Defensive ideas a little bit overpowered?

[Laurwin]

It kinda sucks how the defensive tree becomes a "get out of jail free card" with regards to attrition basically.

Either the defensive tree is OP, or scorch earth is WAY underpowered. Scorch earth costs more mil points than fortifications, it's a litle bit ridiculous if you ask me (compared to forced march where the per province cost is 2 mil points)

You should have HIGH attrition in provinces with scorched earth. (cold plains with not many plants to eat, nothing to forage.)

Scorching the earth means in reality, taking away every usable resources so that it doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. That's on top of possible natural attrition factors.

The only realistic and accurate way to fight against scorched earth policy in real life, is superior logistics. (you need to bring everything with you literally, shelter, food, fuel, water, ammunition)

Foraging works for horses, somewhat, but men don't eat grass or shoot mud bullets! Or drink poisoned water etc...

That kind of logistical chain, where you would minimize attrition from scorched land, would perhaps only be possible with railroad communications, at the earliest point in military history. (this is assuming that you don't want to curb the number of your soldiers, in the scorched earth, so you would consume less resources)

Also, forced march should cause casualties to your own army, for each province travelled with forced march enabled (you shoudl not be able to force march infinite time period with the same army, it's impossible in real life, when you're dealing with foot infantry armies, everything being muscle powered, not the blitzkrieg mechanized warfare of modern times)

 

[Novacat]

Defensive is fine, if anything its fourth on the list of 'Most preferred military ideas', still useful but hardly amazing.

Given, I do agree that Scorched Earth costs way too much MP.

Also, forced march should cause casualties to your own army, for each province travelled with forced march enabled (you shoudl not be able to force march infinite time period with the same army, it's impossible in real life, when you're dealing with foot infantry armies, everything being muscle powered, not the blitzkrieg mechanized warfare of modern times)

Forced March already prevents your morale from replenishing, so thats penatly enough.

 

[Zander]

Defensive is fine, if anything its fourth on the list of 'Most preferred military ideas', still useful but hardly amazing.

That's weird, because every source I've ever seen describes it as #1, except in situations where Forced March is needed more.

 

[grisamentum]

Defensive is not at all a get out of jail free versus attrition. It's the last idea in the tree and it only reduces attrition by 25% of whatever you'd take, not -25 as a flat amount.

The good thing about defensive is that it has 25% morale for its second idea whereas Offensive and Quality only have discipline at the end.

Defensive is the ideal group to take first because you also get the +tradition first, and tradition is kinda hard to keep early game when you tend to have a little more downtime between wars.

 

[Novacat]

That's weird, because every source I've ever seen describes it as #1, except in situations where Forced March is needed more.

Those sources are pre-1.3, Defensive was nerfed since then.

 

[Laurwin]

fair enough I guess. But, I still would argue that the -25% attrition is a tad too powerful. Especially, with regards to the usefulness of scorched earth. Scorch earth costs way way too much mil points.
You get 3x forts, for the price of, 1x usage of scorch earth. (scorch earth should arguable also slow down any army?)

I would still say that -25% attrition is kind of too powerful for this time period of warfare. Were talking about mules and carts, and horses and infantrymen, when were talking military logistics in this era.

And scouting parties that are searching the enemy terrain, for food to eat (there will not be many civilians left behind to steal food from, remember scorched earth). Enemy armies should get movement speed penalty in scorched earth terrain at least.

Perhaps a small nerf to forced march should still be in order. Like, small morale penalty each time you move into a province, with forced march (the troops are tired/lack of sleep/hurt/sick from force march, the army becomes more disorganized when force marching continously)

OK let me tell you something, if forced march had no negative sides to it, like in EU4, why doesn't the real life military use forced march all the time, like in the war in Afghanistan for example?
The fact is that it is impossible to sustain forced march for infinite period of time, with the same troops . There exist R&R (rest and refit) periods in every war, in every army.

 

[Mann42]

Defensive is amazing up to the 25% morale. After that it's optional, but until you get that morale boost, it's choice #1.

The attrition protection is nice, but after its nerf in 1.2 and the overall nerf in manpower in general, it seems to make minimal difference unless coupled with high tradition and enough +Manpower bonuses that you can still regen the attrition you do take faster than you take it.

