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Peter Ebbesen

the Conqueror
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Mar 3, 2001
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Manpower Guide

This version is updated to match EU4 v. 1.0 - and is thus sadly out of date; It will be updated for Art of War.


Index

Manpower Basics
A Few Pointers
Examples
...Epirus
...Messina
...Kiev
Manpower Mathematics
Pool Mathematics
Manpower in Detail
Silly Example – Extreme Manpower



Manpower Basics

The manpower used to recruit new regiments and reinforce damaged regiments is drawn from your country's manpower pool. This pool is global in the sense that your units can draw on it at any time regardless of where they are located.

Each province a player controls provides a certain amount of manpower to this pool on a monthly basis. The amount of manpower added depends on the province's infrastructure, local and global efficiency modifiers, and is further modified by modifiers governing recovery speed.

The size of the manpower pool is ten years of provincial manpower plus 10,000 men.



A Few Pointers

  1. The recovery speed of manpower is primarily governed by war exhaustion (more is worse) and army tradition (more is better).
  2. A core in a province significantly increases its manpower.
  3. Overseas provinces provide less manpower.
  4. Revolt risk in your provinces will seriously harm your manpower, as will blockades and religious intolerance.
  5. The tax value of a province has a small impact on total manpower, much less than its impact on the cost of cultural conversion.
  6. The unique building, the March, should always be placed in a province with as high a manpower efficiency as possible (so definitely in an accepted culture province) unless there are really good strategic reasons for placing it elsewhere. Its manpower benefits do not scale with base manpower, or income, only with efficiency. It should also be built as early as possible, as it provides by far the most manpower per ducat of any building.
  7. Religious conversion is very important to manpower as it gets rid of significant manpower penalties for being heretical or heathen.
  8. Culture conversion of non-overseas provinces for the purpose of manpower is extremely expensive in diplomatic monarch points but has the advantage that it costs no ducats. It is so expensive that it is usually far better to spend the diplomatic monarch points on just about anything else – unjustified demands in conquest, tech, idea groups, buildings that improve trade or the navy. By improving your economy you can afford the ducat cost of the things that increase manpower the most. If you truly feel you have more DMP than you can spend and cannot funnel it into a stronger economy, then culture convert provinces with high base manpower and low taxvalue first to maximize your benefits.
  9. If you have the ducats, buildings are – by far – the most monarch-power efficient way of increasing manpower. And monarch power is the most limited resource in the game for large countries, where ducats is the most limited for tiny countries.
  10. Manpower efficiency modifers from all sources (buildings, ideas, triggered modifiers) stack and are an exceptionally good way to greatly increase your manpower.
  11. Tier 1-3 army buildings are great for their cost as they provide a good manpower boost for their price regardless of the base manpower of the province.
  12. Tier 4-6 army buildings provide a larger manpower boost for provinces with high base manpower than for provinces with low, so should preferentially be built in provinces with high base manpower.
  13. As a general rule, unless your country is really rich, you should build tier 1-3 army buildings everywhere before you being building tier 4+.
  14. Manufactories provide a huge boost to manpower, and the higher base manpower of the province the better. If you can afford the ducat cost, they are the best manpower building for their monarch power cost apart from the unique March you can build. Since different manufactories unlock at different tech levels, you may have to wait to build manufactories in your very best manpower provinces.
  15. Getting the two first ideas of the Economic ideas group to reduce the ducat costs of all buildings by 20% is very helpful for the purposes of building up a solid manpower base.



Manpower examples

In this section I take a look at the manpower for several typical situations, cross-indexing buildings with manpower efficiency and calculating the manpower. For instance, to see the manpower in a non-accepted culture (-33% efficiency) province for a country that does not have any other manpower efficiency modifiers and has built a manufactory, cross-index manufactory and 66% to find the answer. The entry ALL is used for all army buildings T1, T2, T3, production buildings T2, T4, and a manufactory.

Higher tier army buildings (tier 4+) increase efficiency rather than adding directly to the manpower like lower tier army buildings; to see the results of high tier army buildings, look in a column for higher efficiency.

The manpower efficiency in a given province is listed in its tooltip. A list of most global and local manpower efficiency modifiers can be found under "Manpower in Detail".

