You can be the best economist and the best diplomat in the games you play, but if you don't know how to fight, your power will remain ephemeral, because in foreign conflict as in all things, its not just the tools that count, not just your economic resources and your diplomatic leverage, but knowing how to use them and your other resources to project your power. Besides that, war is a fun distraction from the more tedious economic and diplomatic toils that everyone has to go to to slowly build up your country. It's the fastest way to enhance your power, but on the other end its also the easiest way to lose power. The better you understand the priciples of war, the less risk you take whenever you engage in it. So I give you this guide. This one can pretty easily be used as a reference as well as a walk through.
There are many aspects of war to consider. I'm just going to go through as many situations and factors of it as I can, to give as much information as possible. Feel free to skip through some of this- it gets more complex as it goes. Starting with the wise preparations you should make before going to war, in two categories, longterm and shortterm.
For longterm, you must:
1) try to ensure your morale is as high as it can be. Morale affects the outcome of battles greatly. Ways to raise morale are moving your domestic slider policies toward quality, offensive, and free citizens, as well as toward land or naval. This is the most longterm way to ensure your morale is up. Other ways are to stay ahead in tech, and to claim the Defender of the Faith Title(increases morale by .5), or if you're catholic, to switch to Counter Reformed Catholicism(also increases morale by .5). Only one nation can hold a particular religions DOTF title at a time, so you must claim it fast if you suspect a war is coming. The same goes for switching your religion to CRC; any catholic nation can go CRC, but you have to stay sharp about switching to it because you can't do it once you're at war.
2) try to keep your tech up. Most technological advances by themselves are not that important, but there are milestones that really make a difference, called "CRTs". These all improve morale as mentioned before, but they also increase the kill power of your ships and troops greatly, and will give you a major advantage if you can get one before your foe. Refer to the LAND and NAVAL files in the DB folder to see the exact differences in morale and killpower between the differet tech levels.
3) plan around the leaders you get. That is, try to make sure that your major wars coincide with the periods that you have good leaders, and that you're generally at peace when you don't have good leaders(unless you have some other strong advantages, of course). You can check which leaders you have in either the DB file or the savefile. You should also know how good your enemy's leaders will be.
4) know your monarchs. The military stats of your monarch affect your morale, by giving you anywhere between + .25 for a top quality monarch to -.25 for the worst monarchs(not many of these in the game though). And as with leaders, you should check on the stats of your enemy's monarchs.
5) be aware of what your neighbors are doing, what they're planning, and how that affects you. Knowing whether someone wants to fight you or not, or whether someone will defend a country that you hope to attack can be extremely important.
Now, shortterm preparations...
1) first thing before you start a war (or if you expect someone else to DOW you)is to raise your standing army up to the maximum you can support. If Manpower is the limiting factor, you should raise even more troops than you can support, so your MP pool lasts longer(ussually after the late 1600s, or anytime if you're a very small country), if you can afford the extra maintenance costs, that is.
2) position your troops, but don't send them to the border right away where your foe can see them. Try to maintain the surprise factor.
3) before you dow, or immediately after someone dow's you, RAISE YOUR MAINTENANCE! People forget to do this one all the time, and it can cost you big. Your morale suffers greatly if you don't raise your maintenance.
In actual fighting, you have 7 ways of killing enemy troops:
1)a fire phase
2)a shock phase
3)an enemy retreat- in which the enemy loses troops based on the relative maneuver values of your leaders, the relative morale of the armies, and the kill power of the victorious army during the phase in which a retreat is made
4)attrition
5)fortress defenses- when an enemy chooses to assault
6)taking a province that has troops currently being raised
7)giving them rebels through stabhits and war exhaustion, which can at least distract them, but will cost them some losses too
Its good to be aware of all seven for obvious reasons. Often it is not pitched battles that decide a war, but the ability to use 3-7 to your advantage.
Now I will go through the early periods of the game to the later periods, and try to give an account of most general situations, and the right tactics to use for them.
