EU4 - Development Diary - 26th of March 2019

[tom025]

Take your time Jake, we do appreciate that your looking about merc and tech debt. The game needed it !

 

[Lamahorse]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Wild_Geese

I'd love if there was some mechanism to model the extent of mercenary soldiers during the period. It was estimated between the end of the Williamite Wars and the mid 1700s that over 200,000 Irishmen had died in continental wars as mercenaries to a whole range of armies.

 

[Vollwertkost]

Looking forward to a fix to the mercenary system, whatever shape it might take! Let's take a look at it from a design perspective:

In EU4, if the player is faced with a problem, he or she can take various steps to counter said issue. If the first thing didn't work right away and right now, one can take more drastic measures, even if it is more costly or if that means facing more problems in the long run. This kind of staggered approach, the toolkit of a monarch, so to speak, could be applied here as well.

Treasury running dry? Take loans, reduce maintenance, etc. Can't take more loans? Exploit land, debase currency etc.
Manpower running dry? Hire mercenaries, exploit land, ask nobility. No more mercenaries available/willing to follow your cause? Increase mercenary pay, hire foreign mercenaries, allow looting of the land to attract more mercenaries etc.

Whatever the fix will be, I'm happy as long as the endless spam is put to an end and as long as the player gets more 'branches' in his tree of decissions.

edit: Also it would be cool if the new mercenary system interacted in some way with the army tradition and professionalism system!

 

[kettch]

I'm sure you're growing tired of hearing it by now, but we continue to iron out tech-debt issues (which really deserve a dev diary of their own)

I do not know about others, but I certainly will not grow tired of hearing those sweet words in the near future.

 

[Lamahorse]

Also unaccepted cultures within a country should give your rivals a 'pool' of limited recruitment. The Spanish and French armies had Irish divisions for nearly the whole period because of the volume of men moving to the continent for service in their armies.

 

[R3un1]

This sounds great, but for me, the thing that needs to be introduced into EUIV warfare mechanisms is some sort of notion of supply train, to stop the ludicrous game of "chase the fuck-off stack" around the map. An example of how it could be implemented would be if your army is in a province that is not connected to your capital, through your own provinces, occupations, or transport ships nearby, that army should be taking massive attrition and have a massive speed penalty!

I would disagree (respectfully of course) as this sort of limitation would not be grounded in historical realities of early modern warfare where armies would largely live of the land with little to no need to have any contact with the capital for prolonged periods of time. I do agree, however, that the current state of affairs is sub-optimal. So maybe introducing mechanic similar to the naval attrition — when you are for a long time inland, out of contact with your country a ticker would gradually raise the attrition and other negative effects — would reasonably address this problem.
Obviously with that your are just asking for overhauling how occupations and looting works.

 

[Rzeczpospolita3Narodów]

Supply roads makes a lot of sense for the game.You can represent it kinda you getting supply as far as you staying in road of occupied provinces if you far away from the occupied provinces you getting attrition, and that decrease your army morale, as option if province has prosperity and you raiding it you dont have attrition, but if there devastation you getting debuffs again. I would love to see something like that. Thank you for the new diaries.
@DDRJake

 

[Jywert]

Great. Will be interesting too see how will you go about curing the merc spam.


The current system could work with some tweaks like
if you could increase price with casualties and amount of loot and pillaging mercenary armies do. As many times mercenary armies did not fight money change hands, city was not pillaged.
Hmm... Bit similar to cav ration? Amount of merch army can handle before the mercenaries could switch sides or fight less strong to run away to avoid casualties. Arrive later to battle as they were pillaging the country side.
Like really bring the advantages of true professional army what was drilled on standardized way not some hog pot group of people all around.

Would love to have a light supply system. Like non professional army would be forced to spread around the whole province and an professional army could have a supply trains. So You could have 100k non-pro army in province. Then 40k prof army arrives. They are ready to fight imminently with all their forces but 100k would take few days to gather So you could have much more impact as the smaller army could fight like 40k vs 20k then few days go 40k vs 40k and so on. But when the whole army has gathered the prof army could retreat. Could have caused much more damage to army then their own as they had the advantage at start.

Real attrition could be cool too. No that capped stuff anymore. 100k troops from Spain will starve in Siberian winter. Tie the attrition to professionalism. And a real use for supply camps. Great Empires needed supply points. Usually they conquered towards a supply centers what the radiated to a new area. You cannot forage weapons, horses and troops.

 

[LonelyOldFool]

I would disagree (respectfully of course) as this sort of limitation would not be grounded in historical realities of early modern warfare where armies would largely live of the land with little to no need to have any contact with the capital for prolonged periods of time. I do agree, however, that the current state of affairs is sub-optimal. So maybe introducing mechanic similar to the naval attrition — when you are for a long time inland, out of contact with your country a ticker would gradually raise the attrition and other negative effects — would reasonably address this problem.
Obviously with that your are just asking for overhauling how occupations and looting works.

