New military improvements: what's fixed, what's not?

[Desseabar]

So with the new military improvements in the DD today, I figure it's worth discussing: what are the pain points in the current system that remain vs. are resolved?

Going back to dev diary 140, these were the key issues they highlighted:

• Front splitting causing wars to become unmanageable or frustrating
• Units suddenly teleporting away when their front disappears
• Supply isn’t impactful enough and armies win battles they should really lose when facing critical equipment shortages
• Lack of a proper military access system, i.e. Prussia having to naval invade to reach Denmark
• Troop allocation to offensive vs defensive battles causing unexpected outcomes (for example, a general using all local troops to defend against one naval invasion causing another naval invasion to just walk in unopposed)

1-4 all seem addressed, at least to some extent, in the DD we saw today. Teleportation in particular seems to have a 'permanent fix' as it's no longer part of the game, with troops having to travel somehow back to friendly territory. Supply seems rebalanced to be more impactful on actual organization. Now it remains an open question how this feels and works in practice.

We haven't seen much clarity that point 5 is resolved yet, though, which is my bigger worry.

I'd say there's still a few more common issues that are not addressed:

• Armies unrealistically shipping troops around the world: there was a comment that the devs want to add supply cost, but I worry the AI would struggle with that. My preference would be a cap of "you cannot have more battalions in territory not connected via land to your capital than you have ships" to set a hard cap on how many troops can be sent from China to Denmark.
• Occupied states still contribute to the economy: we've heard about cutting off states from the economy for a while, but this still has not been implemented. I would hope for something with the new trade+military rework
• AI struggles with balancing cavalry+artillery (now renamed "special units?") and army composition, so it's unclear if that's resolved.
• Naval rework is not in scope for this update.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

First to note is that it's a fix to the military and not war system at large. So stuff like endless wars is not touched by the patch.

As for the features, I am kinda unsure what to think. If the military access mechanic was added now, then it would be a constant thing to ask for it over and over, and just spam those invasions teleporting into the enemy country, hoping some will land unopposed and then occupy the enemy capital, because there was noone defending it. But with the "preventing front splitting" changes, it might be, that you go through Belgium, occupy French Low countries, and it's still the same front as the Alsace one. It might make naval invasions really weird, where you aim for a state far enough away to make sure it doesn't just auto connect to the main front.

 

[exi123]

From the point OP stated, the scale of warfare around the world is also my biggest gripe. Moving armies with hundreds of thousands of men around without propper fleet sizes should really not possible.

Getting lucky with a naval surpise landing with a small expedition force to break fronts is welcomed on my side, but to worry every war that you may have to fight somewhere on the world that a GP gets involved with hundreds of battalions is insane, there should not be such power projection until the very end of the campaign, if at all.

For me the current fixes look good and I do not have a lot of concerns about front logic side of wars. The whole management of armies could and should be easier, upgrading units, ships and such is just so much clicking. We still can not just swap ship types on all levels... I really wish I could just set a HQ for a military force somewhere and the game places the units by itself in the region. I really, really do not care much where the battalions are based in a strategic region. It would also be nice if I could just pick a port a base for a fleet and all levels are located there. This would also help with the weird thing that you build naval bases in some outlying regions just because... yeah no clue honestly.

 

[MJAnderson]

They lost me when I got to the line "this is not a total rework of the military system". Admit it's a mess and start over. Just shinier lipstick on the pig if you dont

 

[Fatherlorris]

I don't see how the new system fixes the front splitting to be honest, they just spilt diffrently now, but the core problem remains.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

I don't see how the new system fixes the front splitting to be honest, they just spilt diffrently now, but the core problem remains.

Yeah, it's essentially a bandaid on top of a system to make it less annoying. Largely a need to it comes from armies being glued to fronts as the only way of engaging with them (so a split front with no glued army is completely open), and the lack of clear relation between speed of a front and speed of an army (and why a front can go faster than an army trying to chase it, or why an army can push the front, have a change in hub location and need to go towards it, leaving it open (which got a bandaid)).

 

[L-Histidine]

The new algorithm means splitting will (presumably) only happen when there's a meaningful separation between the two would-be fronts, instead of on every random obstruction, at least.

Fronts outpacing their armies might be solved by the suggestion someone posted in the DD that we could now return to the pre-1.5 advance-by-province.

 

[Froonk]

It doesn't fix the massive amount of micromanagement in creating and managing armies that exists currently, including the CIVesque opportunity cost between building units and building buildings.

Front splitting was problematic and annoying in the wars but it only really flared to be really annoying in particular circumstances mainly in Germany and India. Meanwhile every game I play I am annoyed throughout peace and war with creating, managing, merging, updating and reforming armies. Especially if you want to be efficient with using cavalry and artillery where you have to have different armies for fighting, advancing and defending which is such pointless micromanagement.

I still don't see how this new system adds anything beneficial over cavalry and artillery as PMs. I also don't see why there shouldn't be an organization tab for armies to automatically set ratios and maybe even add bonuses based on army type so that there is more of an organizational and doctrine benefit to actually having different unit types.

