It's not a piece of shit, and I enjoy many aspects of the game as well. I'm simply not inclined to make up stuff simply for the sake of giving it an inordinate benefit of the doubt.
100% War Score should mean unconditional surrender
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I find it less of a breach of my suspension of disbelief to conclude that "occupying a province" is meant to represent only provisional strategic control of the province thanks to focusing on a strategic bottleneck or some such (given the measly minimum requirement of 2000 soldiers to execute a siege). With that principle in mind, a conclusion that 100% WS does not equate with complete victory and warrant unconditional surrender is not so difficult in my mind.
Thus, I do not agree with OP that "100% War score should mean unconditional surrender." I don't even know if unconditional surrender was practiced in the European tradition prior to Grant's demand of it at the sieges of Forts Henry and Donelson.
ADDIT: ah, seems that when Nappy was on his short lived come back tour, he was proclaimed an outlaw, and thus his surrender was by definition if not by name "unconditional."
So the concept was not totally unheard of during the period, but certainly not a norm.
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Alternatively, consider it a game mechanic designed to stop countries blobbing instantaneously and to encourage small but consistent expansion. Otherwise alot of games would end up with France occupies Spain/Burgundy and France wins / it's up to the player to defeat France as no other country has a chance to.
If you don't like the mechanic then don't play the game or don't aim for 100% occupation, just go for your wargoal and peace out.
If you don't like the mechanic then don't play the game or don't aim for 100% occupation, just go for your wargoal and peace out.
Exactly. It is far too easy to conquer a province in EUIV, unless "conquer" only means "hold just enough fortresses to dominate movement."
Each province in the game probably has 200+ major market villages, not to mention outlying hamlets and farms. Each of these would be the locus for several thousand people. To safely garrison a village would require maybe 100 men. So, according to my very rough estimate, to "totally conquer a province" would require 20,000 troops, minimum.
Historically, very few states opted for "total conquest" of entire provinces. They opted for "total conquest" of 10 percent of a province, maybe, then trying convinced the other 90 percent that they ought to consider themselves conquered. The most efficient way to do this is a treaty: inflict just enough hurt on the other side so they would give it away. Hence 100% war score = 1-2 provinces transferred.
I'm for buffing defense in general, and also for leaving room for the 1-province nation that simply refuses to be conquered even if you do take the key fortress. But without that, no unconditional surrender is a good enough compromise.
So keep that country occupied at 100% war score, where's problem then?
Then your people suddenly get pissy that you're winning. (Call to peace)
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By golly, it's almost like fitting mechanics to our interpretation of history allows us to cherry pick examples to suit our a priori preferences, regardless of what those preferences are!
This is obviously historically accurate, because it happened at least once, somewhere in the world, at some point between 1444 and 1821.
You realize that he's describing the vast majority of cases here, right? As in the only example he (or I) can think of of unconditional surrender is in the Naponeonic era, and they didn't even ask for that much warscore once they beat him...
Well, historically it didn't work to occupy countries indefinitely - your armies wouldn't want to, the people there wouldn't want you to, it was just bad all around. And the only points of holding onto provinces after the war is over for more than five years are for completely ahistorical reasons, anyway.
You realize I'm on neither side in this quagmire of a pseudo-discussion, right?
I personally find that very difficult to believe when you consider the years it can take to win the siege when a strategic bottleneck would take days, and castles would average somewhere in the range of a couple of weeks to maybe a 3 months absolute tops. Also In that case there should be an extended siege where you do take complete control that requires more troops, and having more troops should drastically increase the rate of the sieges. bottlenecks take days to defeat with more men, in the absolute worst case you can walk around it and cut off the food supply from both sides within a week or two, not two years.
(1) The vast majority of wars were ended briefly after a very small percentage of the country was sacked and a much smaller amount of troops died than "total victory for one side's army" especially when compared to how most people play EU4. This is in part because the AI has completely different rules for WS and willingness to negotiate peace and in practice won't actually give you the partial victory you earned unless you go to 100% WS which leads to (2).
If you want to have smaller historic wars have a war system that rewards you for that. Not the current system that fails utterly to work unless you get complete victory to the man, which leads right back to why people are having this discussion in the first place, if I have to conquer all of france to get anything, I should be able to take it all from them in some scenario despite them having a size above 5 provinces.