I'll Just counter this slightly if I may. I can give you some primary sources if you like but the wiki has a good summary of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_logistics . The EUIV time-frame represents when military logistics became a really significant factor in warfare. Large parts of military campaigns involved manoeuvring of armies to avoid getting cut off from supply lines, and pitched battles were relatively rare. The "being in contact with your capital" part would just allow some sort of abstraction mechanic to allow a basic representation of supply lines. Maybe it could be more like, being in contact with one of your unoccupied forts (which would add incentive to strategically build forts).

 

[Dayvit78]

Is one of your goals to make mercenaries be more useful in early game, to be superseded by standing armies while the game progresses as it was done historically?

This is a very interesting idea. For example, mercenaries could have a separate (global) military tech which is slightly higher at the beginning of the game, and then seriously lags by the end (about 10 techs). Making mercs not much use except for garrison duty or seizing provinces without opposition forces by the late 18th century.

 

[qq97890]

I suggest that change regular army position and mercenary position.

Every country have mercenary's manpower pool. If the country is depleted the manpower pool, Country can't hire or replenish mercenary like regular army.

Original army also have manpower pool. But depleted manpower pool or no, Country can hire or replenish army. However country suffer heavy debuff until manpower is restored.

 

[ERS92]

@DDRJake As you will be changing merceneries -can we return to army building from EU3 where you could build units depending on province culture? Like when you concquer Tunisia as Aragon - you can build there muslim cavalry units notonly your current ones from tech.

 

[Kogrin]

I'm posting here my ideas and thougths on the merc system, everyone feel free to quote me to refine/add ideas, i'm sorry for the bad english^^. Every suggestion for the fixes is thought to be materially implemented within the game limits, i know that overcomplex realism is not possible to achieve in a game, expecially if you want to keep game speed and AI fluid and the gaming experience less grindy and cumbersome.
THIS WILL BE A LONG POST, YOU ARE WARNED.

SO let's start with the problem of the merc system today:

- on the MILITARY side:
1) they can be spammed everywhere, they simply appear from nowhere at will, making really easy for an overextended rich nation to simply disband an army in europe and recreate it in a matter of months in india without need for naval supremacy or similar communication routes.
2) they keep all the national military bonuses: military focused nations can spam their superior troops even after manpower (who should represent the pool of national troops of the nation) is gone while non military focused nations are struck with their bad army stats even if they have the money to purchase the best equipments and troops that a mercenary band can offer.
3) their only limit is a % of the max forcelimit +20+bonuses, so large nations can keep an endless blob of troops while smaller nations are struck with their 10 mercs army.
4)They cost no manpower to reinforce, once you have a mercenary regiment it will reinforce forever no matter what, making attrition useless against them.

MY IDEAS TO FIX THEM:
3)to keep things as simple as possible in game i think that the regional pool is a good idea, the pool can depend on the MIL dev of the provinces in that region (i think 0.1 per mentioned dev similar to forcelimit can be a good start plus the % on mercenaries availability) + a fixed amount per capital present (i think that +1 or +2 per cap can be good, similar to the old vassal forcelimit system, this is thougth to be the majority of the pool), this will allow regions with an high amount of nations in it (f.e. Germany, Italy) to have more mercs available, as soon as the game progresses and smaller nations start to disappear the pool will drastically diminish aswell. The pools are kept separated, so you can have f.e. 50 german mercs bought from the German pool in German provinces and 30 french mercs bougth from the French pool in French provinces, not 80 mercs to recruit anywhere, this will force you to bring them to the front instead of simply spawning them where you want. To make things intresting the merc pool can be made in common for all nations, f.e if Venice and Genoa buy all the avaiable mercs in italy to fuel their wars Milan cant recruit them anymore in Italy, making and effective way for whealthy nations to merc starve less whealthy ones. To keep track of how many mercs of the pool are being used can be added a counter like the banner's one that shows how many troops are spawned out of the total for that region in the state interface.
1) and 2) the type of merc that is spawned is tied to the culture of the province you call them in, f.e. indian culture's provices will spawn indian tec mercs, european culture's provices will have western mercs and so on so that England can recruit western troops on his island but only indian troops in india; mercs should have fixed stats NOT influenced by military ideas that dont target them specifically, i think +10% morale +5% combat ability and +5% discipline could work, so that Prussia will have to choose between his national space marines or the generic troops, and Venice can plan to rely on the generic mercenary troops and avoid to take some military ideas, focusing on economy instead without being completely crushed on the war fields. Could be nice to have some event tied on the various regional pools that alter the stats or merc avalaibility temporarly.
4)that is the hard part, can be left as it is if the other changes are impemented, the reinforce speed of the mercs can be drastically reduced ( like -75%) to force new purchases lowering the pressure on the front and the effectiveness on sieges OR in addition to the merc pool can be added a merc manpower pool (always tied to MIL dev and nation capitals like mentioned before) regionally that replenishes way faster than a normal manpower pool to make mercspam more limited but not useless and to make nations rely on less effective mercs like the asian's.


