Are there too many available military leader slots now?

[LucasG21]

Hello all. The recent patch made it possible to gain extra leader slots by increasing your force limit, meaning that you have slightly more free mil leaders available. However, combined with bonuses from ideas and techs, this can rapidly add up. As a result, without even really trying, it is now possible to have more leader slots than you could possibly need. This ends up diluting the actual value of these extra leader slots.

Pictured is an example of a recent France game of mine. Of course, I do benefit from two helpful Idea Sets, but I feel as though their actual value is reduced by the vast number of ways I have to increase the number of slots. What do you think? Is this a real problem, or just a minor difference?

 

[TolHydra]

I agree that managing super late-game armies with a limited selection of leaders was tedious, yet up to that point having more than double the amount you need makes the whole thing meaningless. And to be honest, it's rare for a campaign to continue after the 1650s so those super large force limit scenarios aren't as common to begin with. Especially considering you tend to always have slightly more mil than you need so you can go above the limit depending on the situation.

Besides, I kinda liked that effectively managing a super large military was strenuous on at least something. It was just unfortunate that the limitation was abstracted to the degree of tied-up magic points.

Let's not even mention those admiralty slots, who even uses 7 admirals at the same time. They are not exactly free but maybe I don't have that sigma ”let's waste 300+ dip to dab on the AI” mindset.

 

[jamal bakr]

I agree that managing super late-game armies with a limited selection of leaders was tedious, yet up to that point having more than double the amount you need makes the whole thing meaningless. And to be honest, it's rare for a campaign to continue after the 1650s so those super large force limit scenarios aren't as common to begin with. Especially considering you tend to always have slightly more mil than you need so you can go above the limit depending on the situation.

Let's not even mention those admiralty slots, who even uses 7 admirals at the same time. They are not exactly free but maybe I don't have that sigma ”let's waste 300+ dip to dab on the AI” mindset.

well, no one used tons of admirals because for the longest time you had really limited leader slots and so you wanted (at most) one admiral for your deathstack. Now you can get 7 or w/e, might lead to new interesting tactics with mass blockading.

 

[TolHydra]

well, no one used tons of admirals because for the longest time you had really limited leader slots and so you wanted (at most) one admiral for your deathstack. Now you can get 7 or w/e, might lead to new interesting tactics with mass blockading.

I may make use of at least some of those slots, if one admiral didn't cost 50 dip by default. If they were much cheaper, sure.

 

[bokorthedust]

I think it's a great change. I always found it annoying that I have an army of hundreds of thousands of man and only 5 generals in between them. And I think it's quite well balanced too, 80 FL for +1 means that even as the military hegemon you get +12 and that's a reasonable number because you still have more stacks than leaders if you want to manage the supply limit and attrition. I honestly don't think it severely dilutes those ideas that give leader slots either.

 

[Saat98]

Mid-late game, I usually use 40k stacks (and I merge 2 of them for big wars where a 40k stack might get stackwiped.) So late game, I would have a general per stack/per every 2 stacks in this patch. In my recent WC, I used around 6 stacks for ROTW and 10-15 mega stacks for Europe. The only microing I really had to do with generals was, after each war in the ROTW, sending my generals to Europe and viceversa. As I had a ton of mil points, so I wouldn't have minded paying for a general for each of my stacks to avoid that. (Btw, my FL was shy above of 3000, so with the new system I could have 38 or so leaders). It is a positive change but not gamebreaking.

But really, it is not that big a deal. I don't think that increasing the leader pool affects anything.

Besides, it is not realistic that a small nation has the same number of leaders than a big nation. I find it realistic that the number of available leaders scales with your force limit. Although I would say that it is more realistic if it scaled with the actual number of boots you have on the ground.

 

[Kanem Bornu]

It's a great change. It never made sense that I could only have 5 generals without penalty despite having 1 million troops. It might be a tad overkill on the limit but that's fine with me. I would much rather have a limit I won't reach than one I'm struggling to stay under.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What is the basis for evaluating how many generals available is "too many"?

Each general purchase costs a non-trivial amount of MIL, and in late game where there is considerable incentive to win some wars faster by assaulting forts (or at least doing the barrage), MIL isn't completely throw-away, even if it isn't as important to have high income as the others.

Additionally, it has long been possible by keeping reinforcer stacks nearby to keep a general or two in reserve to attach + put in combat as needed, effectively teleporting it around. This seems like a way to pay MIL to reduce that micromanagement, that costs less than before (you are not taxed 1 MIL income/mo/general as soon).

Anyway AI sucks a general swap micro compared to the player, so this is probably a (small) relative buff to AI + relatively small QoL improvement to player.