Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #23 - Fronts and Generals

[lachek]

Thank You for answers! So do I understand right: when the war starts (after we finish preparation stage) we have little to none influence on events? I really would hate if those memes about Victoria 3 warfare being just a risk game were true

You can give new Orders to Generals at any time; choose to mobilize more of them; give Orders to Admirals, which are quite different from those available to Generals and which we'll learn more about next week; choose to activate more Conscripts (more on that in a couple of weeks); choose to move them to different Fronts or focus on specific Fronts; and handle all the economic aspects of the war and its impact on your industry and Pops, to name a few things you might need to deal with during war, in addition to all the stuff you usually deal with during peace.

 

[PDX_Maciej]

Can someone please explain - why I see Victoria 3 DD only about 3-4 pm GMT on THURSDAYS when they are dated WEDNESDAYS?

We are implementing DDs ahead of time to make sure that everything works as it should - and hitting "Publish" button on Thursdays. Sometimes it may result in a date inconsistency.

 

[lachek]

Can generals die in battle? And if so, what happens to their interest group? And to the troops they are commanding?

Generals dying in battle would be a random event type thing, there's no specific mechanics for this. It is however not uncommon for Generals to gain various Conditions during war, which affects their health and can cause them to die at some point in the future. This can also happen naturally due to age.
When Generals die their Interest Group will lose the Clout they conferred upon them and their troops would be reassigned to other Generals, or the Garrisons if nobody has enough Command Limit for them.

 

[lachek]

I think you will still run into a lot of these corner cases when dealing with fronts against multiple neighbouring countries. Also, very longs fronts bring up their own difficulties: from a supply and combat perspective, it should actually matter where troops are concentrated along the front. Some parts will be in high infrastructure areas and some parts in distant hinterlands. With a very long front, a general's troops could effectively be teleporting from battle to battle.

We've definitely run into a lot of edge cases with how Fronts behave while developing this system, but it currently looks quite stable.
Since we actually compute how many units are allowed to be involved in a given battle and don't throw all of a General's men into battle after battle, the risk of units "teleporting" even along long fronts is in practice virtually non-existent.

 

[DebbieElla]

Do not feed the trolls. Report and move on. Infractions handed out, thread cleaned up.

 

[lachek]

And if a front splits? Say, the Italians and French push into Bavaria in WW1 and link up, but the Germans rally and push them back, with the front re-splitting at the Swiss border. (With some of the German minor state coalitions that can plausibly exist, I'd expect a lot of this if we see Prussian- or Bavarian-led alliance groups fighting in the 1850s or so.)

Then they split, the Generals decide where to go, and if any newly created Front ends up unstaffed (maybe you only had 1 General on the Front that split) you are notified.

 

[lachek]

In case of one general having capacity to command all armies from a specific strategic region, there is some advantage in recruiting more than one general per strategic region?

1. Flexibility; having Generals with different qualities can be a good thing
2. Political concerns; having a single General in command of all your troops could make one Interest Group too cocky / powerful
3. Command Limit; if you have a huge army, or want the ability to command a large number of conscripts, you might need several high-ranking Generals to effectively command them all

 

[lachek]

I can think of one reason fronts could be split: terrain. With a giant front, how can I make sure my mountain expert general sticks to the mountains?

Your mountain expert will favor defending in the mountains if this is possible. But he can't hunker down in the mountains and never risk getting attacked outside of a mountain province, because he's been charged to defend the entire Austrian front - not to avoid engagements with the enemy if a mountain encounter is impossible. If there are multiple defending Generals on that front though, this increases his chances to only be engaged in his preferred terrain. You tell your Generals who to advance and defend against; they try to accomplish this to the best of their ability given the resources you've made available to them.

 

[lachek]

Does impassable terrain exist in some form? And if it does exist, does it split frontlines?

If it does not exist, is there a possibilty that it will be added later, as has been the case with most other games?

Impassable terrain exists and will split Fronts, yes. However, since province-based unit movements are not a thing in Victoria 3, there's less need for very small patches of impassable terrain that would otherwise cause a lot of Front fragmentation. Most impassable terrain in Victoria 3 is of the "inhospitable wasteland" variety like deserts and tundra.