 

[Ruanek]

OK let me tell you something, if forced march had no negative sides to it, like in EU4, why doesn't the real life military use forced march all the time, like in the war in Afghanistan for example?
The fact is that it is impossible to sustain forced march for infinite period of time, with the same troops . There exist R&R (rest and refit) periods in every war, in every army.

There is a penalty in EU4: armies that are using forced march don't regenerate morale.

And forced march today, where everything is mechanized, is really different from medieval/renaissance/Napoleonic forced march.

 

[grisamentum]

Those sources are pre-1.3, Defensive was nerfed since then.

And +combat ability didn't used to do much, so quality was pretty bad before. Now it's great.

 

[Xeorm]

You can't regain morale while force marching. That in itself is a pretty large loss. But yes, Defensive is a pretty good tree, as all trees should be. Fewer crappy trees the better.

I think though that you're expecting too much out of scorched earth. It wasn't a widely used tactic of the time.

 

[Jomini]

Foraging works for horses, somewhat, but men don't eat grass or shoot mud bullets! Or drink poisoned water etc...

1. Bullets were rarely a problem if you had time to properly loot the battlefield. This is the era of cast lead shot, to reuse a bullet at most you'd just heat the lead in a crucible (lead melts at relatively low 300 odd degrees) and then pour it into a mold (in a pinch you can just dig holes in the sand for small arms). Yeah, you would lose shot after a battle, but if you won, the bullets of the enemy worked just as well. In a real pinch you could even fire small rocks (or larger ones for cannon).
2. Men can and have eaten grass. Yeah it is pretty low on nutrition, but you can get some sugars out of it (hence stuff like lemon grass and wheatgrass). If you boil it or use it to stretch flour, you can do better. It doesn't work in the long haul, but you can buy some time (if only by filling the belly) eating grass.
3. Poisoned water was often drinkable. Remember the typical way to foul water in this era was to throw a disgusting carcass or ten in the water source, the next most common was to place large amounts of excrement in the water. Both of these rely on biological warfare and can be mitigated with: straining, alcohol, and animal sourcing (let the animal drink, drink its blood/urine). More often the bigger problem with fouled wells was that we have an extremely well founded psychological aversion to fouled water. Long before you get desperate enough to drink something with a decayed corpse in the well, you tend to be dropping of exhaustion and in no shape to fight.

Scorched earth, oddly enough, worked mostly by denying horses water and food. You might be able to get men to drink contaminated water at gunpoint ... but horses can be harder. Likewise, while horses can subsist on grass, if you don't have good fodder then the horses have to spend a lot of time grazing. Worse by removing any easily transported fodder, you narrow the forage frontage of the army. With skirmishers in play, you run into the problem that if you disperse wide enough to feed the horses, then you will bleed huge amounts of men and horseflesh to enemy action. Lack of clean water eventually showed up in disease, but it was not always instantly.

Frankly, I find offensive to be far more useful than defensive - forced march lets you massacre armies you might not other kill and to escape when you might otherwise be massacred. Defensive is good for the morale bonus, tradition, and generally most everything else before the attrition reduction.

 

[Evil4Zerggin]

I used to think Defensive was the best, too. But then 1.3 happened and I realized how strong general pips were (-> Offensive).

 

[unmerged(795560)]

I personally have tried both defensive and offensive and defensive is better, hands down. It might even be OP with factions like Brandenburg and others that are already military oriented to begin with. In my opinion it is a must for any player to get this at some point in there game unless their faction ideas already focuses on similar traits. (i.e. their faction ideas give survivability to their troops)
Sun Tzu: "The great warriors of old first put them selves beyond the possibility of defeat and then waited for an opportunity to defeat his enemy"
The notion in this quote is what I think the developers were going for when they were making the defensive branch.

I also think that Forced March should cause extra attrition to the army using it. I mean the only time I've even seen it was when the AI was trying to get away from me. The way it doesn't let you increase moral while in use is fine but irrelevant since if you're advancing, you probably already have full moral anyway.
Scorched Earth I didn't really understand until I read this thread. So what you guys are saying is that for the price of a lot of MP and a huge reduction in income in that sector (which I forget lasts how long) you get an increase in enemy attrition in that sector? That doesn't seem like a fair trade to me. Especially the part where you lose income for a long time. I mean it makes sense but doesn't seem balanced. How are you supposed to keep the enemy in that territory long enough for effects to be worth it anyway? In my opinion it should be something along the lines of a button that increases the enemy attrition in all territories, by percentage, for a short period of time. To make this balanced it should be pretty expensive. (oh and there should be a pop up alerting you if the enemy has activated it)

I think the increase to moral (+25%) is fine but needs to be reworked so that it only works when you're on your, your allies or your vassals/PU partners lands. (hello it's called defensive)

A better option then Forced March in my opinion would be something like Raid/Pillage where it's like Scorched Earth in the penalties to the territory but you get gold or supplies which could represented by men being added to regiments/manpower pool. But you're only allowed to do this after the siege is over. (you've taken the stronghold, what's left is yours)

The forging perk should be moved up to the offensive branch as well.

