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Okay, so I'll have to look into attrition more. I can't remember that problem from EU3 or NA. Was it changed in IN?
 
Zanza said:
So does everybody else apparently as most countries that are involved in wars that I participate in have red war exhaustion numbers.

Is there any way to mod war exhaustion so you don't get as much as you currently get?
There are two easy ways:
1. Lower the cap for maximum war exhaustion
2. Raise the factor which decreases war exhaustion each month

Both values can be found in common\static_modifiers.txt
 
Zanza said:
Okay, so I'll have to look into attrition more. I can't remember that problem from EU3 or NA. Was it changed in IN?

WE was reworked for IN. You can mouse over the attrition value to see what's contributing to it. IIRC naval blockades, occupied provinces, war tax and attrition are the factors affecting it now.
 
One way to reduce WE gained from losses in battles is to abandon battles before your losses become too great. Whenever one chooses to hold firm "come hell or high water", one usually gets both.

-Pat
 
The "strive for less attrition" tactic seems wrong to me. When the enemy attacks my country, it's better for to avoid combat and let him take my provinces than to actually battle him to keep him at bay. I think they should up the WE for losing territory and decrease it for losing men.

The whole idea of 'lets let them wear themselves out pillaging our lands, destroying our forts and looting our towns becuase it causes less internal strife than having soldiers actually fight' seems so skewed to me.
 
The one historical example I can think of in the EU3 timeframe where the strategy of 'lets let them wear themselves out pillaging our lands, destroying our forts and looting our towns because it causes less internal strife than having soldiers actually fight' seemed to work is Russia's defense against Napoleon in 1812. Russia tried the direct opposite of that strategy in World War I...
 
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Am I the only one who has more trouble with BB than WE? In my current game as Russia, I'm virtually paralyzed for long periods of time due to bad reputation, but my WE is 0.
 
Nexen said:
The one historical example I can think of in the EU3 timeframe where the strategy of 'lets let them wear themselves out pillaging our lands, destroying our forts and looting our towns because it causes less internal strife than having soldiers actually fight' seemed to work is Russia's defense against Napoleon in 1812.

not realy sure, but didnt Russia try first to beat Napoleons armies and got slaughtered doing that? if i remember correctly, it was only after having lost a sizeable amount of their current army that the russians resorted to the "let them pillage. loot and later die of cold/short food supply"-strategy. and what did it for them was the large stretch of land they had to retreat into and their famous winter landscapes.
 
Gurag said:
not realy sure, but didnt Russia try first to beat Napoleons armies and got slaughtered doing that? if i remember correctly, it was only after having lost a sizeable amount of their current army that the russians resorted to the "let them pillage. loot and later die of cold/short food supply"-strategy. and what did it for them was the large stretch of land they had to retreat into and their famous winter landscapes.

According to Wikipedia, the Russian army was still intact when the decision was made to abandon Moscow.

"Kutuzov knew from dispatches that his army had been too damaged to fight a continuing action the following day. He knew exactly what he was doing: by fighting the pitched battle he could now retreat with the Russian army still intact, lead its recovery, and force the damaged French forces to move even further from their bases of supply. The denouement became a textbook example of what a hold logistics placed upon an army far from its center of logistics.[39] On September 8th, the Russian army moved away from the battlefield in twin columns to Semolino, allowing Napoleon to occupy Moscow and await a Russian surrender that would never come."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Borodino
 
Against rebels, use all cavalry armies. It's costly but you get rid of having 10+ battles with the same stack, taking attrition every time.
 
MJAnderson said:
The "strive for less attrition" tactic seems wrong to me. When the enemy attacks my country, it's better for to avoid combat and let him take my provinces than to actually battle him to keep him at bay. I think they should up the WE for losing territory and decrease it for losing men.

The whole idea of 'lets let them wear themselves out pillaging our lands, destroying our forts and looting our towns becuase it causes less internal strife than having soldiers actually fight' seems so skewed to me.
I agree. That's rather strange. I think the high value for dead soldiers is a late 20th century invention. It did not even lead to serious domestic problems during the world wars and I assume it did not earlier either. I am not as good as history as many here, so: Are there any revolts because of war losses in the time frame of EU3?
 
I dont like the current WE system. Its both unrealistic, as it seems to be the only thing that affects rebelions, and has too much of an effect. It also appears to scale with large states. I found I had insane WE as a continent spanning superpower after all wars where the small % of men lost really didnt matter.

