Cap on soldiers?

I proposed a cap of 1% of total population (check the thread named Slowdown). That was about the level of the standing armies just before WW1. I also proposed to include the fleet in the units limit, as "big" warships of the time had a crew of some 800 people. That's 4 ships for a brigade and it would also nerf UK a bit. Let's hope it's noticed ...

naggy said:

Currently, soldiers are the only poor/middle strata that really do not have a cap that will prevent provinces from overfilling.

Farmers and Laborers have the RGO cap
Craftsmen and Clerks are capped by the # of factories in the state.
Bureaucrats and clergy have the promotion capped by % in the state.

Soldiers, on the other hand, don't have a cap, and when something causes massive unemployment in a province, you'll find yourself suddenly swarming in soldiers. I'll dig out a screenshot tonight, but I have a province in 1865 China that is 22% soliders, and can support 130+ brigades.

I can't imagine any place in history where a population was 20% professional soldiers...there should probably be a cap, similar to bureaucrats and clergy.

Click to expand...

I agree, it would also have the added effect of stopping armies being implausibly huge near world war levels.

Yes, the promotion is slowed down if you hit the proportion. You can even mod in a total stop of promotion into soldiers if they reach certain % of total population. That would certainly help, but it leaves the growth of existing soldier pops. The increased support costs would certainly limit the player, but does the AI face the same limitations ? I mean, does the AI pay for its troops ? And even if it does with a strong industry even higher costs would be bearable (e.g. the AI UK which gets so huge that it could support thousands of brigades anyway). So I think the cap would be better.

When we (properly) went from directly promoting populations to only managing the environment unfortunately we were not given the proper tools to to do that. you should be able to specify how many openings that there are for bureaucrats, clerics and soldiers. I've never experiences a situation where someone simply announced that they were a priest or social worker or marine and collect a paycheck without first being hired by the related organization.

Unless there is a job opening the unemployed should be, well, unemployed.

In the budget screen you need to know how many pops you need, be able to set exactly how many pops you want to employ, know how many are actually employed, and set their pay. And if possible know how effective they are. You should be able to sand box it and then confirm your settings.

In fact, if they wanted to be spiffy about it there could be result parameters you could set to be met automatically.

Come to think of it, why do bureaucrats (and all other pops) breed more bureaucrats? Shouldn't the spawn of any pop be illiterate and unemployed?

This is why the simulation need "youth" pops that are subsidized out of the pocked of other pops.

Bureaucratic expansion has been nerfed beyond reason in 1.2. You can easily but really easily push down the number of bureaucrats to zero.

Clergymen are capped? Up to what by state? Capping clergymen would prevent from building up on them to increase promotions to certain jobs later in the game.

Capping soldiers to 1 pc of population? Once again, would be nicely done for uncivs.

A cap of at no more than 50% would be nice... Maybe less...