 

[Incompetent]

I used to think Defensive was the best, too. But then 1.3 happened and I realized how strong general pips were (-> Offensive).

Offensive is geared towards a quick knockout blow against an inferior opponent, and gives the best generals if you are a warmonger. Defensive can give you a slow victory against an otherwise superior opponent, and gives the best generals in a more peaceful game (where you need that army trad boost). It depends what kind of wars you are fighting as to which one is better if you can only afford one of them. (If you really want legendary generals all the time, take Offensive, Defensive and Innovative.)

 

[Velorian]

I realize the defensive idea is quite powerful and it annoys me to fight against those who have it, but ultimately I find that I benefit more from picking ideas that help me destroy enemy armies completely, you can often prevent them from recovering and then their attrition is pretty irrelevant.

 

[Evil4Zerggin]

Offensive is geared towards a quick knockout blow against an inferior opponent, and gives the best generals if you are a warmonger. Defensive can give you a slow victory against an otherwise superior opponent, and gives the best generals in a more peaceful game (where you need that army trad boost). It depends what kind of wars you are fighting as to which one is better if you can only afford one of them. (If you really want legendary generals all the time, take Offensive, Defensive and Innovative.)

On the general issue I believe Offensive is nearly unconditionally superior. The difference between 0 and 100 AT is less than 2.5 mean pips in each skill (tests). +1 yearly AT increases the equilibrium level by 20 at default decay rate, and by 33 with Innovative. Assuming AT is linear (it must be on average on the interval between 0 and 100 AT), this translates to less than +0.5 pips per skill (+0.83 with Innovative), which is less than the full +1 from Offensive (excluding Siege, but I'm choosing to focus on field battles here since this is where generals are most decisive). While capping out general skill at 6 (and thus wasting the extra pip) is not taken into account by this analysis on the Offensive side, neither is capping out AT on the Defensive side, which is far more likely especially with Innovative.

As for the idea groups in general, I play SP exclusively, so...

 

[Incompetent]

As for the idea groups in general, I play SP exclusively, so...

Same here. I used to think that chasing after the enemy with Forced March was the way to go, but I realised it's pretty easy to bait the AI into attacking you, and Defensive does pretty well in this situation (the morale boost allows your bait army to last long enough for reinforcements to arrive). After the battle, you can still give chase at normal speed, and the increased reinforcement speed and lowered attrition means your army will have recovered a lot of strength when they fight the enemy again.

You've obviously done the numbers on generals and found that Army Tradition isn't such a huge boost on that score. Still, the other benefits of AT are pretty good, I feel. Of course, this is irrelevant if you already have max AT all the time, which is why I say Defensive is best suited to a more peaceful game.

 

[Duke Von Hannover]

In SP I suppose Defensive is the best of the Idea groups however in MP the military idea groups are perhaps the more balanced of the three sets.

My personal preference is

Offensive
Quality
Pluto/Defensive
Quantity

(in that order)

 

[Laurwin]

1. Bullets were rarely a problem if you had time to properly loot the battlefield. This is the era of cast lead shot, to reuse a bullet at most you'd just heat the lead in a crucible (lead melts at relatively low 300 odd degrees) and then pour it into a mold (in a pinch you can just dig holes in the sand for small arms). Yeah, you would lose shot after a battle, but if you won, the bullets of the enemy worked just as well. In a real pinch you could even fire small rocks (or larger ones for cannon).
2. Men can and have eaten grass. Yeah it is pretty low on nutrition, but you can get some sugars out of it (hence stuff like lemon grass and wheatgrass). If you boil it or use it to stretch flour, you can do better. It doesn't work in the long haul, but you can buy some time (if only by filling the belly) eating grass.
3. Poisoned water was often drinkable. Remember the typical way to foul water in this era was to throw a disgusting carcass or ten in the water source, the next most common was to place large amounts of excrement in the water. Both of these rely on biological warfare and can be mitigated with: straining, alcohol, and animal sourcing (let the animal drink, drink its blood/urine). More often the bigger problem with fouled wells was that we have an extremely well founded psychological aversion to fouled water. Long before you get desperate enough to drink something with a decayed corpse in the well, you tend to be dropping of exhaustion and in no shape to fight.

