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Europa Universalis III 46143 EU3 - After Action Reports (AAR)
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How do you actually use scorched earth in your games?

Like this?

1. Scorch one of your provinces
2. Let their big stack try to take it
3. After attrition hits, attack them


Because I've tried that and I dislike that tactic for several reasons:

1. If they have a doom stack, chances are high that they will just take the province before attrition can really hurt them and have much less problems afterwards.
2. When you attack you can have up to -3 on your rolls.
3. In the beginning of a war they might not attack with a doom stack but with far smaller armies which are only a little or not bothered by attrition.
4. You risk getting a province sieged, thus gaining war exhaustion.


I prefer the following method:

1. Have a small defense army in a border province
2. Have cavalry stacks in the provinces behind
3. When they are tempted by the small defense army, merge the cavalry and defense forces at the time of the enemies arrival


Advantages:

1. No extra war exhaustion
2. No risk of losing the province
3. Defensive bonus


If you use scorched earth differently, please let me know.
 
You got it more or less right, but I would note that for reasons you pointed out scorched earth is only really effective in heavily fortified provinces. Don't bother scorching a province with a level one (or even two, depending) fort, they're just going to take it instantly anyway.

On a level four or five? Watch that doom stack melt away.
 
Grandmasta said:
You got it more or less right, but I would note that for reasons you pointed out scorched earth is only really effective in heavily fortified provinces. Don't bother scorching a province with a level one (or even two, depending) fort, they're just going to take it instantly anyway.

On a level four or five? Watch that doom stack melt away.
Click to expand...

So you are only using it when you have level 3 fort?

This is around 1610. By then I don't have any enemies left which would make such a complicated tactic necessary...
 
I would like to disagree with you both. Scorched earth tactic is best when the enemy has a doomstack too large for you to defeat even if you gathered all your strenght in one province. Your method Kirschbaum fails, am I afraid, if the enemies army is simply large enough to defeat both your border and rearguard army.

I had personally had good experience with the following recipe.
Acquire:
One Enemy Doomstack (Preferably with both slow units like art and inf)
One Cav stack approximately 10k
At least a dozen off eggs.. I mean provinces
One reasonably good shock general

Put your Cav stack on the border and wait for enemy doomstack to engage it. When you see your enemy approaching scorch the earth, and retreat to a province behind your. Enemy engages you and you fall back hoping they will follow you. Scorch land there, plot out an course fourther into your wealm and take the heat from your opponent once more. If everything goes to plan they will follow you, hoping too exterminate your army. Repeat this until either of the following happends.
1) Enemy doomstack understand that it's taking too much attrition and retreats (hopefully into the previous scorched province)

2) Enemy doomstack get down to a eatable chunk

The rest is almost self-explaining. Charge 'em and annihilate them

Little tips, use a large cav force, you are going to take attrition hits yourself, but your in your own provinces and will replenish them, enemy won't. If you use a small one it might get whiped out and then you'r gonna have a bad time
 
Sondrety said:
I would like to disagree with you both. Scorched earth tactic is best when the enemy has a doomstack too large for you to defeat even if you gathered all your strenght in one province. Your method Kirschbaum fails, am I afraid, if the enemies army is simply large enough to defeat both your border and rearguard army.

I had personally had good experience with the following recipe.
Acquire:
One Enemy Doomstack (Preferably with both slow units like art and inf)
One Cav stack approximately 10k
At least a dozen off eggs.. I mean provinces
One reasonably good shock general

Put your Cav stack on the border and wait for enemy doomstack to engage it. When you see your enemy approaching scorch the earth, and retreat to a province behind your. Enemy engages you and you fall back hoping they will follow you. Scorch land there, plot out an course fourther into your wealm and take the heat from your opponent once more. If everything goes to plan they will follow you, hoping too exterminate your army. Repeat this until either of the following happends.
1) Enemy doomstack understand that it's taking too much attrition and retreats (hopefully into the previous scorched province)

2) Enemy doomstack get down to a eatable chunk

The rest is almost self-explaining. Charge 'em and annihilate them

Little tips, use a large cav force, you are going to take attrition hits yourself, but your in your own provinces and will replenish them, enemy won't. If you use a small one it might get whiped out and then you'r gonna have a bad time
Click to expand...

Okay, there is an important difference to the tactics I read so far:

By having a bigger army in the border province you force the enemy to accumulate a bigger stack on their side. This is because the AI doesn't attack armies it's not able to beat.


But one question:

When their stack follows you, do they siege the provinces on their path or do they just try to annihilate your army?
 
My only experience with scorched earth has been with Muscuwy (mostly I have either small nations or superior forces rendering the strategy useless) for, among other reasons, immersion and roleplaying. It works brilliantly againsst those pesky Golden Horde uhm...hordes...

And that would be without sieging properly
 
Kirschbaum said:
I prefer the following method:

1. Have a small defense army in a border province
2. Have cavalry stacks in the provinces behind
3. When they are tempted by the small defense army, merge the cavalry and defense forces at the time of the enemies arrival


Advantages:

1. No extra war exhaustion
2. No risk of losing the province
3. Defensive bonus


If you use scorched earth differently, please let me know.
Click to expand...

If you can defeat a doom stack with this strategy, there's no reason to use scorched earth. If not, you're strategy will result in even higher WE for yourself, lower WE for them, and you still lose the province plus you've lost the battle. Plus, your army is heavily weakened.

-Pat
 
Scorched earth is entirely dependent on the size of the enemy. If the enemy is manageable without it, it's not necessary. However, if the enemy is so large you can't possibly win, scorched earth can save your bacon.