-on the ECONOMIC side:
1)the loan system in my opinion is broken, every country can spam loans for more than 40 years of income coming from nowhere making endgame wars a endless grind of who goes bankruptcy first, (usually nobody), with less whealthy nations heavily crippled by the inflation because they have to spam little loans while the whealthier ones can take 1000 gold ducats in a single loan for the same price in inflation. In this system money = manpower, if my loan pool allows me to evoke 300'000 ducats= 10'000 mercenary infantry regiment= 10'000'000 man. This is a raw calculation, i wanted just to show how money can be converted into troops. As i always said in my multiplayer games europa 4 could be a nice setting for a fantasy game, ducats are mana and mercenary are the undeads rising from the ground in endless swarms, but sometimes with awesome godly stats. To fix the mercenary system we need to fix the loan system too.
2)relying on mercenaries has no drawbacks: for example during and after the 100 year war France had BIG problems dealing with the wild merc bands that were pillaging his lands after their employment was expired, he payed some to go away and he killed others with his national army to restore the order. In europa 4 you can disband at will and nothing happens.

MY IDEAS TO FIX THEM:
1) make nations choose between loans of fixed amounts in the economy interface: 50, 500, 1000 with relative fixed inflation cost so that an OPM Ulm doesnt have to take a bazilion 10 ducats loan to reach the desired sum but can choose the bigger loan. Another good change that i implemented successfully on a mod for multiplayer purposes is to raise the intrests for every other loan you take, f.e. you take 1 loan with 1% intrest, then you take another one but the intrests raise to 1.5% and so on making loan spam exponentially more expensive and rapresenting the private investitors raising their demands to give more money to an indebted nation. Could be intresting if you can ask loans to all the estates for a price on loyalty if it doesnt get repayed and a price in influence for every loan you ask them.
The changes on the MILITARY side i think will fix the mercspam problem. Nations could get discounts on mercs in the region where your cap is located.
2) - SIMPLE solution: you pay to disband mercs or they will become a rebel army that pillages around and you have to kill them.
- COMPLEX solution: new mercs estate for all nations, disbanding mercs without paying them will lower the loyalty of the estate; if the estate is disloyal you get penalties on mercenarie's stats and availability, if is loyal you get bonuses. You can give them land to increase by 100% the amount of the forcelimit that goes to the merc pool from MIL dev if estate is loyal or above raising the min autonomy of the province representing the mercenary chief that uses the provice to recruit men for his band.
You can ask the estate for elite mercenaries for money or MIL monarch point working like the rajput estate mechanic but bound to the merc specific military stats (new troop type, bonuses on the stats, max recruitables defined by the lands you give to the estates) to represent the investment you do to get the best mercenaries on the market. To make you choose the troop type you have 3 possilbe request to ask (infantry, cavalry or cannons) that share the same cooldown (once you select one you cant ask for the other until the cooldown expires) and the same hard limit ( the provinces you gave to the estate so that you cannot have lets say max 10 inf, 10 cav and 10 cannons with the same investments on the estate, you have to choose how to split this 10 elite mercs limit).
You can give the merc estates a LOT of money based on your income to raise their loyalty, this represents the reputation you are trying to get as a rich nation to motivate mercs to figth and to join your armies.