1420-1500(pre tech 9 fighting).
In this kind of fighting, the only things that matters are 2,3, 4, 6, and 7 . There is no fire phase. You want to fight with cavalry all the time on plains. Infantry is viable on mountains, forests and swamps, but mostly because it's cheaper. It's still not much better than cav. On plains or deserts it should only be used as either a seige force or casualty absorbtion.
In the early game, money is very tight. So you'll almost never be able to use all your manpower, thus MP doesn't really matter, except how it affects maximum support and the rate your war exhaustion increases. Because resources are so tight, winning 1-2 battles can easily determine the outcome of a war. And because there's no fire phase, and only an extremely powerful shock phase for cavalry, battles tend to be resolved very fast. People refer to pre-LT 9 as seige warfare, because you can't assault until you get to LT 5 and even after that, assaulting is very hard, but shock warfare is a more apt title IMO. Especially if you have a superior leader or higher morale, battles resolve so quickly and losses are so hard to recoup, that you can easily obliterate an opponent's defenses with one well executed thrust.
But this is only possible if you know where the enemy's armies are before you attack, and they're within initial striking distance on a plains province. With a high maneuver leader, coordinating overwhelming force into an army to strike the opposing army before your foe has time to react can result in the decimation of their army. If you're confident that you don't have another major army somewhere, all you have to do then is go inland patroling his provs with your cavalry contingents, wacking any reinforcement armies he tries to raise.
Normally though, the defender has the best chance of annhilating the attackers main army, because the defender's has the benefit of seeing all the attackers movements within the defenders territory, while the attacker can't see beyond the line of sight of whatever provs they control. The defender just needs to keep an eye out for when the attackers forces become too spread out to cover each other, or attrition wears them down too much to properly hold the line, and then all the defender has to do is mass cavalry and roll over the attackers. For this reason, it's safest to only lay seige to forest and mountain provs as an attacker, because the shock phase doesn't kill off units on this terrain quite as fast. You can seige plains provs if the way is clear- try to scout ahead with 2-3k armies to know where the enemy is, and what his movements are(and if your scouts arrive in a prov with a big enemy army heading toward it, you better disband it so he doesn't get to kill it and get more battle warscore).
Which brings me to one diplomatic tactic that needs be highlighted: For easy intelligence, the best thing is to have an ally spy on the enemy for you, using a royal marriage they've signed with your foe. They can tell you all the troop movements and you don't have to risk scouts or anything, and your enemy may not even know they're being spied on then. For this reason you should ussually ask someone when they offer a RM if they agree to not spy on you.
Back to pre LT 9 fighting- max attrition is much higher, so you should take special care to avoid massing troops in provs where supply isn't sufficient to support them. This should be pretty easy though, with troop numbers generally being rather low. Especially if attacking along coastal regions, all you have to do to get all the supply you need is blockade the enemy's ports when you seige them. It doubles the supply for you in the prov(ok, not all the supply you could need but it should be enough to support most of your army if its not a dirt poor prov). Otherwise, split your armies up when you advance, keeping them adjacent to each other so that they can easily cover one another in case of an enemy counter attack(don't bother with this unless you're seiging provs in the area- if not, just hold your guys in your own territory). But since your troops are split up, its even more important to keep a close eye on the enemy(or at least, the provs adjacent to you, so you can react with your reinforcements armies extremely fast).
If you are below LT 9 fighting against someone who is at LT 9, you will probably lose, but there is a strategy that can bring victory. The key is to keep your morale up- the main value of getting LT 9 before your opponent is that the fire phase destroys your morale, often winning the battle before the shock phase can even begin. You can counter this by only sending a very small army into battle to absorb the opening fire phase- like 5-10k infatry(just as long as its not under 1/10 the enemy force). Send your major cavalry force to arrive just before the fire phase ends, bringing your morale back up so that you can fight on somewhat even terms when the shock phase starts. You get -1 shock for this, because you start the battle off with way less cavalry than your enemy, but at least you can make them suffer a shock phase. It can prove quite successful if you have a good shock leader. The way to time it correctly is by sending your cavalry in when the infantry's movement is slightly under halfway complete.
