain a strong victory. The vulnerability of this strategy, however, is that armies retreating to a fleet will disband if the fleet is unable to pick them up when they are finished retreating. Thus a clever enemy can send out a navy to just make contact with yours at the critical time and in effect destroy a large army that should have survived. Of course, you can do this to your enemy as well. As long as you use caution, however, this can be a good strategy. Winning a War: War is a dynamic process. Things change and move over time into different configurations. There are three common ways to emerge victorious over your enemy. The first is to destroy enough of his army to force capitulation. The second is to take territory and prevent the enemy from regaining control of it. Often these two event occur together, though that is not required. If you are asking for core territories, you can often defeat the enemy army and they will surrender the territory to prevent further loss. This is a common occurence in the Balkans, the Netherlands, and Lithuania. If you manage to take some provinces, by siege or by assault, and hold onto them for a while the enemy may realize he cannot get the provinces back and agree to cede them to you. However, most wars end because you take a few provinces and then defeat the enemy army. The goal of warfare is to force the enemy to do something he would not do otherwise; cede land, become your vassal, change religion, etc. As such, the true enemy in every war is the psychological health of your opponent. You must not only take his land, but you must convince him to give it up through a treaty. If you fail to do this, he may hold on thinking he can emerge victorious eventually. For this reason, taking control of a few provinces and then destroying your enemy's army is often a recipe for success because of the psychological damage to the enemy's will to resist. Closing Remarks: The hallmark of a great tactician is flexibility and adaptability. If your current situation calls for innovative action, do it. Retreat and regroup if you encounter difficulty. If you make a mistake, try to correct it. Winning wars is a dynamic evolving process. Sometimes, you may be forced into poor situations. You will make mistakes and errors of judgement. However, a sound understanding of battlefield tactics will usually allow you to overcome your errors or at least minimize the damage they cause while maximizing the effect of your enemy's errors and mistakes. GAME MECHANICS ADDENDUM: This section is an attempt to put all tactically important information on game mechanics in one spot. Additionally, some analysis is applied to weave the components together into a "whole fabric" way of looking at tactical combat. Movement: Movement FAQ Cavalry is the base for determining movement. It takes cavalry 10 days to move to a plains province, 12.5 to deserts and forests, 15 to a swamp, and 17.5 to a mountain province. Crossing a river adds 5 days. An army moves at the rate of its slowest part, so if you have infantry in your army it will take 150% of the normal time to move and artillery will double the normal time to move. Movement in Africa and other special areas doubles the time as well. There are other factors that affect movement, but they are not tactically important because they are very special cases usually not involving combat. Loading and unloading from a fleet is pretty much the same as above, but if you control the province movement will occur much faster. What does this mean for you tactically? You should not obsess with calculating actual transit times, what is usually important is relative differences. If you leave at roughly the same time, you can determine whether or not you will intercept the enemy. Lets say your army is standing on a plain and observes an enemy army move into the plain next door and continue on towards a mountain or swamp province. Assuming no artillery is in your army, you should be able to move onto the plain and intercept your opponent before he finishes his movement into the mountains. Understanding movement rates allows you to lay ambushes. You can keep a majority cavalry army lying in wait and when an enemy army starts marching off the plain you can intercept it on the ground of your choosing. In the early centuries of the game when cavalry is very powerful, ambushing enemy armies on plains can be very effective; particularly in France and Eastern Europe. Combat Resolution Calculations: DP Slider FAQ Morale FAQ CRT FAQ One of the most important factors in battles is morale. There are 4 domestic sliders that affect morale; Defensive-Offensive, Naval-Land, Quantity-Quality, and FreeSubjects-Serfdom. Defensive-Offensive changes give you .02 boosts to morale and you can gain anywhere from +.20 at full offensive to -.20 at full defensive. You dont get a morale penalty for being naval, but you do get a boost from being land oriented; up to +.50 at .10 points per click. Quantity-Quality and FreeSubjects-Serfdom work the same; down to -.25 or up to +.25. This is not a discussion of which DP sliders to move, but that is the game mechanic at work. However, if you want to improve your morale through DP settings, Land is the clear choice and Offensive would be the least important. Base morale is a function of tech level, so unless you are at a radically different tech level from your opponent or on a critical tech level; this is not important to you. You can view the morale of your armies by hovering the cursor over the morale bar. Morale serves two functions in EU2; determining the length of combat and a portion of the damage. All other things equal, having better morale will result in victory. However, dont be fooled by the morale shifts in battle; they represent how close the other side is to retreat. That is not to say much about casualties. Sometimes, you can have much better morale but because of other factors (tech, terrain, numbers,etc) you will be taking heavy casualties. Keep your eyes on the troop losses! If you are taking heavy casualties, it may be time to manually retreat. Dont be afraid to do this! He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day! CRT (Combat Resolution Table) is determined by your technology level. CRT represents fundamental advancements in warfare. If you have land tech 17 and are fighting an enemy with land tech 18 (higher CRT), you will be greatly disadvantaged. This can be negated by other factors (morale, terrain, numbers, etc) but dont expect to win equal battles at a lower CRT than your enemy. Certain technology levels are CRITICALLY IMPORTANT. If you are close to one of these levels, invest heavily in land tech so you dont fall behind or so you can have an advantage against your enemies. Terrain plays a vitally important role in combat. Terrain favors the defender. The numbers are not that important, but a rough way to look at it is this; the longer it takes to move into a province, the greater the advantage. Crossing a river into a mountain province provides the largest advantage and crossing an open plain provides the least (no bonus at all). Try to fight your enemy on a terrain that favors you. Keep in mind that cavalry does not perform well in rough terrain. This is how you determine provinces with Maximum Tactical Advantage.

Thread starter unmerged(5161)
Start date Feb 26, 2004

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Chaingun

Field Marshal

49 Badges

Feb 26, 2004

About the fleet exploit: I am not a master in naval warfare (in fact, I've only played nations where navies are significant very few times), but wouldn't it be possible to support the invasion fleet? By this I mean that a large naval power could guard the sea zones around their main fleet landing troops with smaller navies, perhaps just enough to prevent small enemy navies from disturbing the landing. I admit it's a lot of micromanagement, but is this strategy ever used?

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