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That's ... just not true. If you look at some of the sieges during the 80 Years War, they took months or years (Check for example Siege of Leiden). This was when the Spanish had ample cannons to wage war with.
The issue with siege warfare is that, as long as you have the garrison+1 man and they can't get relief, you'll win. It's a question of time, but you can't lose to a besieged province. In history, we see during numerous European wars how enemies when facing a superior army in the field, gave them the finger from behind great walls, and at some point they signed a peace and the invading army went home without a victory.
I agree with the rest of your post, btw, that's why I don't respond to it.
... what? Name me an example of an unconditional surrender (Of a head-of-state, government body etc, not an army or army official) after the year 1000 and before Napoleon. It was demanded of Napoleon, yeah, was it demanded of anyone before him in anything remotely like the EU4 timeframe?
- I am asking because I don't know of any. There were a few armies, and it also happened a few times in Ancient times (Vercingetorix at Alesia could be said to be an unconditional surrender if you grant Caesars commentaries and that he was a head of state and not just an army general), but in the EU timeframe I know of Napoleon after his 100 days exile.
Well, if your strawmen do not work at first, pile more on, right?!
Okay, so first of all: When we're talking about history, we're talking about actual history. Something where we, apart from VERY few examples, never saw wars in the EU4 style. Occupations like we see in EU4 never* happened. Now that you're aware of that, we can get on to the next point:
EU4 is a game of abstraction. When EU4 decides to divide the world into provinces where each province has 1 controller, 1 owner and 1 fort, that is a huge simplification. 1 siege happening over years is an abstraction - it simulates (Or attempts to) the period through some general, abstracted terms, and has to factor in game balance, game mechanics and how fun/immersive it will be. Standing armies in EU4 (And even any real kind of "national" army) is such an abstraction.
So when the game shows a province that is occupied after 1 siege that took a total of 4 years, you should now be aware that is an abstraction, and it would not have looked like that in the real world even if the outcome would be the same. That 1 siege would have been a number of sieges, of cities and fortifications, and probably a series of battles for strategic areas (Such as fords/bridges, a good mountain pass, whatever have you). You'd probably leave garrisons in the cities and fortifications, and through denying your enemy any effective control over the surrounding area you would force him to the negotiation table.
Any kind of "occupation of the province" is ludicrous. Some players recognise that what EU4 presents is the abstraction, and are thus able to comment on the EU4 abstractions and simulations in terms of their historicity.
What 100% WS in EU4 represents, and how it would look in reality, are two very different things. The Swedish several times invaded Denmark and occupied a number of castles and cities (Even to the point where the EU4 representation would probably be 100% WS), but the Danish king could in a number of ways without effort dismiss Swedish demands. Why? Because they had no control over the country, they had only effectively denied the Danish king control.
These abstractions are fine enough for game mechanics. I think they can be improved, but the 100% WS (And calls for "unconditional surrender") is a symptom of the problems, not what needs to be fixed.
As has been pointed out a number of times, the problem is not that you can't get anymore than 4-5 provinces at 100%, but that you need 50% WS to take the first, at which point you can just as well continue to 99% and take all 4.
The game, through a number of mechanics, incentivises a total war scenario that did not happen pre-WWI.
If we fix the need and incentive to wage nation-wide or region-wide wars, it is much easier to do anything about the sometimes wacky warscore mechanic.
*You can probably find a few nitpicked examples to counter that "never" from an absolute never to an effectively never. I don't care.
My phrasing was terrible with "absolute tops" I was attempting to convey the average length of a siege and the average length of a siege is much shorter than the multi-year sieges we get in EU4 I was attempting to say the average length of sieges should be drastically shorter than we get, the specific post I was responding to was that you were merely trying to take chokepoints of strategic interest. an ideally defensible castle with a great supply of food and unbreachable walls will obviously last longer than most, but you certainly are not going to take months to win any and every checkpoint you happen upon. Even your example was a siege that they specifically say had an abnormally large surplus of food and the siege was broken and resupplied after a couple of months when the army left to do something else.
I have no objection whatsoever to you losing siege stacks from sallies if the average siege length was drastically lowered, especially if a failed sally could win the siege for you entirely. It would be nice if there was some system to cause repeated sieges to cause progressively more damage though, even if you win 3 sieges in a row, if you're only given a week's rest and the neighboring countryside is besieged, you're still not getting more food.
