EU4 - Development Diary - 15th of January 2019

[Ololorium]

your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.

Armies are useful for:
- rebel suppression
- native suppression
- land exploration
- calculation of "power" of your country, which keeps subjects in check and affects chances to get an alliance
- combat
As for the imbalance between big nations and small nations, I can think of a couple of ways to deal with it:
1) Simply raise the base maintenance cost of armies. This way, everyone will have to fight limited wars with only a fraction of their full army, unless they have no other option, and a total war will probably lead to bankruptcy. At the same time, give weak states a maintenance cost discount in a defensive war, scaled with "strength of alliances" modifier.
2) Remove army replenishment on foreign territory (and severely reduce it on occupied territory), so that a reasonably strong invading force can dwindle in size to the point when a smaller defending army can catch it and expect to win. Of course, the attackers can fall back and regroup, but it would be so much better than "march forward, wipe a smaller defending army which never stood a chance, siege everything, annex".
Of course, some balance changes around it would be necessary, abd the AI will have to be taught all these new tricks, but tweaks to the balance and AI are going to be done anyway.

 

[Shoo]

So we can plug suggestions here?
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/reworked-trade-mechanics.1138804/

 

[Blackwhitecavias]

Armies are useful for:
- rebel suppression
- native suppression
- land exploration
- calculation of "power" of your country, which keeps subjects in check and affects chances to get an alliance
- combat
As for the imbalance between big nations and small nations, I can think of a couple of ways to deal with it:
1) Simply raise the base maintenance cost of armies. This way, everyone will have to fight limited wars with only a fraction of their full army, unless they have no other option, and a total war will probably lead to bankruptcy. At the same time, give weak states a maintenance cost discount in a defensive war, scaled with "strength of alliances" modifier.
2) Remove army replenishment on foreign territory (and severely reduce it on occupied territory), so that a reasonably strong invading force can dwindle in size to the point when a smaller defending army can catch it and expect to win. Of course, the attackers can fall back and regroup, but it would be so much better than "march forward, wipe a smaller defending army which never stood a chance, siege everything, annex".
Of course, some balance changes around it would be necessary, abd the AI will have to be taught all these new tricks, but tweaks to the balance and AI are going to be done anyway.

Your suggestions do not help small nations, raising the base maintenance would hurt them as they don't have a safe space in the interior of their territory to park armies which they don't need and as such need to keep their entire armies active to prevent them being stackwiped. removing army replenishment would also hurt them due to bigger countries being bigger and as such having more territory for others to take attrition damage.

 

[Lor360]

Mothballing armies? Soon people will be calling for mothballing rebels and rivals

 

[Yolojandro]

I have found a few bugs:
-The castilian/spanish mission gc_cas_spa_california (Colonize California) is supposed to give permaclaims on all of the California colonial region. However, colonial_region isn't a valid scope, so it gives no claims. Change it to the California region maybe?

-The portuguese event flavor_por.5 (Capture of Santa Catarina) checks for any_active_trade_node in a bunch of indian regions. However, about half of these regions don't have any trade node in them! They should be changed accordingly to the sea regions where the trade nodes are.

 

[bebrst]

Mothballing armies could be considered an easy way to simulate feudal armies. In turn army maintenance should increase so that in the early game, mothballing when in peace is a must. As countries grow bigger and military tech advances, there will be more money and less expenses of maintaining an army, thus having now real standing armies.

In addition it could be closely tied to army professionalism. Low army maintenance lowers the level of professionalism of an unit

 

[leefnmajors]

ETA on 1.28.3? That TC fix can't come too soon.

Also, will 1.28.3 be strictly bug fixes, or any small balance changes/mechanics changes?

 

[FreyrDS]

I can sense it, they're planning a Low Countries expansion!

 

[diekaaskop]

Will there be any changes to AI not really realizing how strong ones navy is...
If you play as a pirate nation for instance with only islands and the largest fleet of the world but only a standing army of around 30k, big nations keep declaring war on you cause (or at least i think thats how it works) they (mostly) see your 30k army... Which is a thing they shouldnt do cause their navy would get crused and thus makes them eventually want to sign a white peace since its taking too long..

 

[PatrykCXXVIII]

Mod tweaks in the Launcher

I love this idea. Giving more information and flexibility with mods in the launcher would be extremely useful in games with such extensive mod communities as ours, and is certainly something worth exploring how to do right.

I'm so happy that this was noticed.
I'm really looking forward to see what will you do to the launcher.

 

[Carlo Curiosus]

Mothballed Armies

This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat.

Exclusively except for looting, sieging, guarding colonies, exploring, suppressing liberty desire & revolt risk, and deterring war declarations. You could argue that some of those are combat, but the same can be said of piracy/anti-piracy (or blockading). In a similar vein, mothballing your 100 heavies and 50 transports trivialises the cost of maintaining a large navy...

I suspect that "A large navy is far less likely to win a war, so from a balance perspective no-one cares" might be more accurate .

However, it is irritating (and makes no logical sense) that you have to pay for your entire peacetime army just so 5K troops can safely explore South America, or so a single one of your dozen 30K stacks can kill a few rebels. Being able to prioritise specific armies as always 100% maintenance would be another way of handling it (although I guess it equates to pretty much the same thing, depending how you envisage mothballing).