In the next era of warfare, LT 9- LT 20 or so, the main change is that the fire phase now acts as a means of escape, a relatively harmless phase that doesn't really inflict any casualties, but can still hurt morale. It acts as a way to retreat from any battle before casualties start to mount. As long as one side has infantry in a battle, there will be a fire phase. But if both sides have only cavalry, the battles are basicly the same as pre- LT9. If you kill all of somebody's infantry and want to pursue and destroy the remaining cavalry, maybe because they have a leader, you have to split your infantry off so your cavalry instantly brings it into the shock phase, otherwise he'll just get an easy retreat from the fire phase.
The same principles of war apply, army sizes will still be fairly small ussually, but once they start to get bigger, attrition tactics tend become more important. At this point ensuring that you have supply in a province becomes more important, because in most battles its likely that you'll be over the province support limit. To keep supply you have to have a steady line of troops covering or seiging provs(or be in control of such provs) leading to wherever your army is. So, if you want to pursue an army after a victory, leave a covering force first so you don't get +10 attrition in the prov you're heading to. Normally you don't want to spread out too much like this though, as its pretty easy for the enemy to disrupt supply killing small covering forces.
The other reason to have supply, or at least have a little army in place next to where you fight a battle, is this. If your army fighting on enemy soil has no adjacent provs that you either control or have another army resting in, it will be much harder for you to retreat with that army. It can still be done, but you have to spam orders, which means that it'll cost you a few precious seconds. With a fire phase you should be ok, but if its just shock, you're in trouble. And later on when fire becomes more important, this becomes even more dangerous.
The ratio of cav to infantry on plains should now be about 3:1, allowing infantry to absorb reasonable losses and remain active for the fire phase unless the battle is going aweful.
Next era, LT 21-34, infantry and cavalry have about the same importance. You'll still want to use heavy cav in plains, but the ratio to cav and inf should be about 1/1 now. It doesn't matter much if this ratio isn't perfect. Armies are bigger and there's more money, so attrition tactics become more important as you have bigger armies.
LT 35-50, cavalry loses importance. It's now only really important for getting +1 shock in plains by having more than your opponent, and enhancing the value of your maneuver in retreats, or enemy retreats. Infantry and Artillary rule. Infantry is probably better in general at this time though because its faster and cheaper, while artillary has a lot more punch, though vulnerable if you run too low on inf. After you get LT 41, and build a bunch of CCs, numbers get really huge.
LT 51-60, artillary reigns. Its so strong that you need it in any army you're planning to fight some major pitched battles with. The fire phase at this point is about as deadly as the shock phase was in 1-9 LTs. Thus you can now annhilate an army instantly if you've got the firepower, and especially if you've got a good leader. Never face an uberleader with a mediocre leader unless you have overwhelming numbers, and by the same token, try to pick off enemy armies that aren't well led with your good leaders as much as possible. But protect your best leaders at all cost, if you lose them, your ability to fight pitched battles is practically gone.
Some general things. The ways to win wars are to achieve stabhitting warscore and start stabhitting, forcing the enemy to choose between losing stability and ruining his economy, and then probably losing anyway, or just give up then. And the other way is to achieve a very decisive victory, killing his leaders. If you have a force peace rule, which all civilized games do, you need only worry about warscore though. Just get 99 warscore and stabhit them into the ground, if they haven't accepted a more moderate peace by this time.
The principles like engaging leaderless armies with your good leaders and maintaining supply general apply to all periods. One other thing.
