Battles take forever

[Tederheid]

Ah, the battle of Agincourt. A great pitched battle that took a year and a half. The first couple of months it looked like the French might win, but when the Burgundians and Aragonese heard of this eternal battle taking place, they mobilized their armies and marched across France to assist the English. For the next month things looked dire for the French. But all was not lost for them. Their Castillian soon followed the Aragonese, and when Hungary joined the war, mobilized their army, waited for their organisation to rise and then march all across the continent to take part in the battle which now had just celebrated it's one year anniversary. The French might just have won if the Swedes didn't arive just at the last three months of the battle to tip the scale in favor of the English. All soldiers of France were now dead.

Really. Strategy is meaningless if armies from all over Europe have the time to join eternal battles. I'm kind of fed up with it. I realise this is a game and not a simulation, but this takes away a lot of fun for me.

 

[Contiguous]

It's not a single battle, it's an abstract representation of a series of battles within the province.

 

[Red John]

It's not a single battle, it's an abstract representation of a series of battles within the province.

Depends on how you look at it. Sometime it gets stupid, though.

 

[sinkingmist]

It's not too bad at full combat width, but terrain reduce combat width waaaay too much.
Mountain battles are just, meh.
I've just modded out the combat width reductions from terrain and increased the dice penalty.

 

[Ruanek]

I've had some battles (realistically, more like campaigns) last several months with potentially hundreds of thousands of troops on each side. It's not always a bad thing, because it draws enemy (and ally) armies in which can be easier to manage that what they'd otherwise do.

If you don't want to continue the battle you can leave after a week anyway.

 

[Anthropoid]

Just call them "campaigns" and they are not quite so egregiously painfully ahistorical

But yeah, I feel your pain. It does _totally_ dominate the way wars are fought, the fact that battles drag on for so long and often allow for forces that (seemingly) were not even mustered when the "battle" started to join in before it ends :rofl:

Here's to hoping PDS or PI or whatever they are these days overhaul the combat engine in EU5!

 

[unmerged(184583)]

I had one of these epic battles in the mountains of Pirineo the other day. I actually quite enjoyed it, it was funny seeing troops from all over pile in and help, but I bet the AI france didn't find it funny. It started out iirc 16k vs 31k, ended up being over 100k on each side by the end of the war, and was basically the destruction of the french army.

 

[TingJonKi]

These long 1 1/2 year mountain battles are ridicules especially late gate where you can get into 500v500 troops

you can basically mobilize multiple armies during said battle just to send into the meatgrinder, heck I think most battles in WW2 or WW1 didnt last 1 1/2 years :|

Pic related its a product of a three year battle in which I was able to easily able to continue producing troops just for the battle while the AI kept sending and sending its huge deathstacks into a stupid battle

 

[Calad]

Also see in that pick how ridicilous small are your prestige and leadership gain after such a massive battle.

 

[Altuar]

One thing that keeps bothering me about the way AI conducts its battles is its willingness to throw away its troops by attacking the human player in mountains.

There are occasions, few and far between, when it is sensible to engage a small enemy stack in terrain where you'll get -3 to -4 to your dice rolls, but even if the AI does recognize these, it certainly fails to tell when the winds have changed, and when it is time to retreat to fight another day.

 

[Krec]

This aint COD, BF4 or even WOT's . I actually think troops move around the map too fast. Thats why i play these games is to plan and lead my armies to victory !! Everybodys in a rush rush these days . Enjoy the game.

 

[Legolas]

The battles are so long for the same reason why in tycoon games, you have trains taking months to go between London and Oxford or buses taking days to commute around a few city blocks. A similar limitation comes up in science, whenever you are talking about any simulation of any process. The fancy term for that is "dynamic range". Basically, you cannot realistically model a system with scale of X, if the model is composed of blocks of size smaller than Y, which is some small fraction of X. In EU games, this translates to an impossibility of modelling 400 years of gameplay with time proceeding in steps shorter than a day (and also an impossibility of modelling the whole world with provinces any smaller than they currently are). That's why it's not possible to represent realistic battle durations, because then they would be over in a flash (a few days at most), and the game cannot reasonably model that. Sure, you could have a 75k vs 75k battle over in a day (real world example: Austerlitz) or a 100k vs 100k battle over in two days (real world example: Vienna 1683), but then you would have only one combat phase (randomly either shock or fire) and one die roll.

tl;dr: If battles were shorter, their outcomes would be much more random than now, and that would not be a good thing.

 

[riknap]

The battles are so long for the same reason why in tycoon games, you have trains taking months to go between London and Oxford or buses taking days to commute around a few city blocks. A similar limitation comes up in science, whenever you are talking about any simulation of any process. The fancy term for that is "dynamic range". Basically, you cannot realistically model a system with scale of X, if the model is composed of blocks of size smaller than Y, which is some small fraction of X. In EU games, this translates to an impossibility of modelling 400 years of gameplay with time proceeding in steps shorter than a day (and also an impossibility of modelling the whole world with provinces any smaller than they currently are). That's why it's not possible to represent realistic battle durations, because then they would be over in a flash (a few days at most), and the game cannot reasonably model that. Sure, you could have a 75k vs 75k battle over in a day (real world example: Austerlitz) or a 100k vs 100k battle over in two days (real world example: Vienna 1683), but then you would have only one combat phase (randomly either shock or fire) and one die roll.

tl;dr: If battles were shorter, their outcomes would be much more random than now, and that would not be a good thing.

the solution is obvious then.

let each tick represent an hour instead of a day!!!!

hah! that's a totally original suggestion (and most definitely not something they're doing in another IP)

 

[saied_88]

The battles are so long for the same reason why in tycoon games, you have trains taking months to go between London and Oxford or buses taking days to commute around a few city blocks. A similar limitation comes up in science, whenever you are talking about any simulation of any process. The fancy term for that is "dynamic range". Basically, you cannot realistically model a system with scale of X, if the model is composed of blocks of size smaller than Y, which is some small fraction of X. In EU games, this translates to an impossibility of modelling 400 years of gameplay with time proceeding in steps shorter than a day (and also an impossibility of modelling the whole world with provinces any smaller than they currently are). That's why it's not possible to represent realistic battle durations, because then they would be over in a flash (a few days at most), and the game cannot reasonably model that. Sure, you could have a 75k vs 75k battle over in a day (real world example: Austerlitz) or a 100k vs 100k battle over in two days (real world example: Vienna 1683), but then you would have only one combat phase (randomly either shock or fire) and one die roll.

tl;dr: If battles were shorter, their outcomes would be much more random than now, and that would not be a good thing.

Excellent post. Anyway, battles are a lot more sensible as of the latest patch compared to 1.2. Battles in that patch used to take ridiculous amounts of time. They seem to be a lot more reasonable now (except mountain battles.. those take too long still due to the reduced combat width)

 

[Legolas]

the solution is obvious then.

let each tick represent an hour instead of a day!!!!

hah! that's a totally original suggestion (and most definitely not something they're doing in another IP)

I'm sure that if that were feasible given the typical computing power of a home PC, Paradox would have done so. In fact, the user wouldn't necessarily have to know about that, and the UI could only show the passage of days, but the internal clock could tick off hours. However, the fact that some actions only occur monthly and some events only fire in "pulses" every so often (i.e. they are not checked for every game day) shows that performance is indeed an issue and the Paradox are trying to optimize the game. Of course, this requires sacrificing some realism, but until we are all running massive computing clusters at home, we have to accept that as inevitable.

That said, I'm not arguing that the combat system cannot be improved, only that improvement in terms of shortening combat duration significantly falls foul of some fundamental limitations.