Alright, I'm going to make an argument for the return of in-combat attrition.

[hashinshin]

So a long time ago Paradox removed in-combat attrition. Last patch they removed (or intensely nerfed) rotating your troops out and back in to a battle. In my opinion these two changes have made made multiplayer wars and large AI wars very tedious. They come down to both sides doomstacking 200k+ troops in to a battle, and then watching for months as the battle resolves itself. All strategic play is removed, and enjoyable positioning and repositioning for sieges/better fights has been removed. While troop rotating wasn't THAT exciting, it was at least something to do while doomstacks duked it out.

I think in-combat attrition was removed to begin with because the AI never quite understood it and would stack their entire army in to a battle and get attrition to oblivion, however I don't think a fix for that is THAT hard, and adding back in-combat attrition would do a lot to make the game play a lot more historically (how many wars were one-front giant 300k vs. 300k fights?) Also, since the AI often fails to understand doomstacking and will put armies EVERYWHERE it might help them actually be competent in the face of player doomstacking.

In-combat attrition would bring back punishing doomstacking . Right now worst case scenario is you take one tick of 5% attrition before splitting up your armies post-battle and lose a grand total of like 10k troops after winning a battle. It would mean holding up a mountain/hill/etc. with a smaller army against a larger one would actually be a good decision, as the opponents while still likely winning would take attrition the whole way making it a costly move.

If not in-combat attrition then maybe some other mechanics to punish doomstacking? Reducing siege timers by 15-20% for example so people can actually complete sieges before the rotating doomstack pushes everyone back. (I also think reducing siege timers would be good overall for the entire game, both for historical sake and for sanity sake.) Or maybe attrition that only starts to trigger when above 100k troops, though that would be a bandaid.

I think Victoria 2 has the best combat system of the Vicky2 CK2 EU4 set, and EU4 should try best to emulate it, as an aside. Watch any AAR of EU4 multiplayer and Vicky2 multiplayer and you'll see how much more interesting the Vicky2 wars are.

 

[grommile]

I think in-combat attrition was removed to begin with because the AI never quite understood it and would stack their entire army in to a battle and get attrition to oblivion, however I don't think a fix for that is THAT hard,

Given that they regard AI attrition handling as hard enough that it doesn't take naval attrition at all and the maximum attrition cap is pinned at 5% even while conducting a siege in a scorched Arctic province during a Harsh Winter, I wouldn't bet on your difficulty assessment being on-target.

If not in-combat attrition then maybe some other mechanics to punish doomstacking? Reducing siege timers by 15-20% for example so people can actually complete sieges before the rotating doomstack pushes everyone back. (I also think reducing siege timers would be good overall for the entire game, both for historical sake and for sanity sake.)

While I would love shorter sieges as a way to definitively settle the question "should I build forts anytime ever?" with the word "No.", you can't just "reduce siege timers"; you then also have to audit the impact on the (already usually questionable) value of Defensiveness bonuses.

 

[tinculin]

Can't say I agree with this because I feel battles go on far too long & should be resolved far faster.

During this period it was not uncommon for battles to be over in under a single day.

 

[hashinshin]

Can't say I agree with this because I feel battles go on far too long & should be resolved far faster.

During this period it was not uncommon for battles to be over in under a single day.

A large part of this is because people stack SO MANY troops in to a battle over combat width that you have 4/5 of the armies just sitting back waiting to fight, not contributing damage.

 

[CrabHelmet]

Can't say I agree with this because I feel battles go on far too long & should be resolved far faster.

During this period it was not uncommon for battles to be over in under a single day.

I feel like there needs to be a necessary level of abstraction - if battles were over in a day, the player would have no way to command a retreat or use a bait army under the current system. If you wanted to have day-long battles, you'd need to have some sort of way to tell armies to retreat at a particular damage before the battle began, and you'd need to be able to tell an army to use a particular 'tactic' that can no longer be emulated by troop movements on the map like bait-and-switch.