My biggest problem with the system is the way the ai handles WE. We can all admit that the EU3 ai doesnt always make super smart decisions, but with the whole WE it easily pushes itself to record WE levels. This coupled with the rebel problem messes up the ai far more than it does to you.

The WE issue along with the supposed latin tech rebels (as specifically appears to be the case), are in my view game breaking. I also dont like the new dipploannexation change as while not game breaking has broken dipploannexation, its now better to declare war on vassals and annex them.

Because of these I am a little bit reluctant to start a new epic game from 1399 to 1821 and am currently playing HOI2 instead and may go back to wow for a bit too. At present the game just becomes annoying later on with the putting down rebel groups and you see most of the ai countries imploding all the time.
 
I've waged offensive wars without getting my WE higher than 3%. Don't get attrition, if you're besieging a city with an army taking attrition, attack! A siege costs way more in morale than it does in manpower, and I do not believe it costs any WE.

I've had to adjust my fighting style a bit. You cannot send in 30k stacks in search of their king anymore because they'll die of attrition and kill your empire with rebels. For the rest it's just simple.
 
Garak said:
Am I the only one who has more trouble with BB than WE? In my current game as Russia, I'm virtually paralyzed for long periods of time due to bad reputation, but my WE is 0.
I feel exactly the same. I'm very careful as far as WE goes, so most of the time I won't even collect war taxes. BB however is an entirely different matter. I haven't had much luck with my kings' diplo skill lately, and I no longer vassalize minors but have to annex them instead due to the centralization hit.
 
In a nutshell, attempt to fight on your own territory (or allies that you have access with) and pursue and destroy on the enemy's territory. When you have destroyed their armies, you can safely use small stacks of troops to cover all provinces and will even lose WE while sieging.

Works for me, I just turned a 47,000 troop, 55,000 manpower Bohemia (3rd in the world) into a 4,000 troop, 52,000 manpower Bohemia and covered all their territory. It was beautiful and quite a victory for 1.37 WE (was 4.00 WE for the declaration though). I admit, it helps when the AI tries to invade the Low Countries from Bohemia! :rofl:
 
Zanza said:
Are there any revolts because of war losses in the time frame of EU3?
Yes - in France during the Napoleonic Wars. The later stages of the English Civil War saw towns and counties arming themselves in order to stop recruiters and tax-collectors from either side entering their territory (the 'Clubmen'). There was a similar phenomenon in Germany during the Thirty Years' War.

Note that all these conflicts were unusual for the period because they were total wars, affecting all of society. Most of the time governments took care to only fight limited wars for narrowly-defined objectives, so in game terms their WE never got high enough to spawn massive revolts. Unfortunately, human players tend to approach their own wars from a more 20/21st century total war mindset, and the AI has been programmed to match them...
 
StephenT said:
Unfortunately, human players tend to approach their own wars from a more 20/21st century total war mindset, and the AI has been programmed to match them...

Exactly. When humans play, either versus the AI or other humans, almost any war is total war, where the object is to win completely to enforce demands. Well, maybe not 'almost any war', but most war, certainly between big nations. I'm afraid there's nothing to do about it; the AI definitely has to be programmed to act in a similar way.
 
Nimic said:
Exactly. When humans play, either versus the AI or other humans, almost any war is total war, where the object is to win completely to enforce demands. Well, maybe not 'almost any war', but most war, certainly between big nations. I'm afraid there's nothing to do about it; the AI definitely has to be programmed to act in a similar way.

That is really because of the game mechanics. The ai will only give that key province I badly want if I beat it utterly, which is fair enough. But once I have beaten it utterly there is absolutely no good reason not to take some more, because now he can't resist anymore.

PI has chosen (and rightly so imho) to make the peace ai stubborn, but this has consequences for the way this game is played. On the other hand I'm not so sure things would change if the peace ai was less stubborn allowing you get something out of a limited war. It might just be part of human nature to take whatever you can get away with :rolleyes:
 
Zanza said:
So does everybody else apparently as most countries that are involved in wars that I participate in have red war exhaustion numbers.

Is there any way to mod war exhaustion so you don't get as much as you currently get?

not really a problem in my games. basically, the clue is to use small stacks and even smaller ones for beseiging (until you get powerful enough troups to storm).

the total man-power matters: the higher the manpower, the more losses you can take for the same WE gain.

declaring war on the same religious group will give you +1 WE outright; declaring war without a casus belli (within the same religious group) will give even more.

the foraging NI helps a lot. unfortunately that's not available until very late in the game.

as to my games: never had WE in the red zone (playing IN).