 

[lachek]

I've been playing the company's games for about 20 years.

I have to say that I am satisfied. It will of course depend heavily on the execution of the calculation models.

Will there be a way to maneuver or train the commanders?

Do the commanders also have a nationality? I mean by hiring a gifted Pole as Russia and then maybe get a Polish uprising.

Commanders will gain experience over time and faster while in the field. This affects the rate at which they gain or improve their Traits. You cannot explicitly "train" them though, it's assumed they're always trying to get better.
All characters have a Culture, and while the Generals you recruit tend to mostly be of your primary culture(s) it's possible for minority culture Generals to join cultural uprisings.

 

[lachek]

One thing I'm having trouble visualizing is how front lines would work when you're fighting with someone against a common enemy. Can you station troops/make a front line in allied territory (the part about Finland and Prussia vs Russia seems to confirm this, but I am still having trouble visualizing it)? If a front pushes into enemy territory, who occupies the newly taken land if you have more than one country fighting on that front? And is land "occupied" in the same way as it is in Victoria 2 (where you essentially can't interact with it) or Hoi4 (where you can build infrastructure/factories)?

You would give your General a Defend Order, and when prompted which Front to defend, select the Finnish-Russian Front (which already exists, since Finland and Russia are hostile towards each other). If you're actually Advancing that Front on behalf of Finland, it's still Finland that is the "occupier" since this is the Front that has moved. You cannot directly interact with occupied territory (it'd suck to have had a state occupied for a couple of days during which the enemy just demolished all your factories and made half a million people unemployed) but you hurt it indirectly - more details on that in a few weeks.

 

[lachek]

Are troops assigned completely automatically, or do we have some control over it? If I have two generals in a strategic region, can I give all my tank to one of them, or are they split randomly or proportionally? Also, if I have only a single, sparsely populated state in a strategic region, does that mean I cannot use the troops there in a meaningful way without creating an expensive general purely for that state?

Troops are assigned automatically, to some degree in accordance with Rank, but also prioritizing minimizing fracturing between military buildings. So a certain General is likely to get all 10 Battalions from the Barracks in one state, while another get 20 from three different states, rather than the first getting 2-3 and the second getting 5 from each state. This way you can tell which General has command of units from which Barracks and make adjustments accordingly.

Battalions from Strategic Regions without Generals can still defend their region from incursions, but do so completely hands-off without the benefit of a General's trait and with no ability to concentrate them on a specific Front. But a single General with low Command Limit is not particularly expensive in Bureaucracy, virtually all countries would hire one in that situation without breaking a sweat.

 

[lachek]

What happens to troops when the states in which their barracks are located are conquered by the enemy?

They can no longer be supplied by their Barracks, which will cause the General's supply score to drop proportionally to how large a percentage of the force they make up. This in turn decreases the max morale of all troops under that General's command.

 

[lachek]

With this new mobilization system, how will garrisons work? For example, in places like Gibraltar, Hong Kong, etc. you might want to constantly keep relatively large numbers of troops at high readiness. Do you just build lots of barracks in these places?

And if you build barracks overseas, will army pops migrate from the homeland to fill them if there are not enough eligible local recruits? In places like Gibraltar there might not be enough elegible local pops to properly garrison them. Not to mention you might not want a garrison with local pops if you fear a local rebellion.

Yes, you build Barracks to recruit soldiers who go into the Garrison by default, and will only leave it if they're assigned to a mobilized General.
Since Barracks are buildings, they hire according to the same priorities as other government buildings. If they run out of local qualifying Pops to hire they won't forcibly move people from other parts of your country there, but over time people will move there naturally to take those available jobs.

 

[lachek]

In CK3, there's a system where within a battle, there are a bunch of advantage rolls that add a bit of extra strength to one side or the other. The trouble is that because each battle consists of many such independent rolls, the variance washes out and the rolls barely matter. Where do you strike the balance of variance with fronts and battles? Does any individual battle really matter if there are going to be many of them before the front is won or lost?

A 100 vs 20 front is a "sure thing", but what ranges of strength ratios do you envision not being a "sure thing"? In a vacuum, how should we think about the odds of victory in a 60 vs 40 front, for example, assuming all else is equal?