I'm not making straw man arguments, I'm just calling people out for completely making stuff up outside of what's in the game to support essentially "what the game meant to say".
I fail to see how your statement of "fact" has anything to do with my point. It's irrelevant whether wholesale occupations occurred historically; everything in the game (aside from the restrictive warscore) points to the fact they certainly happen in EU4. That may be ahistorical, but that should be corrected by modeling the costs, rather than introducing more ahistorical-ness on top of it.
You're running into game design theory here, and I think I'm inclined to disagree with you on that matter, but oh well.
Yes, things are more complicated IRL/historically than they were in EU4, but that says nothing as to whether a province that is "occupied" as far as the game is concerned is actually "occupied" or not. Really that's a meaningless question anyway.
Really, because you know the game includes "occupation" as a part of war, by that name. But yes, of course, some players know better as to what the game "was trying to say". I on the other hand just take the game at face value, and obviously the game is heavily abstracted (to its detriment I would say), and I maintain that the game's representation of the costs and benefits of occupying a whole country are poor. I can't really tell whether you're disagreeing with me on that matter or not, given how much of your argument is grounded in stuff outside of the game itself.
The problem is that 100% WS is completely and utterly meaningless, so I refuse to entertain comparisons about "what 100% warscore would look like IRL".
I guess this is where we disagree. You're fine with abstractions that require you to bend over backwards in convoluted attempts to justify their historicity (or ahistoricity, I'm not sure which it is with you), whereas I'd like mechanics that actually map onto realistic and meaningful situations at face value.
The solution is better representing the costs of occupying enemy territory, so that we can more historically represent the benefit of occupying enemy territory, without arbitrary balance mechanisms in place (i.e. warscore).
Fair, I misunderstood you then. You're right - my apologies.
@ mcmanusaur:
Was all I needed to read, really. It's not that we disagree about current game mechanics (More specific, total war scenarios and WS), but rather the analretentive nitpicking and misrepresentation you did that put me off.
I'm not going to continue discussing this with you, not just because it's counterproductive to be in disagreement over personality rather than content, but also because it makes me want to kick kittens, which is usually a bad sign.
In regards to the annex/vassal issue: Just add a massive stability penality and diplocost to annexing extremely large nations as result of 100% warscore. Want to take france as whole (even if just to make it a vassal)? Sure, just pay the 800 diplopoints and take -6 stability.
As well, I think it's, gameplay and realism wise, legit to split up a country into countless subnations (aka, releasing nations) if you beat it with a 100%.
As well, I think it's, gameplay and realism wise, legit to split up a country into countless subnations (aka, releasing nations) if you beat it with a 100%.
If 100% warscore doesn't represent unconditional victory, then the gameplay should be changed to represent that. i.e, you shouldn't need to occupy the whole country to get 100%. CK2 did this. You only needed full occupations if the war target was small. If the target is an empire of 50+ provinces, you only need to fully occupy 10 provinces or so to achieve 100% score. CK2 also made it made it so some conquests can be arbitrarily large -- by giving an incentive to continue a war beyond the 100% score minimum.
It's a contradiction to justify the low rewards of 100% warscore by saying it's not a total war, but then requiring a total war in order to achieve it. If the rewards are meant to be constrained and reasonable, then make the amount of fighting necessary also constrained and reasonable.
It's a contradiction to justify the low rewards of 100% warscore by saying it's not a total war, but then requiring a total war in order to achieve it. If the rewards are meant to be constrained and reasonable, then make the amount of fighting necessary also constrained and reasonable.
I agree with this. The problem with EU4's warscore system is that battles and wargoal give you very little warscore, you are pretty much mandated to occupy 30-40% of the enemy even IF you annihilate every army they have and seize the objective. Expecting the player to fight total war for one or three provinces is just... stupid.
Really really old comment I know, but isn't that exactly the same as just making them become a vassal directly from the peace offer?
Completely agreed here.
I've been trying to argue the same thing, and I wish I could have simply thought to use these words. The response is "the game's abstraction is far from the painstaking nature of total war", but even so total war is the closest thing to what it's depicting, so the point still stands.