Even in lowly 1 and 2 level Forts, SE can cause that little bit of extra hurt. Even of a fort is insta assaulted, the province is still hurting, and that enemy force will (hopefully) stay in it for a month. That's all you need, to get them caught for a month or for the end of the month, especially if you do not engage them or they you.

You do not want them to engage your forces upon entering the province. If they do, they suffer NO attrition that month. This basically gives them a month free ride through your lands. They need to waltz in unimpeded. They need to walk into scorched province after scorched province. They WILL stall eventually. Having a single CAV in adjoining provinces, scorching and then running away is enough.

I have brought 10/35/0 French stacks to a grinding halt this way two, three or four provinces in depending on the general and the fort levels... (a defensive bonus or advisor can really help you here) ...A split CAV army to hit them of 10K-15K each stack once they start showing signs of wear is enough. Sometimes all you have is a 10K-15K stack. If so, you need to wait that extra province to make sure they don't have enough in the tank.

The key is the dance.

The first time they dance and the province doesn't fall...

Well, that's the last time they dance in my house...

Empty provinces are like empty promises.

The AI armies run in thinking they are going all the way to the capitol... They couldn't be more wrong. They are simply running too far from home. Once they're stuck deep behind the lines, they can't do anything but attrit and die.

T
 
Sondrety said:
I would like to disagree with you both. Scorched earth tactic is best when the enemy has a doomstack too large for you to defeat even if you gathered all your strenght in one province. Your method Kirschbaum fails, am I afraid, if the enemies army is simply large enough to defeat both your border and rearguard army.

I had personally had good experience with the following recipe.
Acquire:
One Enemy Doomstack (Preferably with both slow units like art and inf)
One Cav stack approximately 10k
At least a dozen off eggs.. I mean provinces
One reasonably good shock general

Put your Cav stack on the border and wait for enemy doomstack to engage it. When you see your enemy approaching scorch the earth, and retreat to a province behind your. Enemy engages you and you fall back hoping they will follow you. Scorch land there, plot out an course fourther into your wealm and take the heat from your opponent once more. If everything goes to plan they will follow you, hoping too exterminate your army. Repeat this until either of the following happends.
1) Enemy doomstack understand that it's taking too much attrition and retreats (hopefully into the previous scorched province)

2) Enemy doomstack get down to a eatable chunk

The rest is almost self-explaining. Charge 'em and annihilate them

Little tips, use a large cav force, you are going to take attrition hits yourself, but your in your own provinces and will replenish them, enemy won't. If you use a small one it might get whiped out and then you'r gonna have a bad time
Click to expand...


This is how you do it.


And keep in mind that Scorched Earth is a weapon for the weaker against a stronger enemy. If you can just walz over their armies in a field battle, simply crush them and dont try to use a unsuitable tool against them.
 
Grandmasta said:
You got it more or less right, but I would note that for reasons you pointed out scorched earth is only really effective in heavily fortified provinces. Don't bother scorching a province with a level one (or even two, depending) fort, they're just going to take it instantly anyway.

On a level four or five? Watch that doom stack melt away.
Click to expand...
Given that you can just walk through provinces, am I right in thinking that scorched earth tactics are almost entirely reliant on AI stupidity? Clearly a human player would just keep marching for your main army instead of sieging scorched provinces. If they improve the AI to do this, scorched earth might become basically useless?
 
No, you take attrition when you march enter a province, so this isn't simple AI stupidity. You would keep marching and just take more attrition, in fact, over the same time period, you would take more attrition if you kept marching than if you stood still. If the other army kept running, then by the time you caught up to them you would have lost many men to attrition. Then the enemy could hit you and push your weakened army back. Smart tactic would be to split armies into small enough chunks that they don't suffer attrition, but that could allow the enemy to engage the chunks one at a time. still, if you could manage to reform by the time they attack, or shortly there after, then you could still repulse them, but you would suffer higher losses than if you had concentrated your forces at the beginning.On the other hand, you would have avoided attrition.

Scorched earth is a sound strategy, and not just because the AI is stupid.
 
Grandmasta said:
You got it more or less right, but I would note that for reasons you pointed out scorched earth is only really effective in heavily fortified provinces. Don't bother scorching a province with a level one (or even two, depending) fort, they're just going to take it instantly anyway.

On a level four or five? Watch that doom stack melt away.
Click to expand...

I totaly don't agree. When i played as moscow, scorched earth saved my ass when fighting poland in multiplayer. Thou poland was a noob, still :

If army comes to scorched provinces they immediately lose X% of the army, unless there is your army there.
If they assault they lose morale, if they don't they will have to siege it, or split army.
If they lose morale you can attack them when they are at low morale, and defeat them much easier(if they failed the assault, then you will only fight their cavalry, so you may have numerical advantage), or possibly even wipe them(if you come on the right time).
If they split their armies, there is chance you will be able to wipe the smaller stack, or defeat the bigger, once it divide too much times.

In high fort level provinces, it is not realy usefull, since those have higher supply, meaning it is harder to inflict attrition. Even if they take the low level fort, it will still be scorched, so they won't get so much of an advantage. If you scorch enough provinces, you may deplete enemy manpower before he even fights you, and quickly defeat them. If you use attrition smart, you can wipe much bigger armies. It is usefull to scorch province you retreated to after lost battle, if enemy have bigger army - you will lose less army than your enemy when you will have to retreat again, so it may equalize the losses.
 
Kill it, kill it with fire?
 
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