Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

The Historic Inevitabilty of Epic Failure

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Mods said:
he's wrong, the reason he could annex the other one was because he had surrounded it with his land, meaning daimyo's with their capital non coastal can be annexed
He just needs to find a way to get rid of the green one and the shogunate will actually disband then
Click to expand...

That was moving the capital, not eliminating it, I think? I'm just extrapolating from what I know of game mechanics and from what Prawnstar himself did earlier in the AAR - he took Liguria off Genoa and thus eliminated them in a war with their Milanese overlords. Japan is something weird, though, and I might very well be wrong.
 
Mods said:
he's wrong, the reason he could annex the other one was because he had surrounded it with his land, meaning daimyo's with their capital non coastal can be annexed
He just needs to find a way to get rid of the green one and the shogunate will actually disband then
Click to expand...

This is not a criticism of you specifically, but there have been, by now, *alot* of theories as to how this could be solved. But, since tis a bug, the behavior of the game in this rgeard might simply be unpredictable, and there's no guarantee that what worked in one instance would work in another.

In any case, some experimentation will be necessary, there's plenty of time to figure it out though, the rest of Asia is pretty much his, so its not like there's alot to keep him occupied there, as I recall. So, various experiments over then next hundred years and he'll probably find *something* that works.
 
Is it possible that the daimyo which offered a peace deal was the Shogun with high influence and therefore able to interact with outsiders? I appreciate that I don't know much about Japan in 5.1 and I've already moved on to 5.2 so can't really test this.
 
Dauth said:
Is it possible that the daimyo which offered a peace deal was the Shogun with high influence and therefore able to interact with outsiders? I appreciate that I don't know much about Japan in 5.1 and I've already moved on to 5.2 so can't really test this.
Click to expand...

That actually raises the question, is 5.2 save game compatible with 5.1? My recollection/understanding is that 5.2 solved this issue, so if it is, that would be one way to resolve this mess.
 
Neat advancement of the Empire. Really sucks your new leader. He's the stats to survive 40 years. Somehow I don't think you'll miss the boundary disputes. Border friction works just as well. Japan's a mess. Don't think you will getto annex Japan, if the other daimyos make peace first. But its's worrth a try. Blue will offer you territory, so have the BB space to accept.You really need blue to take out green. Try raising revolt in pink. That would work better had you destroyed their army. If you wait ti after the truce you'll eventually sign runs out and remove your friendly rebel stack's opposers. Ensure you take the ex-green capital off blue in peace -don't want an extra daimyo revolting away.

I take it you're now after Bohemia's northern german ports.
 
Prawnstar, why not change to a form of government with elections, get a good diplo leader and then switch back to your government with the Imperialism cb?

The stab hit is a small price to pay for the faster burning of BB, higher BB limit and the chance of better Adm and Mil skills, isn't it?
 
uat2d said:
Prawnstar, why not change to a form of government with elections, get a good diplo leader and then switch back to your government with the Imperialism cb?

The stab hit is a small price to pay for the faster burning of BB, higher BB limit and the chance of better Adm and Mil skills, isn't it?
Click to expand...

Seems rather cheesy.
 
Its manipulating the game to take 2 advantages from the situation. Prawnstar has the choices of:
1) Elected leaders
2) Imperialism CB

Stability can be recovered very fast with total investment especially if he can get the economy firing properly. So he gets an advantage for ~30 years in exchange for the short disadvantage of some time with low stability. Sounds cheesy to me.
 
What Dauth said. Also, this was in the last batch of comments and PrawnStar has already said he thought it cheesy.
 
Excellent AAR, very informative on the macro side of thing, why you attack and when to attack and what to take etc. but i would really like to see more information on specific wars, what to siege, what to assault, what army compositions you use and when to fight, because that is my main problem with this game on very hard. I cant seem to win any wars against France early as England until i get to a point of infinite manpower and tech advantage. I tried to follow your strategy (in preparation to 5.2 where my standard cheesy WC tactics wont work anymore) but France just rapes me every time. In a war where France was against majority of HRE that occupied their south provinces and with their main 40k doomstack permanently stationed in Paris because i placed 2 10k stacks in bordering Burgundy provinces they still easily killed all my invasion forces even when outnumbered. And were at 1 WE even with war taxes.

About Japan situation nothing you can do except edit the save, or maybe enter the game as Minamoto and declare war on OPM daymo hoping they annex. I had 2 games where last 40-60 years were focused exclusively on trying to annex Japan, basically you should not disband shogunate before they are left with 2 daymos, the event will not fire properly shogunate will not disband but the union/vassalage-like status they have with Japan will so you cant annex OPM-s.

If shogun has high influence (and it appears it does since he signed white peace) so he can negotiate with foreigners you can try to use the bug that lets you annex from demand tribute tab if they have two provinces that are not connected to one another.
 
apostrof said:
I cant seem to win any wars against France early as England until i get to a point of infinite manpower and tech advantage. I tried to follow your strategy (in preparation to 5.2 where my standard cheesy WC tactics wont work anymore) but France just rapes me every time. In a war where France was against majority of HRE that occupied their south provinces and with their main 40k doomstack permanently stationed in Paris because i placed 2 10k stacks in bordering Burgundy provinces they still easily killed all my invasion forces even when outnumbered. And were at 1 WE even with war taxes.
Click to expand...

