Chapter six:
Coat of Arms menu. Part Three.
Brief Military, Policies, Advisors, Tradition, Missions and Decisions
I'm very glad that we made it through the difficult income and inflation bit. It is time to finish this menu and then finally, we can actually start playing this game.
---A little warning, this chapter has become larger than what I expected. Every remaining tab will be discussed as briefly as possible so you will know the basics. After that more information will be given as we progress through the game.---
Next to the
budget screen tab, we find the
military tab. Here's what it looks like.
Any idea what we're looking at here?
Just like in history, almost every nation has an army. I don't need to tell you that those armies were used to fight wars, but also to keep the peace when rebels popped up. EU3 divides the army into three different units which all specialize in either
fire or shock. Do take a note that every
technology group has its own separate units.---This is a mere basic explanation of the workings of the army, it will be fully discussed in the split-off section of this AAR.---
- Infantry. European armies manly consists out of infantry. These guys begin fighting with a pike, but, as our land technology gets more and more advanced, gunpowder is used. Before gunpowder becomes dominant in the battlefield, infantry are not very strong in defeating enemies. Infantry units are capable of sieging a fortress. They are important when assaulting ---will be explained later--- a fort. Infantry are specialized in their fire attribute.
- Cavalry. Cavalry are the guys on horses. In EU3, cavalry and infantry both move at the same speed. These regiments ---one unit of cavalry--- are very important for destroying the enemy in the first 150 years. Cavalry are able to siege a fortress, but can't assault it. Also important is that cavalry weigh more for attrition casualties. ---Attrition will be fully explained in the split-off section.--- The cavalry units specializes in shock.
- Cannons. Cannons cannot be made until they are researched in land technology. They are slower than infantry and cavalry, but are more powerful and can speed up a siege of a enemy fortress a lot. Like infantry, cannons specializes in fire. Something to remember is that cannons can not fight on their own. They will be wiped out! Mix cannons with infantry.
As our land technology gets more advanced, newer and better units appear. Infantry remains infantry though, just better units. Now we field
Latin Medieval Infantry and Latin Knights. Our existing army can be upgraded to better units in a instant. This will get covered once the game gets going.
Besides our land army, we also have a fleet of ships. Those are also categorized.
- Big ships. Big ships are the most powerful ships in the game. Remember that scene from 'Pirates of the Caribean 3' with that big badass Britain ship? Well, that's a big ship. These ships are good at destroying any navy. We also need them to protect our sea lanes once we have established colonies, hence to secure our tariffs.
- Light ships. Light ships are smaller but faster than their big ship counterpart. Great for exploring and as an escort for your transport ships. They do get destroyed easier when compared with big ships. They can also protect our tariffs rate.
- Galleys. A galley is old type of ship used in the Mediterranean area. Thanks to the high shock multiplier on lower naval tech levels and +1 bonus to damage in inland seas---will be covered in the split off section---, they can wreck havoc on your expensive big ships when fighting in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea in the first 100-150 years. Galleys can not protect our tariffs income from overseas.
- Transport ships. These ships can transport our troops are not good at fighting sea battles. We need to make sure those ships are protected when we send them out. Transports are too not able to protect our tariffs sea lanes.
Our naval technology will improve over time and that unlocks new ships. Now we only have a
Carrack, Galley and a Cog. Unfortunately we are not able to upgrade our existing navy to a better one in an instant. We need to build a whole new navy when that happens. Don't worry, those old ships are excellent for fighting
pirates ---will be covered later.---
That was some basic information about our armed forces, it will be covered in depth in the split-off section. Including what those modifiers we see exactly mean and what the optimal composition is for our army
stacks. A
stack is a part of our army grouped together. The army standing in London is called a
stack. Don't confuse a stack with a
regiment, as a regiment is just one thousand men, either infantry, cavalry or cannons. 2 regiments 'stacked' together is called what...? Correct! A stack.
Below the summary of our troops we see something called
War Exhaustion. Again, as the split-off section specializes in War, I won't go into detail here. Suffice to say now is that war exhaustion shows how much support there is for the ongoing war(s). The higher it gets, the more time troops need to get recruited and ships need to be build. Ships and regiments will also become more expensive. But the worst part of war exhaustion is that it increases
Global Revolt Risk. How to deal with war exhaustion and how you get it, will be covered in the split off section.
Now we see two sliders, one for our land troops and one for our fleet. This is our monthly maintenance we need to pay to keep our troops equipped. We also see that we have 7 regiments at the moment and our
support limit ---formerly known as
force limits, here on the forum force limits is used--- is 37. That means that our nation can sustain and equip 37 regiments of men, regardless of those being cavalry, infantry or cannons. Take note that cavalry maintenance costs more than infantry and cannons. If we have more then 37 regiments, our maintenance costs will increase dramatically. It's important to always know your support limits! The same applies for the naval support limits. ---Support / Force limits will be explained in full detail in the split-off section.---
What do those sliders actually do? Well, as you can see here...