The costs of the various buildings is as follows, where ?MP is used for manufactories because some manufactories cost AMP, some DMP, and some MMP.
Code:
              | Ducats | Monarch power            |
--------------+--------+--------------------------+
| Army T1     |     50 | 10 MMP                   |
| Army T2     |    125 | 20 MMP                   |
| Army T3     |    225 | 30 MMP                   |
| Prod T2     |    125 | 20 AMP                   |
| Prod T4     |    375 | 40 AMP                   |
| Manufactory |    500 | 10 ?MP                   |
| ALL         |   1100 | 40 AMP + 30 MMP + 10 ?MP |

Epirus example:

The first example is a province that is poor and weak, Epirus. It has a base tax of 2 and 2000 base manpower. It would cost 50 DMP to culture convert (25 per tax).

Code:
Epirus        | 66% | 100% | 150% | 200% | 250% | 300% |
--------------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+
| None        |  33 |   50 |   75 |  100 |  125 |  150 |
| Army T1     |  49 |   75 |  112 |  150 |  187 |  225 |
| Army T2     |  66 |  100 |  150 |  200 |  250 |  300 |
| Army T3     |  99 |  150 |  225 |  300 |  375 |  450 |
| Prod T2     |  39 |   60 |   90 |  120 |  150 |  180 |
| Prod T4     |  43 |   66 |   99 |  132 |  165 |  198 |
| Manufactory |  66 |  100 |  150 |  200 |  250 |  300 |
| ALL         | 142 |  216 |  324 |  432 |  540 |  648 |

As can be seen, army tier 1-3 buildings provides a significant increase in manpower even in a low manpower province. With such a low base manpower, a Manufactory only provides as much manpower as building up to tier 2 army buildings, making it rather expensive while only saving a few monarch points.


Port of Messina:

Messina is a province with tax 6 and 5000 base manpower. It would thus cost 150 DMP to culture convert.

Code:
Messina       | 66% | 100% | 150% | 200% | 250% | 300% |
--------------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+
| None        |  85 |  130 |  195 |  260 |  325 |  390 |
| Army T1     | 102 |  155 |  232 |  310 |  387 |  465 |
| Army T2     | 118 |  180 |  270 |  360 |  450 |  540 |
| Army T3     | 151 |  230 |  345 |  460 |  575 |  690 |
| Prod T2     | 102 |  155 |  232 |  310 |  387 |  465 |
| Prod T4     | 112 |  170 |  255 |  340 |  425 |  510 |
| Manufactory | 168 |  255 |  382 |  510 |  637 |  504 |
| ALL         | 260 |  395 |  592 |  790 |  987 | 1185 |

This is looking better. At 5000 base manpower there is a lot more manpower to go around, and a manufactory now provides more manpower than the first three tiers of army buildings.



The Gates of Kiev:

Kiev is a province with a base of 14 tax and base 8000 manpower. It would cost 350 DMP to culture convert.

Code:
Kiev          | 66% | 100% | 150% | 200% | 250% | 300% |
--------------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+
| None        | 147 |  224 |  336 |  448 |  560 |  672 |
| Army T1     | 164 |  249 |  373 |  498 |  622 |  747 |
| Army T2     | 180 |  274 |  411 |  548 |  685 |  822 |
| Army T3     | 213 |  324 |  486 |  648 |  810 |  972 |
| Prod T2     | 174 |  264 |  396 |  528 |  660 |  792 |
| Prod T4     | 190 |  288 |  432 |  576 |  720 |  864 |
| Manufactory | 279 |  424 |  636 |  848 | 1060 |  837 |
| ALL         | 388 |  588 |  882 | 1176 | 1470 | 1764 |

A true manpower stronghold, but for the love of God, do not waste your DMP on culture converting it unless you are blessed with divinely gifted diplomat-monarchs throughout the game. Surely you have better things to spend your DMP on!



Manpower Mathematics

B - Each province has a manpower base determined by its history file. I will denote this base B.

F - Provinces provide goods, and this too is important for manpower, as it determines the base manpower factor, which I denote F.

C - Building army buildings in a province can provide a constant increase in manpower. I will denote the sum of these constant increases C.

E - Finally, the manpower can be used more or less efficiently depending on national ambitions, traditions, ideas, and other modifiers. The manpower efficiency I will denote E.

M - Based on these numbers, the manpower of a province can be calculated, which is the number of men this province will provide to the manpower pool per year, and it is:

M = E * ((B * F) + C)

The screenshot below shows where to find these numbers in the provincial display.


Provincial Manpower
smzf.png




Pool Mathematics

P – The manpower pool I will denote P. It has a maximum size of 10*(S + 1000), where

S - is the sum of provincial manpower in the county.

R - is the manpower recovery speed, which is a percentage modifier that is applied to monthly manpower recovery.

Every month, S*(1+R)/12 is added to the manpower pool, up to the maximum size.

