Hello
In the light of @DDRJake 's newest dev diary, where he mentioned that in the future the dev team intends to nerf mercenaries, I'd like to play Devil's advocate and explain why, in my opinion, mercenaries are a must in game's current state.
But even though it was the dev diary which inspired me to write this post, these are ideas that I've had for quite a while, and I feel like even if the dev team were to abandon today's diary, this post would still be 'up to date'.
Edit 26.12: I realized after re-reading this whole post again that somewhere along the lines my main point might have been lost, so to make it completely clear. I DO NOT think that mercenaries should be the core of EU4's warfare. What I'm trying to highlight in this post is, that there are certain aspects of the game that need to be taken care of BEFORE mercenaries are nerfed, not after.
Now, to make something completely clear, I've been exclusively MP player for more than 2 years, hence I'll be focusing only on the MP aspect of the game, as I'm simply not knowledgeable enough about SP to make any valid points regarding it.
Alright, so to start off, the reason why, in my opinion, mercenaries should be left in the game as they are(or at most with minor changes) is there are other game mechanics that are in their own way broken/unbalanced or otherwise meaningful enough that mercenaries become a necessity for a healthy campaign. Specifically, these mechanics are(IMO): forts and terrain penalties, economy building and deving.
Economy
As it is, the time required to go from being an undeveloped country to a fully built one is ENORMOUS(for reference, it's a custom to develop every single one of your provinces to at least 20 development, as this threshold unlocks additional building slots, so assuming a country with, say, 8 average dev and 150 provinces it'd take him 1800 development clicks to get there).
I made a web-based save parser which can be used to portray the issue quite well:
This is an "improvement mapmode". It shows not current development, but how many times given province was developed in total.Each light green province in the map was boosted at least 10 times, dark green means an improvement of 30 and more.(this is a map from one of some recently played MP campaigns that I've watched closely. Shoutouts to @Distinct for creating that monstrous Russia that you can see there)
There are countries in that campaign which over the course of 200 years clicked the development button over 2000 times.
There are so many things that you need to do that at some point it becomes much better for player to not under any conditions go to war with anybody, because he still feels like his country is 'underdeveloped' and as it is right now. player wars in EU4 are extremely costly, and if both sides decide to do their best then unless there is a massive discrepancy in their strengths then it will usually also end up in both bankrupting.
Why is that a problem?
Because it's warfare that is currently the much more complex and arguable also more fun and satisfying aspect of the game, and as such the game should do all it can to encourage fighting wars, and this leads to my first suggestion:
1. If you want to nerf mercenaries, then at the very least make economy more interactive, give it some depth that current warfare system has; make it so that 'building up' your country is no longer about brainlessly spamming develop/build button over your entire country for a span of few centuries.
Currently mercenaries contribute positively to the game(or at least to its MP aspect) by giving the attacking side in a war a small advantage, by giving him a small window of time before the enemy fully mercs up aswell, where he can actually push into his enemy's territory and hope to force some good engagements and by giving the defending side in so called "ganks"(wars where one side is massively outnumbered by the other) at least some small chance to fight back.
If this is taken from the game, then something else needs to be added in return, otherwise a huge chunk of MP games will simply turn into a snoozefest, where nobody would ever want to start any war past a certain date, because going on the offensive means a certain death and being destined for irrelevancy.
Forts and terrain penalties
If mercenaries are to be nerfed, then so should be forts. As it is now forts are brokenly strong. They provide players with a possibility of nearly indefinitely delaying their opponent's attacks. Even with full cannon backline, AoR bonus against forts it still takes ages to take down a single lvl 8 fort. And you can have dozens of them spread all over your country, but most importantly, forts provide players with a possibility to fight their enemies in an advantegous terrain. And even though for some of you it might come as something rather natural, it's still not healthy for the game, because terrain penalties right now are simply far too strong. To give an extremely rough estimate -> one -1 in a battle translates into about 7-8% discipline difference(direct effects of a -1 penalty is that you deal on average ~~16% less damage, 32% for a -2 penalty). This, in turn, makes it so that it's at least very difficult to push against most countries, unless you have a massive numerical advantage.
Up until now, mercenaries were a huge help here. They allowed you to quickly assault some forts if your enemy didn't pay enough attention, or to have a siege stack which consists of ~~60-120k troops(depending on timeframe) that didn't eat too much attrition. Nerfing mercenaries, "making attrition more impactful" will in turn nerf declaring any offensive wars, as the attackers will now be practically bound to be completely drained out of their resources and lose unless they have massive numerical advantage.
