Peasant levies are broken

[Niko92]

The idea behind peasant levies is that your army is composed of untrained mobs of levied soldiers, rather than few well trained units. However, in practice peasant levies make you not have an army at all.

This is because Peasant Levies gives a 0.1x modifier to POPs becoming officers unless they are aristocrats (I'm guessing to represent nobles leading armies). This however completely prevents you from recruiting any units as aristrocats have no reason to convert to officers as they make more money working in Manor Houses. Since you can't recruit officers, you can't recruit soldiers either. My current army has shrunk by 1/3rd in just 6 years because I have no possibility to replace battlefield losses.

You might be asking why I haven't just switched to Professional Army (which seems to be the meta to do as the first thing as any country). My main reason is RP, I'm trying to make a country heavily controlled by aristocrats. The fact that you basically want to switch to Professional Army as soon as possible whenever you play tells me how broken Peasant Levies are.

To fix the issue I would remove the 0.1x modifier for qualifications completely. Peasant Levies already lock you to only using irregulars as your conscripts, which is a big nerf to begin with as soon technology progresses even a little bit.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

That's not the problem.

The tooltip is showing you that you have 0 qualified pops. That means none of your Aristocrats are even qualified to be Officers. Whether the Aristocrats want to work as officers isn't even a factor yet. If you hover over a pop and then hover over the Workforce number you can see what their qualifications are, and the factors affecting the rate at which they earn qualifications:

The underlying issue is that you simply have too few Aristocrats. The fact that the size of your army is limited by the number of Aristocrats available to levy Peasants is something that should be expected for that model of army organisation.

 

[Delterius]

I don't dispute what the tooltip is saying, but I have had issues refilling armies as early game Russia. I can't imagine the problem there was a lack of aristocrats. This has to be a global issue.

 

[Niko92]

That's not the problem.

The tooltip is showing you that you have 0 qualified pops. That means none of your Aristocrats are even qualified to be Officers. Whether the Aristocrats want to work as officers isn't even a factor yet. If you hover over a pop and then hover over the Workforce number you can see what their qualifications are, and the factors affecting the rate at which they earn qualifications:

View attachment 1336490

The underlying issue is that you simply have too few Aristocrats. The fact that the size of your army is limited by the number of Aristocrats available to levy Peasants is something that should be expected for that model of army organisation.

There clearly are aristocrats with qualifications for officers. Here are aristocrats working in administration for example. 51 with qualifications and +0.99 coming new every month (there is also another cultured pop with 91 and +1.91 as values. But then in the state view the values are much lower.

I don't think it's just an issue with qualifications. I see this in pretty much every game. Every country with Peasant Levies can only get like a fraction of the units that they have on paper because they can't actually get full strength into their units.

 

[Xuampas]

Yep, the problem is the acceptance level. I had the same issue playing Dai Nam, even in 1890 with professional army and 60% literacy the Shan states only can recruit officers from servicemen. You need Aristocrats with V (full acceptance), or they will be capped to 0 cualifications for officer. I think this should be changed tho.