Assaults. Don't risk them unless you've got plenty of power, and there isn't an enemy army nearby. There are exceptions, like if there are only a few troops left in the garrison, or you've simply got overwhelming force vs the fort, but ussually you want to wait- either engage the enemy army force, or have backup ready to aid your morale in the coming battle should the assault fail. And if you're pretty sure you can get away with a normal seige instead, do it, because assaults cost more troops.
I've probably forgotten a lot, but ah well. I'm tired of working on this stupid guide
.
There are many aspects of war to consider. I'm just going to go through as many situations and factors of it as I can, to give as much information as possible. Feel free to skip through some of this- it gets more complex as it goes. Starting with the wise preparations you should make before going to war, in two categories, longterm and shortterm.
For longterm, you must:
1) try to ensure your morale is as high as it can be. Morale affects the outcome of battles greatly. Ways to raise morale are moving your domestic slider policies toward quality, offensive, and free citizens, as well as toward land or naval. This is the most longterm way to ensure your morale is up. Other ways are to stay ahead in tech, and to claim the Defender of the Faith Title(increases morale by .5), or if you're catholic, to switch to Counter Reformed Catholicism(also increases morale by .5). Only one nation can hold a particular religions DOTF title at a time, so you must claim it fast if you suspect a war is coming. The same goes for switching your religion to CRC; any catholic nation can go CRC, but you have to stay sharp about switching to it because you can't do it once you're at war.
2) try to keep your tech up. Most technological advances by themselves are not that important, but there are milestones that really make a difference, called "CRTs". These all improve morale as mentioned before, but they also increase the kill power of your ships and troops greatly, and will give you a major advantage if you can get one before your foe. Refer to the LAND and NAVAL files in the DB folder to see the exact differences in morale and killpower between the differet tech levels.
3) plan around the leaders you get. That is, try to make sure that your major wars coincide with the periods that you have good leaders, and that you're generally at peace when you don't have good leaders(unless you have some other strong advantages, of course). You can check which leaders you have in either the DB file or the savefile. You should also know how good your enemy's leaders will be.
4) know your monarchs. The military stats of your monarch affect your morale, by giving you anywhere between + .25 for a top quality monarch to -.25 for the worst monarchs(not many of these in the game though). And as with leaders, you should check on the stats of your enemy's monarchs.
5) be aware of what your neighbors are doing, what they're planning, and how that affects you. Knowing whether someone wants to fight you or not, or whether someone will defend a country that you hope to attack can be extremely important.
Now, shortterm preparations...
1) first thing before you start a war (or if you expect someone else to DOW you)is to raise your standing army up to the maximum you can support. If Manpower is the limiting factor, you should raise even more troops than you can support, so your MP pool lasts longer(ussually after the late 1600s, or anytime if you're a very small country), if you can afford the extra maintenance costs, that is.
2) position your troops, but don't send them to the border right away where your foe can see them. Try to maintain the surprise factor.
3) before you dow, or immediately after someone dow's you, RAISE YOUR MAINTENANCE! People forget to do this one all the time, and it can cost you big. Your morale suffers greatly if you don't raise your maintenance.
In actual fighting, you have 7 ways of killing enemy troops:
1)a fire phase
2)a shock phase
3)an enemy retreat- in which the enemy loses troops based on the relative maneuver values of your leaders, the relative morale of the armies, and the kill power of the victorious army during the phase in which a retreat is made
4)attrition
5)fortress defenses- when an enemy chooses to assault
6)taking a province that has troops currently being raised
7)giving them rebels through stabhits and war exhaustion, which can at least distract them, but will cost them some losses too
Its good to be aware of all seven for obvious reasons. Often it is not pitched battles that decide a war, but the ability to use 3-7 to your advantage.
Now I will go through the early periods of the game to the later periods, and try to give an account of most general situations, and the right tactics to use for them.
1420-1500(pre tech 9 fighting).
In this kind of fighting, the only things that matters are 2,3, 4, 6, and 7 . There is no fire phase. You want to fight with cavalry all the time on plains. Infantry is viable on mountains, forests and swamps, but mostly because it's cheaper. It's still not much better than cav. On plains or deserts it should only be used as either a seige force or casualty absorbtion.