 

[pvtgunny]

give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region

I love this idea, especially if it gives a liberty desire malus with the colony. Bearing in mind that one of the roots of the American revolution was the British refusal to allow settlement in the ohio valley. Of course by the time that period rolls around everything is already colonized in the game, but who knows.

 

[Canute VII]

Mothballed Armies

This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.

There are other approaches to this with ideas like higher costs for far flung armies: It could/should be more expensive to operate the Dutch armies in China than in the Netherlands. Such things are not on the cards currently, but make interesting food for thought.

I think it could work in the opposite direction: give individual army stacks "missions" that make them operate on full maintenance/morale, even if the army slider is low. You kind of did this already with drilling, although morale will be reduced somewhat while drilling.

E.g. I like the "natives suppression" mission proposed before:

Maybe something like this:

* Implement a new army mission (cf. drilling, rebel suppression), "suppress natives". This could have the same area selection mode as suppressing rebels, so you can tell it where to go.
* An army that is suppressing natives will always be charged at full maintenance, regardless of the maintenance slider (as with drilling armies) and would always fight at full strength, but would not be possible to manually control.
* Manually moving or otherwise ending native suppression will immediately reset the army's morale to zero (as it has to reorganise to it's change in mission and purpose).
* While in native suppression mode, an army will attempt to engage any native uprisings within its assigned areas. When there are no active natives, it will move to sit in any undefended colony within its area.

And some more ideas could be found here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/introduce-new-leader-type-engineer.1030428/

Alternatively, have "mothballing" an army stack cost dear: e.g. -10 power projection and/or -10 prestige and/or -1 professionalism. Power Projection would be well served with a voluntary way of loosing it, don't you think? Maybe scale PP loss by army stack size to force limit? Or better an increased monthly PP loss?

Also, on the topic of "higher costs for far flung armies": Per se, a dutch army in china will cost the same there as it costs in holland. But maintaining communication, moving the army there in the first place, supplying it with accustomed ressources from home - agreed, this will be costly over the distance. So maybe add a movement cost in ducats while not at home? Similar to the forced march power cost. This could apply in enemy terrain and in foreign areas with military access, but maybe not in allied areas and probably not in subject terrain. It could also be scaled by army stack size to target province supply limit, so that smaller armies (of smaller countries) would be less effected.

 

[BladvakRO]

There are some QoL or bugs that annoy me:

1. the navies that do not get out of an occupied port. my own navy is expecting them out on the seas for some navy tradition and prestige gains!

2. unintentionally hitting the unconditionnal surrender button instead of sue for peace - the difference can be almost 200% . it did happen a few times, especially when I was tired, so it's something that needs to be addressed.

3. I want to know how to signal the other countries that I want the following and I'm willing to pay up even if brings me into debt: condotieri, knowledge sharing, loans, alliances, call to arms, etc. some kind of a manual list that says: hey, I'm more than willing to get into a war with no territorial gains even if you don't have enough favors with me JUST because that's one big rival I want brought down a peg (usually Ottos or Ming which otherwise I wouldn't hit on my own until later)

4. remove the ticking score of a siege in a port with castle. I want to mimick the great siege(s) or Gibraltar, Malta or Krete so that if I have an undefeated navy that is bringing in supplies, the enemy cannot conquer the province unless it decides on a costly assault. oh, and unsuccessful assaults in islands which have no friendly navy nearby should stackwipe the attackers.

5. expanded age bonuses : I know age bonuses are lost when the age resets, but that shouldn't be the case. we should be able to keep half of the bonuses from the previous age, and a quarter from the bonuses from two ages prios, and an eighth of the Age of Discovery bonuses if we are in the Age of Revolutions. That would be an incremental loss of bonuses and it would mimick the national traditions of the country. Or instead of halving the number of bonuses, have at most 3 bonuses available during the next age, and then once that age is over, to be able to keep 2 bonuses, for example ending up with Higher Developed Colonies into the Age of Revolutions.

 

[phe123]

Timing of the hotfix for the TC bug?

 

[browd]

Timing of the hotfix for the TC bug?

Probably 2019.

 

[Sanguine Caesar]

Is there still time to make suggestions for the next patch?

 

[condorcet01]

will we be getting an easier way to build in many provinces, like bringing back the ability to build in the ledger?

 

[DassiD]

I'd also look at the Balkans and Anatolia, some cultures are severely underepresented. It is made worse by the very large provinces, but also there's plain wrong culture placement. Places in Turkey that remained ethnic greek until the 19th century aren't greek in 1444 for example, same with armenian, albanian, dalmatian and many more. It makes it seem like the empire the Ottomans managed to build were a trivial process, it wasn't. In the province file for Sugla/Smyrna it is written "Do not change to greek", even though wikipedia states: "Greek influence was so strong in the area that the Turks called it "Smyrna of the infidels"". So please take a look at how provinces are shaped and how cultures are distributed. I've also made a mod which tries to correct some of these inaccuracies if you need specifics.

 

[Gaussia]

I fully agree with your thoughts on mothballing armies.