 

[Silens]

One of the biggest issues for me is the lack of a limited scope of wars.

Over every little thing, all sides start to mobilize 100% of their troops and call in all of their conscripts. Until the midgame, most wars can be won fairly quick, so it doesn't start as a big deal. But once everyone has hundreds of battalions? Then the AI will make some erratic decision over some trivial piece of excrement in the middle of nowhere, join a random diplomatic play against you, and kick off a total war involving the entire world. Performance goes down the gutter, and you have to micro dozens of little fronts in a total war scenario.

And that brings me to my second grievance. Once you're stuck in a total war, you have still very limited wargoals, and often you're stuck in the next total war before even the truce is up.

I say that if a major power forces you into a total war scenario, where in order to win you come to occupy their entire core territory, that they should be at your total mercy (or rather lack thereof). If one side escalates a conflict that much and finds itself forced to surrender unconditionally? Then they should be carved up, and put in a position in which they are unable to wage any wars for the next decade or two. A complete dismantlement of their army and fleet and crippling reparations should be the absolute minimum here.

Kind of what happened in WW1, which started over Austria's wargaol against Serbia, before everyone and their mother got involved and millions of dead started piling up. Which ultimately resulted in the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Trianon, the Treaty of Saint Germain, the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and the Treaty of Sèvres. FAFO - do stupid things and win stupid prizes.

But I'll wait with criticism regarding that second point until the next DevDiary. If the diplomatic treaties are what I hope they are, then I'll be happy (for the time being).

 

[Amina144]

It doesn't fix the massive amount of micromanagement in creating and managing armies that exists currently, including the CIVesque opportunity cost between building units and building buildings.

Front splitting was problematic and annoying in the wars but it only really flared to be really annoying in particular circumstances mainly in Germany and India. Meanwhile every game I play I am annoyed throughout peace and war with creating, managing, merging, updating and reforming armies. Especially if you want to be efficient with using cavalry and artillery where you have to have different armies for fighting, advancing and defending which is such pointless micromanagement.

I still don't see how this new system adds anything beneficial over cavalry and artillery as PMs. I also don't see why there shouldn't be an organization tab for armies to automatically set ratios and maybe even add bonuses based on army type so that there is more of an organizational and doctrine benefit to actually having different unit types.

I really hate the idea of strictly defense or attack armies, wars and fronts happen on strategic scale in this game, this shouldn't be the case. You need infantry and artillery in both cases.

Like why they implemented this? Now the templates basically either full infantry stack, 50/50 with cav, or 50/50 with artillery. And devs promised this wont be the case yet it still happened.

 

[Delterius]

I'd like to echo the sentiment that fiddling with different types of barracks across a nation, spread through different states, is a massive quality of life loss. Ideally if I have 50 barracks in my country I should just be able to define how many of those train infantry and how many train artillery. Having a civil war right now is truly the worst because odds are you build your army in bulk and all your infantry was in some states, all your cavalry is in another and all your artillery is in yet a third grouping.

I just want Barracks to work like Stem Cells so that you're able to set what unit types they service straight from the army formations screen. I want my 55 barracks to form a 25/25/5 army? They just do it automatically when I tell the HQ army what template to use.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

One of the biggest issues for me is the lack of a limited scope of wars.

I generally agree, but I've also never seen a game actually solve that problem. Closest I've seen is the autopeace if neither side is actively engaged in invading in Imperator. I think it's inherent to the fact that this is a game where most of the pressures to not do a total war don't really exist for the player, I'm pretty much always better off mobilizing as many troops as possible with the most maximalist demands I feel I can achieve because the worst case scenerio is I restart my campaign or load an earlier save while the real life worst case scenario was a coup and death.

 

[Desseabar]

I generally agree, but I've also never seen a game actually solve that problem. Closest I've seen is the autopeace if neither side is actively engaged in invading in Imperator. I think it's inherent to the fact that this is a game where most of the pressures to not do a total war don't really exist for the player, I'm pretty much always better off mobilizing as many troops as possible with the most maximalist demands I feel I can achieve because the worst case scenerio is I restart my campaign or load an earlier save while the real life worst case scenario was a coup and death.

The problem with Vic3's mega wars are diplomacy (tendency to get involved in too many wars) and that it's too easy to ship your troops around the world. Slower troop movement, hard caps on how many troops can go overseas, and making the AI less prone to join random wars would all help, and to me remains the biggest issue with the game. It's just really frustrating seeing an unreformed Qing get Denmark as a puppet and watch the tenth world war over "regime change in Hawaii" or whatever.

Also frustrating to me is that, as military gets more abstracted, it seems like war will just be more "big number wins." The game doesn't have to be HOI4, but there's no strategy for targeting economically valuable states nor defending in mountains/jungles. E.g., the Russo-Circassian war should be an extremely slow, grinding war: Russia fights province-by-province and Circassia gets massive defensive bonuses. Instead, Russia steamrolls Circassia the second the truce ends because they can ship their entire army into the Caucasus. Similarly, the US never needs to worry about a long guerrilla campaign in the Philippines or on the frontier, China never has to worry about rebels in the mountains, etc.