In the early game, money is very tight. So you'll almost never be able to use all your manpower, thus MP doesn't really matter, except how it affects maximum support and the rate your war exhaustion increases. Because resources are so tight, winning 1-2 battles can easily determine the outcome of a war. And because there's no fire phase, and only an extremely powerful shock phase for cavalry, battles tend to be resolved very fast. People refer to pre-LT 9 as seige warfare, because you can't assault until you get to LT 5 and even after that, assaulting is very hard, but shock warfare is a more apt title IMO. Especially if you have a superior leader or higher morale, battles resolve so quickly and losses are so hard to recoup, that you can easily obliterate an opponent's defenses with one well executed thrust.
But this is only possible if you know where the enemy's armies are before you attack, and they're within initial striking distance on a plains province. With a high maneuver leader, coordinating overwhelming force into an army to strike the opposing army before your foe has time to react can result in the decimation of their army. If you're confident that you don't have another major army somewhere, all you have to do then is go inland patroling his provs with your cavalry contingents, wacking any reinforcement armies he tries to raise.
Normally though, the defender has the best chance of annhilating the attackers main army, because the defender's has the benefit of seeing all the attackers movements within the defenders territory, while the attacker can't see beyond the line of sight of whatever provs they control. The defender just needs to keep an eye out for when the attackers forces become too spread out to cover each other, or attrition wears them down too much to properly hold the line, and then all the defender has to do is mass cavalry and roll over the attackers. For this reason, it's safest to only lay seige to forest and mountain provs as an attacker, because the shock phase doesn't kill off units on this terrain quite as fast. You can seige plains provs if the way is clear- try to scout ahead with 2-3k armies to know where the enemy is, and what his movements are(and if your scouts arrive in a prov with a big enemy army heading toward it, you better disband it so he doesn't get to kill it and get more battle warscore).
Which brings me to one diplomatic tactic that needs be highlighted: For easy intelligence, the best thing is to have an ally spy on the enemy for you, using a royal marriage they've signed with your foe. They can tell you all the troop movements and you don't have to risk scouts or anything, and your enemy may not even know they're being spied on then. For this reason you should ussually ask someone when they offer a RM if they agree to not spy on you.
Back to pre LT 9 fighting- max attrition is much higher, so you should take special care to avoid massing troops in provs where supply isn't sufficient to support them. This should be pretty easy though, with troop numbers generally being rather low. Especially if attacking along coastal regions, all you have to do to get all the supply you need is blockade the enemy's ports when you seige them. It doubles the supply for you in the prov(ok, not all the supply you could need but it should be enough to support most of your army if its not a dirt poor prov). Otherwise, split your armies up when you advance, keeping them adjacent to each other so that they can easily cover one another in case of an enemy counter attack(don't bother with this unless you're seiging provs in the area- if not, just hold your guys in your own territory). But since your troops are split up, its even more important to keep a close eye on the enemy(or at least, the provs adjacent to you, so you can react with your reinforcements armies extremely fast).
If you are below LT 9 fighting against someone who is at LT 9, you will probably lose, but there is a strategy that can bring victory. The key is to keep your morale up- the main value of getting LT 9 before your opponent is that the fire phase destroys your morale, often winning the battle before the shock phase can even begin. You can counter this by only sending a very small army into battle to absorb the opening fire phase- like 5-10k infatry(just as long as its not under 1/10 the enemy force). Send your major cavalry force to arrive just before the fire phase ends, bringing your morale back up so that you can fight on somewhat even terms when the shock phase starts. You get -1 shock for this, because you start the battle off with way less cavalry than your enemy, but at least you can make them suffer a shock phase. It can prove quite successful if you have a good shock leader. The way to time it correctly is by sending your cavalry in when the infantry's movement is slightly under halfway complete.