All other things being equal and taken as an average, intuitively I'd say the odds of a 60 / 40 Front should work out to about 70 / 30 with this system.

With a traditional system where all troops in a stack are involved in every battle, there can still be a number of variables that smooth out the squared effect of numeric advantage (like combat width, for example) but what it comes down to is usually the dice in that first battle. If the first battle favors the underdog, the post-battle numbers might be 40 / 35 and at this point all bets are off. But if the first battle favors the advantaged side, it might be 55 / 20 and then the rest is just a given.

The other aspect of relevance is that our peace system doesn't necessarily require a front to be "won or lost" - it can sometimes be enough to have made only a partial incursion to force a peace deal, without wiping out the other country's whole army. So even if your 60 / 40 has been reduced to only 30 / 20 and not the big win you hoped for, if you've made gains in the process that might be enough to get what you want. More on peace in a few weeks.

 

[lachek]

I have two questions.
The first one is related to the size of wars, since the DD mention border skirmishes. Will it be possible to keep a war between large nations limited?
Let's say I'm fighting the AI for an interest we both see as secondary, if I mobilize only partially can I expect them to do the same or they will always fight with full strenght? If I win the first few battles, would they accept a peace offer where I ask for less than my original war goal so we can both avoid a costly continuation of the war or it's always a fight to exhaustion? I understand limited wars are possible in theory, but is the AI capable of understanding it?

This is precisely our aim, and so far I'm quite hopeful.

The second question is related to asymmetrical warfare, both internal and international.
Is there a guerrilla tactic? From what I see here only traditional warfare between organized armies is modeled. I think this new system is exceptionally suited to represent also behind the line military actions, anti-rebel operations and so on. Please consider this.

There is no specific "guerilla warfare" mode, though I agree with you that this system is well suited to it and we have discussed it internally already. It's unlikely we can include this for release but it seems very likely to appear in the future. On that note I can also mention that "limited wars" in the sense of wars limited to a certain geographic region (e.g. colonial wars) is also something we think would work very well in this system, and are considering in much the same way.

 

[lachek]

Speaking of which, will each province have a name? I always disliked the fact that HOI4 removed that. It would give provinces more of a purpose in the game, if only a cosmetic one. Provinces getting less and less important is my main worry about this game so far.

No Because if I asked people to write unique names for 40,000+ provinces they'd quit
On the upside, there are 4-5 named cities in every state region, which means over 3000 uniquely named specific locations!

 

[lachek]

Can you give some insight into the factors that decide how big a battle is?

We're currently fine-tuning this actually, but some variables we're using currently include the base command limit of the Generals involved, the size of the Garrisons, the power differential, and the length of the Front. Tech will also play a role at some point, so early battles tend to be smaller than the potential meat-grinders towards endgame.

 

[lachek]

I agree. I like the concept of having fronts where you assign generals and troops. Because Vic2 Wars are just a drag of bringing all your stacks to a single place and then play hunter-stack-a-moles and then carpet sieging everything. On the other hand, given the example above, there will actually be a SINGLE front between USA and Canada? That feels off. Why not a simplified battle planner from HoI4? Where we can give generals more specific commands besides: GO THERE, START WALKING FORWARD, STOP ONLY WHEN A PEACE DEAL IS REACHED.

In the case of US/Canada, the Fronts would be bisected by the Great Lakes at least. There are also a great many decentralized nations that would interfere with longer Fronts from time to time.

 

[lachek]

How dependent on strategic regions is this feature?

Let me put a mockup example. Germany blobbed all over Europe and now are at war with Russia. There are two theoretical strategic regions in westernmost Russia, let's say the Baltic strategic region and the Ukrainian strategic region.

Let's say the front between Germany and Russia encompasses all of the Baltic region, then a tiny snippet of the Ukrainian region. Are we going to have to assign a small number of battalions and a general to that tiny snippet of an Ukrainian region or will the entire front between Germany and Russia be one whole unified front with no splits due to strategic regions?

The latter. Splitting Fronts by Strategic Region would be way too arbitrary and annoying to manage since Fronts shift around. Strategic Regions are only used to determine the "home" of Generals and Battalions.