I hope there will be enough interface feedback to the player to show increased cost for reinforcements. It's not good when you army maintance suddenly increase and you can't see why.
as long as the inter-war periods will become more interesting and fun, I welcome this - waging war is way too easy and lacks serious drawbacks right now.
So you are implying that doing a lot of something less fun (say, working at a reasonably not unpleasant job) is better than doing a little of something a lot more fun (say, a cruise in the bahamas*)?
*Presuming your captain doesn't have "Captained the Costa Concordia" on his resume.
We have slightly increased the supply limits, and making the difference between safe and hostile territory not as drastic as in early Europa Universalis games. This makes it more possible to fight offensive wars without losing 90% of your army to attrition.
The French also used it during the 100 Years war. But we need to wait and see if scourged earth is still in, not much reason to believe it's no longer usable (although the AI was horrible at detecting it, so it might be). At the very least, it should do a lot more damage to your provinces than it did in EU3...I'm worried about this...
To me, it sounds like EU4 won't allow players to use one of the most effective and most interesting tactics... the Tsar's tactic in 1812 when he had to face Napoleon's imperial army.
Alexandre's tactic was to avoid engaging Napoleon's imperial army in any decisive battle, and to burn anything that invaders could use... So at the begining of Russia's invasion in june 1812, Napoleon's Grande Armée had over 600k men...when Napoleon crossed back the Niémen river on his way back to Paris, he had about 50k men only...
Due to Russians' tactic, Napoleon had to lead his army all the way to Moscow, just to find it was evacuated before his arrival. And few days later, the city was burned to the ground so that invaders would have to endure the harsh russian winter...
Here's a link to a french article about the reasons why Napoleon lost the 1812 war... it explains that even before the winter, Napoleon had already lost over 200k of his men due undecisive battles, deprivation, diseases, desertion and cossacks' sneak attacks...
http://www.histoire.presse.fr/lhistoire/373/pourquoi-les-russes-ont-gagne-23-02-2012-43623
Now... some people will argue that 1812 is outside EU4 timeframe...
You'll understand that the scorched earth tactic had always existed if you read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth
In game terms, I'd like to make few suggestions :
- Supply limit of a province should decrease, if a hostile army sits in for a long time...
- Building fortifications should increase attrition
- Armies should not be able to reinforce while in hostile provinces, unless there is an adjacent controlled territory...
- Controlling the capital city of a province, should be different from controlling the whole province...
- Keeping a foreign province (different religion & culture) under control should require a permanent presence of an important army...
- Keeping a province with high revolt risk under control, should require a permanent presence of an important army... if there is no army in the neighborhood, such provinces should fall into rebells' hands without beseiging it...
Will you be able to zoom out as far as it does in the video?
Being able to do that while posting empires is itself worth any money the whole game could cost.Yes.
Not much action in this thread lately, but still... I've played all of the EU-games, and i've played them a lot. One thing that always seems to happen when playing one of the major countries is that in middle game and especially late game you'll be dragged into wars that spans the entire globe a couple of times per decade... Anyway, to handle these wars you often need to manually scan the map for enemies, pause a lot have a slow game speed. It's hard work and a lot of multitasking...
I've many times wished for a good "war map-mode". A map mode there enemy units and fleet showed clearly, even then zoomed out to the max. The map mode should also show arrows indicating which region the enemies would reach next. Howering over enemy territories should give information about fortlevel and supply limits, without any clicking. I dream would be to have known enemy units and fleets in the list to the right, there your own armies etc. are shown, possibly also giving information about location.
As it is now the big world wars tend to make my more tired than thrilled, which isn't good...