 

[tinculin]

Yeah I'll concede that - armies would need to be able to be told to avoid battle, skirmish, retreat, hold etc which would be a lot more work.

The whole attrition discussion feels like taking advantage of a flaw in game design though I appreciate your opinion differs.

 

[CrabHelmet]

Yeah I'll concede that - armies would need to be able to be told to avoid battle, skirmish, retreat, hold etc which would be a lot more work.

The whole attrition discussion feels like taking advantage of a flaw in game design though I appreciate your opinion differs.

I actually agree with you re: in-combat attrition. I hate the attrition cap, too. I understand the AI can't cope with it, but I'd genuinely be happy with a "make the AI better" expansion rather than TAGs in central Africa I'll never play.

 

[hashinshin]

I actually agree with you re: in-combat attrition. I hate the attrition cap, too. I understand the AI can't cope with it, but I'd genuinely be happy with a "make the AI better" expansion rather than TAGs in central Africa I'll never play.

I don't think it would be THAT difficult. Just hard-cap the AI to never go in to a battle that already has 100k troops.

 

[CrabHelmet]

I don't think it would be THAT difficult. Just hard-cap the AI to never go in to a battle that already has 100k troops.

I don't think it's that simple. I mean, there may be occasions when going into a battle that already has 100k troops could be vital. There's a trade-off between extra deaths through attrition and lost warscore, lost morale, possibility of local stackwipe from pursuit, possibly the finishing of the siege in said province, etc. Making good AI is hard.

 

[Politic Revolutionnaire]

Tell m

I don't think it's that simple. I mean, there may be occasions when going into a battle that already has 100k troops could be vital. There's a trade-off between extra deaths through attrition and lost warscore, lost morale, possibility of local stackwipe from pursuit, possibly the finishing of the siege in said province, etc. Making good AI is hard.

Tell me about it

 

[Nikoleis]

Why not simply putting a combat penalty when above the max units in a combat width, due to difficulties to command so many troops? So larger armies are not getting their full combat power, meaning you have to choose between morale boost or stronger soldiers. Just put a -1% Combat ability by unit above the limit so it is not harsh enough to make stack size babysitting a chore, yet preventing deathstacks as a 40k troops in the 1500 might get around -10 /-15% power overall, leading to higher losses (units unable to retreat due to allies, bigger risk of diseases spreading from the wounded, mismanagement of units getting in each other's way or following the wrong order...). Of course, the penalty cancels out when losses are being accumulated, so after a bunch of assault, you get you fully powered units back.

 

[Chaingun]

My concern is that the way game is currently balanced, if you don't have good military nations ideas or ahead of time in MIL-tech, you're screwed unless you can achieve extreme numerical superiority when fighting someone like late game France. Guess who will be taking the lion's share of attrition in this case. (Not saying I agree with that balance, but that it must be considered.)

 

[TheMeInTeam]

My concern is that the way game is currently balanced, if you don't have good military nations ideas or ahead of time in MIL-tech, you're screwed unless you can achieve extreme numerical superiority when fighting someone like late game France. Guess who will be taking the lion's share of attrition in this case. (Not saying I agree with that balance, but that it must be considered.)

On the contrary, attrition is one of the few things that damages elite troops similarly to nations with standard military NIs. The combination of attrition and assault threat let nations with inferior military NIs compete with the Frances and Prussias of the world back when you had a 15% cap and could assault. You could use numerical superiority and/or maneuverability to punish them for putting their space marines out of position, assaulting down provinces or burning away their manpower without fighting. Without the freebie morale recovery after battles, elite stacks could be worn down and would have to manually retreat or risk wipe.

My understanding is that those things were removed because the AI could not handle them, but perhaps the design really is just to ram armies into each other as the only significant war tactic in the game. The patching has increasingly pushed it that way.