In the next era of warfare, LT 9- LT 20 or so, the main change is that the fire phase now acts as a means of escape, a relatively harmless phase that doesn't really inflict any casualties, but can still hurt morale. It acts as a way to retreat from any battle before casualties start to mount. As long as one side has infantry in a battle, there will be a fire phase. But if both sides have only cavalry, the battles are basicly the same as pre- LT9. If you kill all of somebody's infantry and want to pursue and destroy the remaining cavalry, maybe because they have a leader, you have to split your infantry off so your cavalry instantly brings it into the shock phase, otherwise he'll just get an easy retreat from the fire phase.
The same principles of war apply, army sizes will still be fairly small ussually, but once they start to get bigger, attrition tactics tend become more important. At this point ensuring that you have supply in a province becomes more important, because in most battles its likely that you'll be over the province support limit. To keep supply you have to have a steady line of troops covering or seiging provs(or be in control of such provs) leading to wherever your army is. So, if you want to pursue an army after a victory, leave a covering force first so you don't get +10 attrition in the prov you're heading to. Normally you don't want to spread out too much like this though, as its pretty easy for the enemy to disrupt supply killing small covering forces.
The other reason to have supply, or at least have a little army in place next to where you fight a battle, is this. If your army fighting on enemy soil has no adjacent provs that you either control or have another army resting in, it will be much harder for you to retreat with that army. It can still be done, but you have to spam orders, which means that it'll cost you a few precious seconds. With a fire phase you should be ok, but if its just shock, you're in trouble. And later on when fire becomes more important, this becomes even more dangerous.
The ratio of cav to infantry on plains should now be about 3:1, allowing infantry to absorb reasonable losses and remain active for the fire phase unless the battle is going aweful.
Next era, LT 21-34, infantry and cavalry have about the same importance. You'll still want to use heavy cav in plains, but the ratio to cav and inf should be about 1/1 now. It doesn't matter much if this ratio isn't perfect. Armies are bigger and there's more money, so attrition tactics become more important as you have bigger armies.
LT 35-50, cavalry loses importance. It's now only really important for getting +1 shock in plains by having more than your opponent, and enhancing the value of your maneuver in retreats, or enemy retreats. Infantry and Artillary rule. Infantry is probably better in general at this time though because its faster and cheaper, while artillary has a lot more punch, though vulnerable if you run too low on inf. After you get LT 41, and build a bunch of CCs, numbers get really huge.
LT 51-60, artillary reigns. Its so strong that you need it in any army you're planning to fight some major pitched battles with. The fire phase at this point is about as deadly as the shock phase was in 1-9 LTs. Thus you can now annhilate an army instantly if you've got the firepower, and especially if you've got a good leader. Never face an uberleader with a mediocre leader unless you have overwhelming numbers, and by the same token, try to pick off enemy armies that aren't well led with your good leaders as much as possible. But protect your best leaders at all cost, if you lose them, your ability to fight pitched battles is practically gone.
Some general things. The ways to win wars are to achieve stabhitting warscore and start stabhitting, forcing the enemy to choose between losing stability and ruining his economy, and then probably losing anyway, or just give up then. And the other way is to achieve a very decisive victory, killing his leaders. If you have a force peace rule, which all civilized games do, you need only worry about warscore though. Just get 99 warscore and stabhit them into the ground, if they haven't accepted a more moderate peace by this time.
The principles like engaging leaderless armies with your good leaders and maintaining supply general apply to all periods. One other thing.
Assaults. Don't risk them unless you've got plenty of power, and there isn't an enemy army nearby. There are exceptions, like if there are only a few troops left in the garrison, or you've simply got overwhelming force vs the fort, but ussually you want to wait- either engage the enemy army force, or have backup ready to aid your morale in the coming battle should the assault fail. And if you're pretty sure you can get away with a normal seige instead, do it, because assaults cost more troops.
I've probably forgotten a lot, but ah well. I'm tired of working on this stupid guide
.
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