The manpower recovery speed is highly affected by army tradition and war exhaustion. It is also affected by a few nation specific ideas and event modifiers, but for most countries at most times the only source of increased recovery is via army tradition. The manpower recovery speed is arguably the most valuable modifier in the game where the military is concerned due to it effectively working as a multiplyer on your manpower efficiency (which can be increased by many sources), so if you are offered a chance to get it, do so.



Manpower in Detail

B - Base

The manpower base is set upon game creation to the value defined in the history file for the province. After game creation this value is only changed by event and such events are rare. The displayed value, B, is 1000 times the value in the file. In other words, if the province file says manpower = 3, it means that B = 3000.


F – Base Factor

The manpower factor, F is calculated from the province's goods production, G, by the equation F = G/40 truncated to 3 digits.

Goods production has a base level of 100% + 1% per taxvalue, i.e. 1.06 for tax value 6. This means that buildings that increase tax value directly increase manpower, though only by a little bit.

Increasing the production of goods via the construction of a workshop (+20%), treasury (+10%), or above all, a manufactory (+100%) will significantly increase the manpower factor. Also note that a province being blockaded suffers a serious reduction to goods production, and that revolt risk in a province reduces the goods production by 5% per RR.

Heretical provinces suffer a -50% modifier to goods production and heathen provinces a -20% modifier. Since both heretical and heathen provinces have increased revolt risk, this can quickly add up and result in substantially reduced manpower.


C – Constant

The tier 1-3 army buildings provide respectively 25 (Armoury), 25 (Training Fields), and 50 (Barracks) constant manpower.

The March provides 500 constant manpower.

The manpower constant, C, is the sum of the constant manpower sources present in a province.


E – Efficiency

The manpower efficiency, E, is the sum of local (El) and global (Eg) efficiency modifiers. In the following I list the most common modifiers.

El – Local efficiency:
+10% for being the capital
+25% for being a land province
+75% for being a core
-15% for same culture group
-33% for not being an accepted culture
-50% for being distant overseas
+20% for a Regimental Camp (army tier 4 building)
+25% for an Arsenal (army tier 5 building)
+25% for a Conscription Centre (army tier 6 building)
X% - some events and decisions provide a provincial manpower modifer

Eg - Global Efficiency:
+10% Master Recruiter (Adviser)
+25% Serfdom (Aristocratic Ideas)
+25% National Conscripts (Offensive Ideas)
+50% Leveé en Masse (Quantity Ideas)
+10% Archduchy (government)
+10% Feudal Monarchy (government)
+10% Enlightened Despotism (government)
+20% Tribal Federation (government)
+25% Revolutionary Empire (government)
+100% Steppe Horde (government)
+30% Crusader (catholic occupies a crusade target province)
+50% Vive La Revolution (being a revolutionary government)
+X% from National Ambitions and Traditions if appropriate
X% - some events and decisions provide a global manpower modifer



Silly Example – Extreme Manpower

As an extreme example, Muscovy will eventually gain +25% global efficiency from their National Ambitions and +100% from their National Traditions. It is thus theoretically possible for Muscovy to end up with a global efficiency contribution of +235% assuming the player really wants to take Aristocratic, Offensive, and Quantity ideas while running a Feudal Monarchy or Enlightened Despotism. (This seems a bit of overkill manpower-wise, but it is theoretically possible, so somebody will undoubtedly do it.)

...Let me throw in a Master Recruiter (+10%) while I am at it. That would be about as silly as it gets.

Muscovy longs to be the third Rome and conquers the Ottoman Empire, in particular it conquers Thrace, which has a base tax of 14 and a manpower of 10. It cores Thrace and builds T1-T6 army buildings, T1-T4 production, as well as T1 government, and a manufactory. This means that it gets a local efficiency of 170%, a tax value of 18, and a goods production of 2.48, for a manpower factor of (2.48/40 = 0.062).

The total efficiency is thus 415% -33% =382% if not an accepted culture, 415% if accepted.

Not accepted:
M = 3.82*((10000*0.062)+100) = 2750

Accepted:
M = 4.15*((10000*0.062)+100) = 2988

Anybody insane enough to spend the 18*25 DMP = 450 DMP on culture conversion would in effect be paying 450DMP/(2988-2750) = 1.89 DMP per man. I am sure there are worse ways to spend monarch points in EU4, but right at the moment none come to mind.

It could, of course, be much higher. If Muscovy built its March in Thrace. That would add 1860 and 2025 men respectively. And how about a Muscovy force-converted to catholicism that is crusading while it is the revolutionary target? Huh? But this is getting too silly even for me, so I had better terminate this thought experiment while I retain the vestiges of sanity.
 
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