Scorched earth, oddly enough, worked mostly by denying horses water and food. You might be able to get men to drink contaminated water at gunpoint ... but horses can be harder. Likewise, while horses can subsist on grass, if you don't have good fodder then the horses have to spend a lot of time grazing. Worse by removing any easily transported fodder, you narrow the forage frontage of the army. With skirmishers in play, you run into the problem that if you disperse wide enough to feed the horses, then you will bleed huge amounts of men and horseflesh to enemy action. Lack of clean water eventually showed up in disease, but it was not always instantly.

Frankly, I find offensive to be far more useful than defensive - forced march lets you massacre armies you might not other kill and to escape when you might otherwise be massacred. Defensive is good for the morale bonus, tradition, and generally most everything else before the attrition reduction.

well you still understood my point though? armies will be in big trouble if they have inadequate logistics and they enter a so-called scorched earth enemy area. Humans can survive without water for a couple days, without food for a couple weeks etc... From a matter of merely surviving at minimum levels of nourishment, we can conclude that battle operations of an army will perhaps require a little bit more nourishment to remain effective vs enemy. (soldiers tend to burn more calories, because they get exercise from their occupation)

Also drinking poisoned water, even though it may not cause death immediately, it will be pretty bad for a soldier anyway (if you end up with sickness and vomiting, you are already losing more water, than what you may have gained from drinking that poisoned water- this is my recollection anyway, and it is certainly a plausible outcome?)

In this era of warfare, where everything in the military (except observation balloons!) moves on musclepower, and all that musclepower must eat and drink its own energy from the environment, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the kind of doomstack blitzkrieg in EU4 is a rather odd phenomenon. (forced march doomstacks with low attrition, and surprisingly high morale - granted this requires a combo of offensive and defensive, many idea points)

And, the armies would need gunpowder stores (muzzleloader muskets/cannons) for continuous battle readyness with the enemy. Relying on captured gunpowder stores from the enemy is a theoretical possibility, but an infinitely remote possibility, beyond the realm of possibility for logistical purposes.

Anyhow... I still think that forced march is perhaps a bit uber ability also. And that scorched earth should perhaps be cheaper (it was 25 mil points =1 scorch), even though it's a general game ability, but 2 mil points for forced march, such a powerful ability is also a strong bargain.

I mean, I guess we can conclude that defense and offense have their merits, but perhaps the problem is that these two ideas are simply the best ideas, because of 2 specific levels (forced march, and morale boost) in those idea trees. Other ideas just can't really compete too well with these. For whatever reason.

 

[CrabHelmet]

In SP I suppose Defensive is the best of the Idea groups however in MP the military idea groups are perhaps the more balanced of the three sets.

My personal preference is

Offensive
Quality
Pluto/Defensive
Quantity

(in that order)

That seems an odd order. If you can get Plutocratic, why would you not put it first? It's one of the best idea trees in the game - it has really useful things for almost every aspect of your nation. Admittedly, it's not really military-centric so as a solely 'military' idea, I can see why you wouldn't do it, but in general if I have access to Plutocratic I get it pretty damn early.

If we ignore Plutocratic/Administrative for a moment, I'd say the MIL groups in order of how good they are go:

1. Offensive
2. Defensive
3. Quality
4. Quantity

However, whenever playing MP I'd always take Defensive first, because Offensive only gets really good at the end of the tree whereas Defensive's best ideas are at the start of its tree and usually complement the point you hit tech level 8; if you're not a colonial nation or planning to go Protestant, then taking Defensive as your first idea means you can early-game aggro relatively easily. Generally speaking, though, in every MP game I play I end up going Offensive and Defensive by the end of the game.

Which, incidentally, is really annoying. One of the great things about EU3's sliders were that they were always a trade-off. You could be offensive, or defensive, but not both. The more defensive you became, the less offensive, and vice versa. I dislike that in EU4 that there's no real such thing as specialization - taking a particular idea group never blocks you off from any other idea group.