...putting a slider towards the left decreases the maintenance cost. However every stack fights with morale. When we decrease the slider ---that means put it to the left--- morale plummets. With low morale our troops won't fight long enough to win a battle! In peace times, it is normal to lower your maintenance slider for land troops. If you put it between 25% and 50% of the slider it will be enough to fight rebels. When going to war though, those sliders needs to be at the full right.
For now, set the maintenance slider for naval fully to the left. ---More on morale in the split off section.---
The next tab is called our
religious and rebellious negotiations tab.
Certain religious decisions can be made here. I will cover those when we need to enact them in the game. More importantly is our
religious tolerance towards other faiths. As you can see, our Catholic faith is tolerated fairly well. The
heretic faith of Orthodoxy is not. All
heathen ---Muslim, Hindu, Buddha etc--- faith is also not tolerated. Those tolerance levels are important as they have an impact on our tax incomes and population growths. We don't need to worry about the tolerance levels right now, only when the Reformation hits in ~1500.
Below the tolerance levels you see a grey icon, that is called the claim
Defender of the Faith button. Once we are eligible to become the DotF, this button will light up. In the game we probably won't become DotF as it will involve us in many wars we don't want to be part of.
The
rebel factions part of the tab will contain demands of rebels when they pop up. They can be anything, from releasing a particular country to changing our religion of the state. Just like in the movies, we don't negotiate with rebels/terrorists! Only when our nation is on the verge of collapse it may be worth it to do it. The demands are always very heavy and we get nothing in return.
To the next tab.
In this tab we can change our government type, select a
National Idea and change our policies.
Feudal monarchy is the best governmental type available for us at the moment, so we won't change that anytime soon. If you click on
Feudal Monarchy you will see a small list of other governmental forms. We won't change at this time. The game has numerous governmental types available.
Monarchies
- Despotic Monarchy
- Empire
- Feudal Monarchy
- Administrative Monarchy
- Absolute Monarchy
- Constitutional Monarchy
- Revolutionary Empire
Republics
- Noble Republic
- Merchant Republic
- Administrative Republic
- Republican Dictatorship
- Constitutional Republic
- Revolutionary Republic
Despotisms
- Enlightened Despotism
- Bureaucratic Despotism
Theocracies
Tribal governments
- Tribal Despotism
- Tribal Federation
- Tribal Democracy
If you want to know more about them, I strongly suggest going to the
Wiki.
The black squares are empty
National Ideas slots. A National Idea is a general policy you take to specialize your nation. They are very beneficial. If you hover over the first slot, it will tell you that we can open it at governmental technology level 4. This is precisely why I advised an
statesman advisor at the court section, he will help to get us to governmental tech 4 sooner. When this happens in the game, we can get to pick from numerous idea's which I will list when we can choose.
It's time again for something important. Our
policies. The sliders you see affect everything we do and can only be changed once every 11 years, depending on what kind of governmental form we have. I will discuss them briefly.
- Centralization vs Decentralization. This determines our grip of our king on our nation. The game modeled it so that centralization is by far better than decentralization.
- Aristocracy vs Plutocracy. Here we can choose if we favor the nobles of our nation or the burghers. These burghers are predominately merchants. Both have very nice bonuses.
- Serfdom vs Free Subjects. Do we want to give our citizens more rights and more liberty or do we keep them on the farm and work as they always did? High serfdom is good for recruitment for our armies and keep stability in check, but Free Subjects reduces the costs for technological advancements and boost morale a bit.
- Innovative vs Narrowminded. Innovative also reduces the costs to advance our technology but is bad for our religion as we won't get missionaries. Remember that we are going to convert in the future? We need to be a bit narrowminded. A further plus for being narrowminded is that it enhances our colonization abilities.
- Mercantilism vs Free Trade. If we chose to be mercantile, we'd be supporting our own domestic trade. This is great for large empires. Free Trade however supports trading in foreign CoTs. I'm a bit shallow here, but we probably go towards Mercantilism when we have established our own CoT. ---For more information, Check this out, made by Naggy.---
- Offensive vs Defensive. Do we favor the attack of the defense? Both have great bonuses, it's quite difficult to say which to favor. Defensiveness can give free fortresses which can be a very good reason to chose that. Offensive helps you to defeat powerful armies...choices choices!
- Land vs Naval. As England we will go naval. This will make colonization much more profitable and a bit more easy as it costs less money. Land is better for land orientated nations like Burgundy for example.