Having sort of recreated the beginning parts of the strategy twice now, I have some suggestions:
1) Be patient and commit to the defensive. You're not going beat a monster like France quickly. You're not going to sneak into Paris, so don't try. Wear them down first.
2) Bring friends. At the start of the game, Burgundy and Austria have a decent shot of agreeing to an alliance. If you can bring them into the war, they will provide a lot of distractions for the French and give you a better shot. Burgundy alone is sometimes enough.
3) Make sure your bringing a big enough army to the table. To really damage the AI, you have to induce stack wipes, and that requires a certain level of force.
The first war with France is the toughest, because you have very little ground to retreat from, but nonetheless, you need the advantage of the defensive and terrain, especially since your generals are going to be inferior. France and her minors tend to invade your territories in the south west: torch the territories, have a navy sitting outside the province, and defend, hopefully inflicting disproportional casualties and racking up WE on them. Retreat to save your force if its not going well, let them siege with high attrition. Be prepared to land some troops back in to either assault the province soon as they live or attack them if they assault and lose. Rinse, repeat.

That being said, a more in depth discussion of military strategy and tactics on the part of Prawnstar is *also* something I would appreciate. :)
 
Chilango2 said:
3) Make sure your bringing a big enough army to the table. To really damage the AI, you have to induce stack wipes, and that requires a certain level of force.
The first war with France is the toughest, because you have very little ground to retreat from, but nonetheless, you need the advantage of the defensive and terrain, especially since your generals are going to be inferior. France and her minors tend to invade your territories in the south west: torch the territories, have a navy sitting outside the province, and defend, hopefully inflicting disproportional casualties and racking up WE on them. Retreat to save your force if its not going well, let them siege with high attrition. Be prepared to land some troops back in to either assault the province soon as they live or attack them if they assault and lose. Rinse, repeat.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tips, but this is the main problem actually. I loose all the major battles, even when outnumbering them, and most of the time they stack-wipe me not the other way around. I gave up on the game when they attack my 30k stack with 28k and after winning the first skirmish followed up and wiped my entire army. That was a crippling blow i could not recover from since that was more than 1/3 of my entire army and manpower was already low, not to mention 8+ WE.
 
You don't get stackwiped if you have somewhere to run that they can't follow. (your fleet or MA for you but not France)

If France has drill and you don't, it will make it much harder to wipe them and easier for them to wipe you. Prawnstar took drill for his first idea because France had it.

You'd be surprised what you can recover from if you actually spend the time to play it out.

I think having Aragon as ally was pretty important for Prawnstar's early wars and he was definitely helped by having Burgundy chew up France too.
 
apostrof said:
Thanks for the tips, but this is the main problem actually. I loose all the major battles, even when outnumbering them, and most of the time they stack-wipe me not the other way around. I gave up on the game when they attack my 30k stack with 28k and after winning the first skirmish followed up and wiped my entire army. That was a crippling blow i could not recover from since that was more than 1/3 of my entire army and manpower was already low, not to mention 8+ WE.
Click to expand...

Generals France always seems to get very good generals. The King Charles VI is a very strong general. I will use a 2 general strategy because I seem to have to bad luck of getting a good shock bad Maneuver or Good shock Bad Maneuver. I use 2 armies with both generals attacking with the Shock general landing first and the Maneuver general next. Once I win the battle the Maneuver general grabs the defensive for a better chance at a stack wipe. Usually the 2nd army also has better morale since it came to the scene second.
 
Finally, the advice was meant to work in concert, if that makes sense. You can't just bring a large army, you also have to fight defensively. This last is really really important in this context. You need to position yourself so that the French are attacking you and suffering at least a -1 penalty, and ideally something much more severe. The negative modifier will lower or even cancel out the general's bonus, and if you catch an army without a general (it happens), its even better. It also fights bad RNG dice rolls, meaning lower casualties for you and thus lower WE.

Bring a decent egenral and a decent force and have them fight somewhere where the French receive something like a -4 modifier, and you'll see what I mean.
 
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert here but just as a general tactic that works well for prawn is fighting battles on your land. I realize early that can be difficult vs france as england. However, in a recent game as Urbino I had conquered most of Italy only to have Austria sneak attack me when i wasn't ready for them along with friends. I think I had 40k troops to their 60k. I scortched what I could and waited two provinces away so they would assault. I would often lose the province but they would end up ragged. If I couldn't initially stack wipe them I would drive them out then quick assault the province I lost back to me. They had a shock 6, 2 shock 5's and a shock 4 vs me who had 1 shock 2 I think. So, as you can imagine it was pretty brutal battles for me. In my case, my WE skyrocketed but so did their's. Eventually, Bravaria saw the opportunity and smashed at austria's home land.

Also, I would imagine blockades would be important as they can really hurt france financially. In a different game I was up against France in italy. They didn't have a land route to most of my territory because milan wouldn't give them access. This is similar to england. Their navy wasn't good enough in comparison(think england had wiped it out). So, they could only land stacks of 10-15k. So, another strategy might be to hang back in england and let them send over smaller stacks and wipe them on your territory. Once you've driven their WE up to the 8-10 range you should be able to realistically challenge them.

In short, one of prawn's best strategies is waiting to take the war to the enemy until they are relatively destroyed. With france that will be difficult as they will have nearly unlimited man power. But, the trick isn't always to beat them yourself. If you can effectively cripple them and put yourself in a slightly better than crippled state someone like say Castille or Burgandy might seize an opportunity and go after france in a weakend state.

To me the hardest part of a war like this is knowing when to get out. Prawn has a real knack for knowing how to do just enough damage to the enemy to get what he wants and then get out without taking more than he needs.
 
Mods said:
Man if prawnstar gets any more popular he's gonna need more time to write the feedback then he uses to write the actual updates :p
Click to expand...

It frequently feels that way already :) Feedback can take up to 2 hours.

The plan is to update tomorrow since I was at a BBQ until 2 this morning, Tigers at home this afternoon and guests tonight but I won't swear to it.


I haven't actually finished playing yet...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back