So what can be done about it?
I, for one, would suggest leaving mercenaries as they are, or maybe at most slightly changing them, by taking away the diplomatic-offensive +50% mercs policy, removing +20% mercs avilable modifier from professionalism and decreasing the base mercenary cap from 20 to 5-10. But assuming that Paradox does actually want to go through with it, there are few things that IMO should be done to balance it out(and frankly, some of them I would suggest even if the dev team abandoned their current ideas for next patch completely)
2. Significantly nerf countries' capabilities to build forts - there are few ways in which this can be done. It might be something simple like increasing their maintenance or simply nerfing base siege phase time. One of the more interesting ideas that I came up with recently(shoutouts to Sunday Wars Universalis ^^) is that each fort could reduce its owners' FL by respectively the amount of troops that it has in garrison, multiplied by, say, 1.5
This would force players to put a lot of effort into thinking where to place their forts, or even whether they need forts at all. Those, who decide to have a lot of them, would then be punished by having their army significantly weakened.
3. Significantly increase supply limits - I personally feel that it's slightly ridiculous, that in a game where(at least at late stages of the game) you need to have at least 100k regiments in your "cannon stacks" to make sure that they don't get wiped in contact with enemy and most provinces at that time have a supply limit of about 40-50, attrition is to be made 'more significant'.
While I do understand and support the overall idea that the game should be requiring for the players when it comes to resource management, as it is right now, EU4 simply provides no tools for players to deal with attrition.
You are practically forced to eat permanently 5% attrition on all of your "cannon stacks".
Due to current army UI being simply bad, and not helping at all when it comes to big scale wars you are also bound to keep losing men due to attrition after any sorts of bigger battles, as managing 20-50 stacks of 40k troops is simply impossible with how the game works right now. Which leads me to another suggestion
4. Improve army UI - there are a lot of things that could really help. It would be, for example, really great if after some huge engagements there was a button, which would allow you to automatically turn a, say 960/0/80 stack into 2x 80/0/40 and 20x40/0/0(according to your templates). It would be also great if there was some way of sending multiple stacks into a distant region without having to separate click different goal provinces for every single one of them(again, even if it is somewhat easy at early stages of the game, it's completely impossible to pull off in late game, where you may have over 50 stacks of troops)
This still, however, doesn't do anything to the issue with terrain penalties that I mentioned at beginning, so:
5. Nerf terrain penalties - the reasoning for that is above. What I meant by 'nerfing" here is that IMO every single current terrain penalty should be reduced by 1, so for example mountains would go to -1, forests, hills, marshes etc would go to 0.
I know that some of you(especially among the SP community) would have huge problems with that last suggestion. I understand that, and frankly I feel that if I was playing SP then I wouldn't want this to be added into the game either. And this brings my final proposition:
6. Introduce custom gameplay settings - long has the conflict between the "SP" and "MP" parts of EU4 community lasted, where both sides felt like the dev team is trying to only satisfy the other one, effectively making both unhappy. The truth is, that it has come to a point where it's no longer possible to develop a game which would satisfy both parties' needs. Looking back at what some of the last DLCs and patches added to the game, as a MP-only player I feel like there was a lot of stuff added(for example. huge boosts to India, army professionalism, recent idea groups revamp) that I maybe would've liked if I was playing playing SP, not MP, and then I see a lot of SP players arguing that they feel like PDX is focusing on MP aspect of the game too much.
I feel like this has come to a point where the only way to satisfy both parties is by giving them bigger control over how their game is going to look like. Similar systems have already been(or will be) added to HoI4 and CK2, and the way I see it could work in EU4, is that simply players(or hosts) would be able to choose from a variety of settings when creating a new campaign such as "mercenary FL%", "attrition cap", "base dev cost" etc.
Even if it wouldn't fix all problems that currently EU4 faces, it would still be a huge step in a right direction(IMO).
So to sum up, thank you very much for reading through this small rant. I wrote this rather spontaneously, without having any specific plan for what I want to write in mind, so I sincerely apologize if I made some mistakes somewhere.
There is one very important thing that I want to stress on. I am fully aware that some of these changes simply wouldn't suit some part of the community. As I stated at the very beginning, I play MP exclusively. I can't, and I'm not trying to speak for the SP community here.
Thanks! And if you have any questions or would like to add something, please do!
