Armies & Devastation

[MrKinich]

Devastation is a really good idea, but it never seems to go far enough. It’s easy, especially as a big country, to have little or no devastation for most or all of the game.

Supply trains- especially overland ones- are difficult to organize & expensive. Armies thus supply themselves by foraging food & valuables from the local peasant population. But even though the game calculates a supply limit for each province, having an army hanging around eating all the local food doesn’t actually do anything to the people who, you know, live there. Thus, I propose some changes:

1. Armies should passively cause devastation to provinces they are in. This should be scaled to army size; larger armies (in comparison to supply limits) cause more devastation.
2. Being over the local supply limit increases the devastation the army causes.
   • Perhaps there could be a minimum ratio of army size to supply limit to cause this passive devastation, so having 3 units in a 100 supply limit province doesn’t cause problems. Or not; this would at least give a reason to keep forts up even in secure areas.
3. States in this time period often raised larger armies than they could afford to maintain- something that all EU4 players will have experience with. The real world consequences of this, though, was that the chronically underpaid soldiers would extract their pay from local populations, be they ally or enemy. By contrast, underpaid soldiers in EU4 just fight worse. I therefore propose that lowering army maintenance should increase the passive devastation caused by an army, with a 0 maintenance army causing double devastation.
   1. Perhaps being over your force limit should also increase the devastation caused by armies?
4. Land battles should cause devastation to the province they take place in; the larger the battle & the less developed the province, the more devastation the battle causes

Thoughts?

 

[annulen]

Devastation is a really good idea, but it never seems to go far enough. It’s easy, especially as a big country, to have little or no devastation for most or all of the game.

While I agree it would be nice to have more sources of devastation in game, that's only a part of a bigger set of issues.

1. Impact of devastation can be drastically weakened because of how additive modifiers work. I suggest that devastation effects should be made multiplicative.
2. It's very easy to remove devastation by developing province. Dev cost penalty of devastation is laughable (only +10% for whopping 100% devastation - you're likely to have higher global dev cost reduction in your country even if stacking it is not your priority), and each click removes a lot of devastation. The only real trade off is that it may result in spending monarch power on province with inappropriate terrain and/or climate which you wouldn't develop otherwise (the opposite applies as well - there's little reason not to develop farmlands with normal climate if they have significant devastation)
3. In single-player games after you country grows strong enough (which happens quickly if you play well and don't mind some expansion) you rarely fight wars on your own territory. You are almost never a defender in a war (unless you contrive it), and if enemy occupies your land it's likely a desperate move to avoid direct combat. You'll rarely have big chunks of your own lands occupied. If you have fleet and you know how to use it, it will be you who is sets blockades on enemy coasts, not vice versa. So, improving devastation will probably hurt AI more than human player, which would be bad for balance.

 

[annulen]

Now on armies.

1. Armies should passively cause devastation to provinces they are in. This should be scaled to army size; larger armies (in comparison to supply limits) cause more devastation.
2. Being over the local supply limit increases the devastation the army causes.
   • Perhaps there could be a minimum ratio of army size to supply limit to cause this passive devastation, so having 3 units in a 100 supply limit province doesn’t cause problems. Or not; this would at least give a reason to keep forts up even in secure areas.

I agree there should be a "safe zone" where army is small enough to cause zero devastation. Otherwise it would be frustrating, especially for perfectionists who will have to use a lot of army micromanagement. For example, it can be 50% of province's supply limit. If army is larger, its "devastation footprint" starts linearly growing with increase of army size in comparison to supply limit (and continue growing the same way after supply limit is exceeded).

Also, armies could have a special "mission" (mutually exclusive with drilling and suppressing rebels), which would allow to reduce their devastation footprint, or maybe even heal devastation which existed before army's arrival, depending on army maintenance slider position. Drilling, on the contrary, should increase footprint of army. These changes should make building supply depot much more useful mechanic.

States in this time period often raised larger armies than they could afford to maintain- something that all EU4 players will have experience with. The real world consequences of this, though, was that the chronically underpaid soldiers would extract their pay from local populations, be they ally or enemy. By contrast, underpaid soldiers in EU4 just fight worse. I therefore propose that lowering army maintenance should increase the passive devastation caused by an army, with a 0 maintenance army causing double devastation.

For comparison, in Victoria 2 there are two separate maintenance sliders: one that sets salary of soldiers, and another that sets amount of supplies (like ammunition, weapons, etc), and if you want your army to be large and loyal, the second slider should always be at 100%. As in EU4 we have only one slider and its lower limit is 50%, so I think we can assume that only supplies get cut, not salaries.

1. Perhaps being over your force limit should also increase the devastation caused by armies?

I think it should have more to do with manpower. In EU4 manpower is just an abstract resource which grows with time, just like church power (or prestige, to some extent). Nothing bad happens when you spend it, and you even want to spend it from time to time to give it a room for growth. In reality, when people are recruited to army they are pulled out from economy. I think it could be modeled by applying devastation to the whole country proportionally to the spent manpower, no matter if it's used to make new regiments or to recover losses, and irrespectively of force limit.

 

[annulen]

BTW, I always thought that maintaining prosperity all over the country in EU4 is too easy, even if it's running non-stop wars. Devastation from spending manpower could be a solution to this - if you want prosperity, avoid losses.