Put another way: the military updates feel optimized to let Prussia bully it's neighbors, but colonial conflicts seem forgotten.

 

[kingsword]

It's the "fit a square peg in a round hole" moment in the Victoria 13 project. They just took a file binder and some duct tape to keep the oxygen flowing to the botched mission.

What they should have at this point in the life of the game is just scratch the system, rebuild from the ground up and market with a popular content DLC. The game's player base numbers would take off better than ever.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

The problem with Vic3's mega wars are diplomacy (tendency to get involved in too many wars) and that it's too easy to ship your troops around the world. Slower troop movement, hard caps on how many troops can go overseas, and making the AI less prone to join random wars would all help, and to me remains the biggest issue with the game. It's just really frustrating seeing an unreformed Qing get Denmark as a puppet and watch the tenth world war over "regime change in Hawaii" or whatever.

That would help early, but then the meta becomes rushing to build the infrastruture to do that (naval bases and a large fleet) and then the player gets to knock the AI around because it did something silly like "invest in the states it owns," which, I now get to take.

 

[Desseabar]

That would help early, but then the meta becomes rushing to build the infrastruture to do that (naval bases and a large fleet) and then the player gets to knock the AI around because it did something silly like "invest in the states it owns," which, I now get to take.

I think the opposite issue is more relevant. No one should be building a massive overseas empire without the navy to defend it; there's a reason Russia lost their toehold in Hawaii, for example, and the US was able to rapidly build its navy to steal Spanish colonies.

The biggest issue is with the US, Latin America, and Qing intervening unrealistically in European conflicts, then a secondary issue is with European powers intervening everywhere else in the world. Saying "you need a navy to ship troops to Europe" fixes the former while "it takes two months to sail to China" mostly fixes the latter.

 

[AlexNereča]

Fronts outpacing their armies might be solved by the suggestion someone posted in the DD that we could now return to the pre-1.5 advance-by-province.

This isn't going to happen because having frontline advancement be determined top-down from a percentage of current state occupation is much more convenient for implementing future mechanics like seizing a portion of goods production. I don't exactly understand myself why it's been implied before that it's tricky to make a system to count how much of the state is occupied with province-by-province advancement but on the other hand another explanation given was "the danger of it flip-flopping would be a lot higher" which does make sense to avoid for a number of reasons such as, again, a future mechanic where nations completely lose portions of their states' economic output.

 

[Froonk]

This isn't going to happen because having frontline advancement be determined top-down from a percentage of current state occupation is much more convenient for implementing future mechanics like seizing a portion of goods production. I don't exactly understand myself why it's been implied before that it's tricky to make a system to count how much of the state is occupied with province-by-province advancement but on the other hand another explanation given was "the danger of it flip-flopping would be a lot higher" which does make sense to avoid for a number of reasons such as, again, a future mechanic where nations completely lose portions of their states' economic output.

That's really unfortunate, watching my armies advance province by province after a few decisive wins was one of the things I enjoyed most in Victoria 3's warfare. Current system is a bit more functional in the abstract but it also has a lot of frustration in management with basically no satisfaction at any level.

 

[Desseabar]

This isn't going to happen because having frontline advancement be determined top-down from a percentage of current state occupation is much more convenient for implementing future mechanics like seizing a portion of goods production. I don't exactly understand myself why it's been implied before that it's tricky to make a system to count how much of the state is occupied with province-by-province advancement but on the other hand another explanation given was "the danger of it flip-flopping would be a lot higher" which does make sense to avoid for a number of reasons such as, again, a future mechanic where nations completely lose portions of their states' economic output.

Right now, the frontlines still advance with the flag cover as you battle for a state, but the yellow 'actual frontline' doesn't until the state is won.

Not sure if there's some technical limitations there, but from a UI perspective it just feels nicer to see the frontline push forward with a won battle, even if you don't get any benefits of occupation until the entire state is won.

 

[Hopciu]

To me, this dev diary was a big dissapointment. The long announced "Military Rework", that Devs worked upon for months, appears to be just a bandaid solution, to make profoundly broken system just a bit more bearable, while fixing no serious underlying problems at all. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I criticize the changes announced. It's just, all of that should be implemented as hotfix. I would expect much more from a "Rework".

They announced, they have (partially) dealt with front splitting and armies teleporting, while also adding a new land-based equivalent of Naval Invasion to cheese out.
Not a single word about doing anything with abyssmal War Support system, that makes GPs lose manpower and money in prolonging wars for Regime Change in South East Asian minors.
Not a single word about doing anything with 3 unit types and multitude of General Orders, that only add more micromanagement to already micro-heavy system, and that should never have appeared in the first place.
Not a single word about making war costly, to make devastation and war losses matter, or IGs/Movements/Pops having anything to say about war.
No single word about making logistics matter, to stop GB from throwing all their forces around Pacific Islands, or Russia sending all their armies to USA-Mexican border.

It's just so underwhelming, makes me rather skip 1.9, and wait for update with proper Warfare Rework instead.