- Quality vs Quantity. Again a difficult choice. Many people here on the forum have different opinions which is better.
These policies can be changed once every 11 years, but that can be decreased when we change to a better government. Certain
events give free
slider movements. For now, centralization is the most important slider movement we can choose.
So put that centralization slider towards the left. Now every slider movement can come with two negative effects and one positive. The centralization slider is the one exception, it only comes with negative
events. National Ideas and the policy slider status both have a great deal of effect what kind of events your nation will receive, for better of worse. Now what did you get when you changed the slider?
That happened to me. We will squash those rebels when we unpause the game!
The next tab is the
leader tab.
Here we can see our
army tradition, discipline and naval tradition.
Land and naval tradition, what is that? Well it is how war is traditionalized in our country, it ranges from 0% to 100%. Do you know of the famous quote 'Prussia is hatched from a cannonball' by Napoleon I? It simulates how well we are in war. A high army tradition will make very good
generals and a high naval tradition will make for very good
admirals. Whenever a general or an admiral is recruited, the respective tradition is lowered by 20% of the amount of tradition you have. Tradition is earned when winning battles and exploring
Terra Incognita ---the white spots on the map---. Land battles for land tradition and sea battles for naval tradition. It will slowly decrease however, so a war once in while is good for tradition.
Discipline is something else though. It resembles the quality of our troops. So if we move the quality vs quantity slider towards quality, discipline will improve. Discipline is important as it determines how good our men are in killing others. When discipline is beneath 100%, we need more men to do the job. When discipline is higher than 100%, fewer men are necessary to do the fighting.
---As a rule of thumb: morale determines how long our troops can fight, discipline says how good they are at it.---
In this tab we can also recruit new generals and admirals. We won't do this however any time soon, as the good generals and admirals only come with a tradition of at least 50%. In order to create one, we need 50 ducats and a diplomat available.
Conquistadors and explorers are the only ones who can explore the Terra Incognita on land and sea respectively. We need those when we go colonizing. Do take note that if we ever get into a war with a country that is still covered in Terra Incognita, our troops can march there even if they aren't led by a explorer.
The button
convert our leader to a general will make our Henry a general! He can die on the field of battle though, so it's not always smart to do it. Even more, remember his stats? The military one was a 3. That means he really isn't good at commanding an army. Luckily we see that we already have a general!
Sir Robert Knolles is pretty good general. He isn't assigned to any army yet, we'll do that later. We see some stats here too. What do we see?
- Fire. That's his fire modifier. That means how good he is with directing fire. This doesn't aid us much because fire only becomes relevant in about 150 years from now.
- Shock. Shock is nice, as these improves our shock ability of our cavalry. 3 pipes ---as they are called--- are pretty good for a starting general. The max is 6 though.
- Maneuverability. How fast is our general? Pretty fast. He can outrun many opponents which is crucial in a war.
- Siege. Is Sir Knolles any good at attacking a fort? Well, a tiny bit.
---The split-off section will cover these stats in more depth.---
The next tab, we are almost there.
In this tab we find yet another type of tradition, namely
cultural tradition. Cultural tradition is if we have any great poets or artistic people. It's also related to our intelligentsia. The higher it gets, the better our
advisors will be. It will slowly increase in peace time but will decrease in war time. We also use up this tradition when we
recruit a advisor. Our naval and land tradition is also shown here.
Below that we see all the advisors in the game. By clicking on one, we can
recruit one for the price of 20% of our current cultural tradition. When we recruit an advisor, he will become available for
hire for us for a year. After that other nations can
hire him. So it is possible to
recruit an advisor when we have a high cultural tradition, but we don't actually going to use him. That way, we can make some money by other countries buying him.
Hover over all of the advisors to see what they do.
In the bottom of the screen is where we find
cultural decisions. These decisions are made to increase our cultural tradition, prestige and technology. Some of them can only be enacted once, while others can be done several times. If you hold your mouse over the question mark '?', you will see what we need to enact a decision. When you hold your mouse above the envelope, we see what every decision does. Explore them a bit.
And now the final tab, the
mission and national decision tab.
As you can see, we have not yet given a
mission. Missions are generated by the game to 'steer a player to play a bit historical.' They give rewards when completing them. Take note that decisions are optional and can be safely ignored. We however will try to follow them throughout the game. We even abuse them a bit
.
Now we see the
national decision part of the screen. This is where very important decisions are made. One of them is the formation of the United Kingdom. Go through the decisions and see which are beneficial ---which are nearly all of them!---
Phew, we got through that long menu. Finally it's time to get the game going!! I hope I was right that these six chapters took about 15 minutes to read. On to the next chapter.
Chapter seven: Your first gameplay day.