In the light of @DDRJake 's newest dev diary, where he mentioned that in the future the dev team intends to nerf mercenaries, I'd like to play Devil's advocate and explain why, in my opinion, mercenaries are a must in game's current state.
But even though it was the dev diary which inspired me to write this post, these are ideas that I've had for quite a while, and I feel like even if the dev team were to abandon today's diary, this post would still be 'up to date'.
Edit 26.12: I realized after re-reading this whole post again that somewhere along the lines my main point might have been lost, so to make it completely clear. I DO NOT think that mercenaries should be the core of EU4's warfare. What I'm trying to highlight in this post is, that there are certain aspects of the game that need to be taken care of BEFORE mercenaries are nerfed, not after.
Now, to make something completely clear, I've been exclusively MP player for more than 2 years, hence I'll be focusing only on the MP aspect of the game, as I'm simply not knowledgeable enough about SP to make any valid points regarding it.
Alright, so to start off, the reason why, in my opinion, mercenaries should be left in the game as they are(or at most with minor changes) is there are other game mechanics that are in their own way broken/unbalanced or otherwise meaningful enough that mercenaries become a necessity for a healthy campaign. Specifically, these mechanics are(IMO): forts and terrain penalties, economy building and deving.
Economy
As it is, the time required to go from being an undeveloped country to a fully built one is ENORMOUS(for reference, it's a custom to develop every single one of your provinces to at least 20 development, as this threshold unlocks additional building slots, so assuming a country with, say, 8 average dev and 150 provinces it'd take him 1800 development clicks to get there).
I made a web-based save parser which can be used to portray the issue quite well:
This is an "improvement mapmode". It shows not current development, but how many times given province was developed in total.Each light green province in the map was boosted at least 10 times, dark green means an improvement of 30 and more.(this is a map from one of some recently played MP campaigns that I've watched closely. Shoutouts to @Distinct for creating that monstrous Russia that you can see there)
There are countries in that campaign which over the course of 200 years clicked the development button over 2000 times.
There are so many things that you need to do that at some point it becomes much better for player to not under any conditions go to war with anybody, because he still feels like his country is 'underdeveloped' and as it is right now. player wars in EU4 are extremely costly, and if both sides decide to do their best then unless there is a massive discrepancy in their strengths then it will usually also end up in both bankrupting.
Why is that a problem?
Because it's warfare that is currently the much more complex and arguable also more fun and satisfying aspect of the game, and as such the game should do all it can to encourage fighting wars, and this leads to my first suggestion:
1. If you want to nerf mercenaries, then at the very least make economy more interactive, give it some depth that current warfare system has; make it so that 'building up' your country is no longer about brainlessly spamming develop/build button over your entire country for a span of few centuries.
Currently mercenaries contribute positively to the game(or at least to its MP aspect) by giving the attacking side in a war a small advantage, by giving him a small window of time before the enemy fully mercs up aswell, where he can actually push into his enemy's territory and hope to force some good engagements and by giving the defending side in so called "ganks"(wars where one side is massively outnumbered by the other) at least some small chance to fight back.
If this is taken from the game, then something else needs to be added in return, otherwise a huge chunk of MP games will simply turn into a snoozefest, where nobody would ever want to start any war past a certain date, because going on the offensive means a certain death and being destined for irrelevancy.
Forts and terrain penalties
If mercenaries are to be nerfed, then so should be forts. As it is now forts are brokenly strong. They provide players with a possibility of nearly indefinitely delaying their opponent's attacks. Even with full cannon backline, AoR bonus against forts it still takes ages to take down a single lvl 8 fort. And you can have dozens of them spread all over your country, but most importantly, forts provide players with a possibility to fight their enemies in an advantegous terrain. And even though for some of you it might come as something rather natural, it's still not healthy for the game, because terrain penalties right now are simply far too strong. To give an extremely rough estimate -> one -1 in a battle translates into about 7-8% discipline difference(direct effects of a -1 penalty is that you deal on average ~~16% less damage, 32% for a -2 penalty). This, in turn, makes it so that it's at least very difficult to push against most countries, unless you have a massive numerical advantage.
Up until now, mercenaries were a huge help here. They allowed you to quickly assault some forts if your enemy didn't pay enough attention, or to have a siege stack which consists of ~~60-120k troops(depending on timeframe) that didn't eat too much attrition. Nerfing mercenaries, "making attrition more impactful" will in turn nerf declaring any offensive wars, as the attackers will now be practically bound to be completely drained out of their resources and lose unless they have massive numerical advantage.