The AI's biggest problem with attrition occurs before battles. It has a tendency to clump up 60-100 size stacks and run province to province taking 5% attrition for months/years on end. Needless to say, when the cap was 15% that was a massacre on some terrains. However movement skill has been increasingly removed from the game. If the motivation wasn't to simplify the game for AI and rookie players, what was the motivation? I find it hard to accept a design goal of making the game more shallow on purpose, which is why I took this as an AI limitation change.

Another problem area for the AI is move-lock. It was supposed to help the AI but before it was implemented I gave a bullet point list on how to abuse such a rule against the AI. The implementation didn't make it past #1. Maybe that was a performance-driven change to stop calc spam on the move-stop dance?

 

[CrabHelmet]

I am fairly sure the move-lock actually hurt the AI more than it helped it. The AI is so easy to bait now, much easier than it ever used to be.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I am fairly sure the move-lock actually hurt the AI more than it helped it. The AI is so easy to bait now, much easier than it ever used to be.

Yes, but several of us called that out pre-implementation. If it was not a performance improver, it did nothing but add annoyance to controlling units without pausing. There are multiple ways to force AI engagements into mountains now, and you can reinforce attacked stacks faster while the AI is committed to walking into them. The allegation that this would help the AI was never plausible.

 

[hashinshin]

Well I think at any rate there needs to be a solution to deathstacking. While in the past I felt I could legitimately out-war another player, now it basically comes down to dice roles and basically checking the value of each country's economy+military and then assigning a winner based on that, since all you can really do is repeatedly attack/defend farmland/grassland.

My concern is that the way game is currently balanced, if you don't have good military nations ideas or ahead of time in MIL-tech, you're screwed unless you can achieve extreme numerical superiority when fighting someone like late game France. Guess who will be taking the lion's share of attrition in this case. (Not saying I agree with that balance, but that it must be considered.)

As of right now the combat width pretty much takes care of making sure france and prussia beat everyone anyway.

Plus, it's a bad idea to balance the entire game around the possibility of brandenburg getting big. I think the ol' bberg has needing some of their ideas tuned down for awhile anyway.

 

[bbqftw]

In general, from SP perspective I really didn't like the attrition changes either.

I mean, in old patch versions you actually had to plan with invading Russia, and you were punished increasingly for sieging more and more inland (because occupied land still counted as hostile), and you were rewarded for actually moving your stacks back to safe territory during the winter months.

Frankly, attrition is pretty much negligible at all stages of the game right now, unless you're playing some poor country surrounded by tropical forts. I wish it would matter more.

 

[darkfireslide]

Let's not forget that even if you or the AI do run out of manpower, you can blob mercs to cover for it anyway, which cost ducats instead of manpower for attrition. I don't know. The fort system is neat but I do kinda miss having to siege every individual province, with sieges not taking upwards of 3 years a pop. It definitely made the game more strategic since you could actually maneuver in enemy territory. Plus, late game forts need something like what, 40-60 cannons to get the full siege bonus? It's a little silly.

 

[SPAMbuca]

Yup and by then these stacks get tons of attrition too. It's especially ridiculous to have lvl 8 forts in areas that have a very low supply limit like under 30k while you are expected to siege that fort with tons of artillery for starters. I'd at least say that higher fortlevels should only be allowed to be built in provinces with high development and/forcelimit. It's just not fun to have the AI "fort spam" in the late game and that each fort takes ages and ages to siege down.

 

[hashinshin]

My MP group uses a mod that nerfs forts to 2/3/4/5 from 2/4/6/8. It helps the late game. We got the point where people pretty much refused to play 1700s+ since the fort system scales out of control late game.

I'm considering adding in-combat attrition to the mod now too, since every war devolves in to rotating doomstacks, with everyone stacking on the player that used offensive+quality to get a good general+discipline. Which gets a bit silly when you think about it, quantity players stacking their enormous troop count on to another player and effectively ignoring their low discipline+bad generals.