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Is it a good idea to have French soldiers in the German army?

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Dron22

Dron22

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Jan 15, 2009
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Currently playing as Germany, I have almost no spare soldiers left of North or South German culture to build new brigades. Is it a good idea to use French soldiers to raise new brigades then? I have quite a lot of French culture soldiers from conquered French lands, I also have a lot of African culture soldiers from my colonies, is there any disadvantage of building armies made up of troops that don't belong to your culture?
I am thinking about this because in my last war I had quite a lot of mutinies, where a brigade or two in your army would suddenly take up the rebel flag and turn on your forces. I assume foreign soldiers are more likely to mutiny, apart from that what are the disadvantages of using troops of a different culture?
 
Nothing...go use them at your will. If they're revolting, they'd revolt whether you raise them or not...
 
Just keep them as infantry, rather than losing more expensive units.
 
delra said:
Just keep them as infantry, rather than losing more expensive units.
Click to expand...

I remember that in Victoria I Revolutions non-primary soldiers had lower "reliability", which meant they were more likely to mutiny. So I guess I will build whole armies of Frenchmen and use them for suicidal battles.
 
There's no benefit to ruining your POPs, especially as valuable as Soldier POPs, regardless of what nationality they are. The kind of tiny French minority you have can be suppressed with one click in the politics screen.

I play Austria a lot in AHD (just like I played USA a lot in vanilla), and I often have one thousand nationalities kind of armies, and they work perfectly well.
 
You get more "soldiers are disloyal" events when you have non-state cultural soldier POPs, but as long as you pay them well, militancy among your soldier POPs, French or otherwise, shouldn't be a big problem.

I've used hordes of Japanese soldiers to quickly overrun the South in the Civil War with no ill effects (it makes you wonder what Reconstruction looked like...).
 
Bengal. Should I say more? The usual force behind Vicky UK. One can easily raise hundreds of soldiers from one Bengali province. Except for not being able to raise guards, non-accepted culture soldiers are as good as others. And I have rarely seen national uprisings in the game, liberal, communist and reactionary rebels are more common, and I think they are not affected by culture.
 
Actually, using soldiers of non-accepted cultures is a good plan (especially colonial soldiers). If you think of it - it helps to "reduce" non-accepted culture in your country. Just build these hordes and throw at your enemy... Nobody will cry...
 
I just checked and saw that up to 10% of my soldiers are members of Communist revolutionaries, and most of them are actually Germans. I know it's because of a social reform I keep refusing to pass, but is there a way I can stop Communist rebels spreading into my military?
 
No.
 
All you can do is keep their wages high. Take money out of the military budget and their income decreases, which means they get fewer of their needs and more militant.
 
kunadam said:
Bengal. Should I say more? The usual force behind Vicky UK. One can easily raise hundreds of soldiers from one Bengali province. Except for not being able to raise guards, non-accepted culture soldiers are as good as others. And I have rarely seen national uprisings in the game, liberal, communist and reactionary rebels are more common, and I think they are not affected by culture.
Click to expand...

Oh yea! There or africa is always nice. As some puny nation it is really a massive boon. My Haiti game, i went from 4 regiments to 8 instantly just from conquering Sokoto's Benign region... so I would be in range to colonize some more of western africa and get even more troops and resources.
 
Dron22 said:
Currently playing as Germany, I have almost no spare soldiers left of North or South German culture to build new brigades. Is it a good idea to use French soldiers to raise new brigades then? I have quite a lot of French culture soldiers from conquered French lands, I also have a lot of African culture soldiers from my colonies, is there any disadvantage of building armies made up of troops that don't belong to your culture?
I am thinking about this because in my last war I had quite a lot of mutinies, where a brigade or two in your army would suddenly take up the rebel flag and turn on your forces. I assume foreign soldiers are more likely to mutiny, apart from that what are the disadvantages of using troops of a different culture?
Click to expand...
I actually use foreign soldiers as my shock troops to take the casualties instead of my national pops. Then again I generally play countries with low primary pops so those are precious. If you kill the unaccepted pops they have a hard time revolting, but they very rarely do anyway.
 
kunadam said:
Bengal. Should I say more? The usual force behind Vicky UK. One can easily raise hundreds of soldiers from one Bengali province. Except for not being able to raise guards, non-accepted culture soldiers are as good as others. And I have rarely seen national uprisings in the game, liberal, communist and reactionary rebels are more common, and I think they are not affected by culture.
Click to expand...

I used to like Bengal a lot for their soldier pop too. But I find it a nightmare later on after synthetic dye is discovered and all the Bengali brigades start revolting. I free India now instead. I prefer Sokot, Javanease & Ethiopian mercenaries nowadays.
 
Let's nerf colonial troops?
 
There's never been a good way in either Victoria to model colonial troops. I'm not sure there is one, to be honest.

WWI saw about 1 million Indian soldiers in the British Army (sheesh, talk about The White Man's Burden...). That's a respectable 333 brigades, more than some humans have in their entire army (last night as Japan, I had 250 brigades out of a possible 400, including colonial troops from conquered Chinese states). I think only about 700,000 served outside India during the conflict (with a lot of them employed against the Ottomans and against German colonies), but most humans never leave their colonies completely defenseless anyway. Some of them served in France, so it's not like colonial troops of any nation only served in limited capacities in the colonies.

It's not just the UK, either. France started WWI with only 47,000 colonial troops, but ended the war with 475,000 colonial troops. That's only 158 brigades, but it's certainly not a drop in the bucket.

If other GPs during WWI had colonial empires of similar magnitudes, it would not have been unreasonable for them to have fielded as many colonial troops.

But how do we prevent "Let's conquer Panjab for the soldier POPs?" kinds of strategies. I mean, I can't think of a single historical conquest in the period that focused on acquiring more manpower for the army. (The concept would probably be laughable to most of the imperialists in the period.) The only solution I can think of is twofold: one, we need a "colonial policy" like HOI3 has occupation policies (modifying manpower from soldiers and officers, RGO efficiency, aristocrats, and so on). The other thing to do would be to demote all soldiers and officers in a state to farmers upon colonial conquest, forcing you to conscript from scratch and nerfing manpower from the region temporarily (until you can get POPs to turn soldier again).
 
I actually quite like the idea of newly conquered areas getting its soldier pops demoted into farmers or somesuch.
I will admit as a player I have conquered areas with their soldier pops as my only real goal, and while it makes the game easier, (and probably more fun quite frankly, as can do a little more), it does make it far more un-realistic. Can always NF soldiers.
 
Jorlaan said:
I actually quite like the idea of newly conquered areas getting its soldier pops demoted into farmers or somesuch.
I will admit as a player I have conquered areas with their soldier pops as my only real goal, and while it makes the game easier, (and probably more fun quite frankly, as can do a little more), it does make it far more un-realistic. Can always NF soldiers.
Click to expand...
The only time I have ever done this is as the Boer state grabbing Zulu (going from 1 to 8 units is hard to pass up).
 
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