So what can be done about it?
I, for one, would suggest leaving mercenaries as they are, or maybe at most slightly changing them, by taking away the diplomatic-offensive +50% mercs policy, removing +20% mercs avilable modifier from professionalism and decreasing the base mercenary cap from 20 to 5-10. But assuming that Paradox does actually want to go through with it, there are few things that IMO should be done to balance it out(and frankly, some of them I would suggest even if the dev team abandoned their current ideas for next patch completely)
2. Significantly nerf countries' capabilities to build forts - there are few ways in which this can be done. It might be something simple like increasing their maintenance or simply nerfing base siege phase time. One of the more interesting ideas that I came up with recently(shoutouts to Sunday Wars Universalis ^^) is that each fort could reduce its owners' FL by respectively the amount of troops that it has in garrison, multiplied by, say, 1.5
This would force players to put a lot of effort into thinking where to place their forts, or even whether they need forts at all. Those, who decide to have a lot of them, would then be punished by having their army significantly weakened.
3. Significantly increase supply limits - I personally feel that it's slightly ridiculous, that in a game where(at least at late stages of the game) you need to have at least 100k regiments in your "cannon stacks" to make sure that they don't get wiped in contact with enemy and most provinces at that time have a supply limit of about 40-50, attrition is to be made 'more significant'.
While I do understand and support the overall idea that the game should be requiring for the players when it comes to resource management, as it is right now, EU4 simply provides no tools for players to deal with attrition.
You are practically forced to eat permanently 5% attrition on all of your "cannon stacks".
Due to current army UI being simply bad, and not helping at all when it comes to big scale wars you are also bound to keep losing men due to attrition after any sorts of bigger battles, as managing 20-50 stacks of 40k troops is simply impossible with how the game works right now. Which leads me to another suggestion
4. Improve army UI - there are a lot of things that could really help. It would be, for example, really great if after some huge engagements there was a button, which would allow you to automatically turn a, say 960/0/80 stack into 2x 80/0/40 and 20x40/0/0(according to your templates). It would be also great if there was some way of sending multiple stacks into a distant region without having to separate click different goal provinces for every single one of them(again, even if it is somewhat easy at early stages of the game, it's completely impossible to pull off in late game, where you may have over 50 stacks of troops)
This still, however, doesn't do anything to the issue with terrain penalties that I mentioned at beginning, so:
5. Nerf terrain penalties - the reasoning for that is above. What I meant by 'nerfing" here is that IMO every single current terrain penalty should be reduced by 1, so for example mountains would go to -1, forests, hills, marshes etc would go to 0.
I know that some of you(especially among the SP community) would have huge problems with that last suggestion. I understand that, and frankly I feel that if I was playing SP then I wouldn't want this to be added into the game either. And this brings my final proposition:
6. Introduce custom gameplay settings - long has the conflict between the "SP" and "MP" parts of EU4 community lasted, where both sides felt like the dev team is trying to only satisfy the other one, effectively making both unhappy. The truth is, that it has come to a point where it's no longer possible to develop a game which would satisfy both parties' needs. Looking back at what some of the last DLCs and patches added to the game, as a MP-only player I feel like there was a lot of stuff added(for example. huge boosts to India, army professionalism, recent idea groups revamp) that I maybe would've liked if I was playing playing SP, not MP, and then I see a lot of SP players arguing that they feel like PDX is focusing on MP aspect of the game too much.
I feel like this has come to a point where the only way to satisfy both parties is by giving them bigger control over how their game is going to look like. Similar systems have already been(or will be) added to HoI4 and CK2, and the way I see it could work in EU4, is that simply players(or hosts) would be able to choose from a variety of settings when creating a new campaign such as "mercenary FL%", "attrition cap", "base dev cost" etc.
Even if it wouldn't fix all problems that currently EU4 faces, it would still be a huge step in a right direction(IMO).
So to sum up, thank you very much for reading through this small rant. I wrote this rather spontaneously, without having any specific plan for what I want to write in mind, so I sincerely apologize if I made some mistakes somewhere.
There is one very important thing that I want to stress on. I am fully aware that some of these changes simply wouldn't suit some part of the community. As I stated at the very beginning, I play MP exclusively. I can't, and I'm not trying to speak for the SP community here.
Thanks! And if you have any questions or would like to add something, please do!
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