It's interesting that the shattered retreat "feature" is being added to this game, since it seems like the main focus of Conclave is to make the game more challenging for stronger realms. This "feature" in my opinion just makes it harder to win a war against superior numbers... It just takes away all opportunity to crush your weakened enemy. There should at least be a trait or something that allows a character to engage a shattered retreating army. Im sorry, but a group of victorious high-spirited soldiers wouldnt have too hard a time catching an enemy army who's taken many casualties and who's morale has been shattered; and why would they even let them try to escape? There's no good reason to let an enemy escape... unless you WANT them to just be able to come back stronger next time, and win. But why would any army want that? They wouldnt. They would pursue the shattered army down to the last man and destroy it to ensure victory.
It doesn't make sense, hopefully it can be modded out. I hate having to deny myself achievements though
I also see the "small guys" seriously suffering from it, and the Blobs benefiting the most from it.
I believe with the shattered feature, Paradox somehow tries to reflect also, that in reality seldomly armies were actually crushed entirely (as you described), but when their morale was broken and with first routing army parts, mass routes started often - during this phase, cavalry often chased down routers (or rather catched them up to take pow's) - but in reality, the biggest parts of enemy armies defeated just fled the field (practically unharmed) - checkup some kill/injured-numbers from famous battles, their percentages were rather small in most cases (especially in the middleage).
As for gameplay-mechanic in this relation, it would be wishful, if Paradox could implement for example a trait of the army commander, if he is able to keep morale of a shattered army and even refill it, and getting replacement levies from friendly areas, or, what would be histrically right, that a shattered army, if morale is depleted and the commander cannot keep any morale, that this army goes home.
Great would also, if sub-commanders could replace the main commander, if the sub-commander is possibly influental enough (with traits), and thus even the main commander, who might be a "weak" king, leaves the field and gets penalties and possibly even his governed country rebels or is split up into smaller realms.
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Another thing, to Paradox developers: An item, that could be changed with patch 2.5
(if they still read in this thread)
I would like to desire, that army numbers getting a re-check.
If you would compare them with real numbers of the timeframe, you would find in most cases, that in CK2, the numbers are 50 % or 40 % too high.
Example: William the Bastard (later the Conquerer) had an army of by historians estimated of 7000.
In CK2 with the marked map-start, he fields over 12000 alone with the given stack, without the ones, which stick still in his realms ready to march/join that start-stack.
This is somehow an immersion killer.
Overall, an army of 1000 men was at the time, a real big army (especially in the early middleage).
Battles, with over 5000-10000 men on each side were the very seldom exception, which can be counted on one hand.
Population numbers etc. mattered. In most cases, the rulers had no standing army, but a few house troops.
For CK2, it would be wishful to cut down significantly the number of men, which are "produced" per location (duchy, baronie, town, church/temple).
If the same ratio is kept as it is now, then the balance should be no matter for the gameplay.
... edit ... as a change in this game content-part is not expected by me
anybody who knows the file structures, is there a file that determines the "production numbers of the locations"? Moddable?
... and possibly also for the marked map-starts, given stack numbers?