OFF TOPIC CHANGES I WISH WOULD BE ADDRESSED:
-drilling decays too fast, after the first or second battle is completely gone. In my opinion when not in battle should not decay at all or extremely slowly if you stop drilling, once an army is trained is trained.
-Professionalism works weirdly, i can reach 100% professionalism as a 200 dev nation, then expand to 2000 dev without losing any and then slacken recruitment to get manpower back as a 2000 dev nation. I think that the more dev you ate the more you lose professionalism to mantain the balance of the slacken recruitment and to represent the need to train the new levies gained with conquest and in my opinion professionalism should decay yearly and should be gained faster.
-Military stats should give a penalty on cost: Prussian armies and generals were expensively trained to be the best with the best equipments and Prussian kingdom in his golden era invested heavily in the development of military tactis and infrastuctures, so morale, combat ability and discipline in my opinion must be payed in gold costs (troop cost, maintenance), a Prussian's 140% discipline infantry should not cost like a Russian's 100% discipline one. If you want quality, you have to pay for it.
-Land armies should have the same treatment as the navy does, if you get a new troop type you should pay to upgrate them, having 400k troops automatically upgrading for free its a nonsense. This will add more expenses to large nations that want to keep up with military tecnology.
-The navy is too expensive both to mantain and upgrade, in my opinion the majority of the cost should be on costruction and time to construct; having the upgrade cost equal to the construction of a new ship is too much, and why a 200 sailors galeon cost 3 times more than a 1000 men regiment to mantain?
- a suggestion to partially address manpower problems could be that every type of regiment should cost different amount of manpower both to recruit and reinforce, for example 1000 for infantry, 500 for cav and 100 for cannons, modifying the regiment pips to keep the balance.
- show some love for cavalry heavy nations, i think that the inf/cav ratio should be rapresented more in battle, if i have a lot of cav with a 50% ratio i think that the game should try to get into the figth as many cav as possible respecting the ratio ( even because cavarly on battle is faster and gets to figth before the infantry can)
-non accepted cultures should have heavy penalties to forcelimit gained from their provinces too, you need to force them to figth for you if they dont feel part of your nation.
-lower the economic efficiency (expecially trade efficiency) to cripple more the mindless blobbing that solves every problem
-a complete rework on how you can force peace on your opponent, in multiplayer War exhaustion can be ignored in most wars and stabhits are a joke, just stack stab cost discounts and you can keep someone at war forever. I think that War Exhaustion should be more a mechanic representing your nation that forces you to stop a devastating war both wining or losing.
-Could be nice to have a mechanic rapresenting a fort needing repairs after being conquered with maybe a penalty on defense based on the % of the garrison missing, having to resiege from scrap a fort lost 2 months earlier every time basically makes endgame wars where everyone has entire lines of forts a tedious trench warfare

 

[BartonPOL]

IMO the mercs should also be like a "manpower" thing, what i mean, similar thing to banners, you can recruit mercs from region alike, number of mercs could depend on region devastation, war exhaustion or something like that, so the more devastated region, the more mercs you can hire, and thus, the less income these provinces give to the owner (as there's less men to work or such), and, these mercs also should work with the mercs type of manpower, so they can finally be depleted, not that there's an infinite number of men to fight

 

[Searry]

Late Game multiplayer has always suffered from too fast expansion and once money explodes, the number of merc armies explode and that means each war is a huge world war where all fight for continued existence since one war can change the map and future so much.

 

[anduls]

Great. I would like to suggest to not limit merc numbers on force limit. So small, but powerful states like Venice should be able to field larger merc troops. Maybe this can also shift over the time, as mercs became less important, starting from the early 18th century, at least in Europe.

 

[Dasmani]

I recently posted a thread in the suggestion forum about this, but I wanted to summarize my thoughts and add a few more here for visibility.

I think it's very important for the mercenary system to play well with the other major systems in army maintenance: tradition, professionalism, and manpower.

The system I proposed was that mercenary recruitment could be a diplomatic action similar to constructing spy networks that would increase manpower recovery speed by drawing additional manpower from a pool in the region at the cost of ducats. Once your mercenary network is high enough, you could spawn a number of regiments immediately at the cost of monarch points.

After thinking more about it, I think I'd like to see the mercenary regions tied to trade nodes, with the mercenary manpower dependent on trade value (those utter mercenaries, only looking for gold). The pool would be split among nations based on trade power. Whether the mercenary recruitment should be tied to a trade policy or tie up a diplomat to maintain is a tough call though.

Finally, there should be policies, ideas, decisions and events that allow you to increase army tradition and professionalism by recruiting veteran mercenaries and officers. It would be nice to tie these to otherwise underutilized idea groups, even though we've just had a large idea group rebalance.

 

[Armed Avacado]

As a personal fan of defensive ideas and drawing enemy stacks into high-attrition provinces, I approve. Yes, AI running in debt are more likely to sign peace deals, but sometimes it's hard to win that initial 10% warscore when those manpower losses don't effect the army on the field.

 

[I'm gaming]

No difference among ages? As German mercenaries should be different with Chinese mercenaries, mercenaries of Wallenstein should be different with Napoleonic mercenaries.

 

[brifbates]

Finally, 5 years after release, DDRJake and Groogy decide to cure the game's cancer. Hope you'll succeed.

Not really a fair statement. Mercs weren't even close to this broken at release, that happened in later patches. Early limits like the random spawn, not getting your ideas, much higher attrition limits, lower merc limits, random unit types (and not updating with tech) and so on being removed or relaxed created the problem.