Failed CW - Realization Concerning Money and Military

[OldmansHQ]

(Lol, I not only failed to conquer the world, but also failed to spell the two letter abbreviation for world conquest -_-...)

Hello,

Yesterday I finished my first ever attempt to conquer the entire world, after 1550 hours of playtime . I did Muscovy not because it's easy, but because I genuinely enjoy playing them, they start in an interesting location, situation and have cool set of ideas. Below you will find four screenshots showing the map, summary, economy and military. Americas are not shown, because there's nothing fancy, all belongs to my colonial nations. Already halfway through I knew that I wouldn't make it, but I actually did better than expected. The early game was amazing, before 1500 I took over half Scandinavia, Kazan, almost all of Golden Horde, Livonian area, Danzig and of course Novgorod. I did test MANY openers, now I don't exactly remember how it went. I've been playing this game slowly since the start of 1.13 beta. Past the 1500 the game was still going very well, just not well enough for a complete WC. I learnt and discovered so many things, It's mind blowing. But there is one thing I realised that I thought was worth sharing and discussing, hence this thread. Below the screenshots you'll find what all this realisation is about .

Look at the army numbers. It's insane. The magic lies in conscription centres! Each one adds +2 FL, add to that +50% from quantity and +50% from Muscovite ideas and its 4! No matter how poor the province is, it will always give +2 flat FL (or 4 in my case), in fact the poorer the province the better, because it's cheaper in a peace deal. This is all thanks to buildings not requiring any monarch points, so long as you have the money, nothing stops you. Coin will not only take care of the upkeep, but also force limits and manpower for that matter, so money does everything that quantity ideas do and more. I'm bad at maths and I did not calculate this, but I'm pretty sure that over all, the manpower and force limit from buildings alone wins versus the numbers quantity ideas alone provide.

The conclusion I came to is that in world conquest or in general quantity ideas or any other military ideas become far less important in the face of good old ducats, because as it is, money DIRECTLY translates into military might. Trade and economy ideas are stronger than ever for military expansionists.

Most of the better players probably already knew this, but for me this is big :O. Money was always a way to merely support and extend the power of godly qunatity ideas, not the other way around.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Force limit is no use unless you have manpower or mercenary pool to fill it. It's pretty hard going much past 100 merc infantry in any timely fashion for example, but if you try to use regulars you burn manpower. Unlike the FL buildings, the manpower buildings do not stack multiplicatively with Quantity (only development will, in low auto primary culture). Even in your case with extreme modifiers, you can field double the size of your manpower pool .

 

[OldmansHQ]

Force limit is no use unless you have manpower or mercenary pool to fill it. It's pretty hard going much past 100 merc infantry in any timely fashion for example, but if you try to use regulars you burn manpower. Unlike the FL buildings, the manpower buildings do not stack multiplicatively with Quantity (only development will, in low auto primary culture). Even in your case with extreme modifiers, you can field double the size of your manpower pool .

I could have built A LOT more training fields, and build them in provinces that have high MP, because their bonus is percentage based, which is something I didn't do >_>. Besides I don't need my MP to match my FL. There was never a situation where I would be using literally all of my troops, and they'd all take damage, because they're spread all around the globe. Some on random islands, only watching for rebellions. Even if I magically ran out of MP nationwide and some stacks are depleted, each standing stack is frozen MP, and I can always just swap them.

Also, "extreme" is delicate way of putting it .

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Manpower efficiency works only off the base manpower of the province. Right culture, quantity ideas, none of that matters.

I find that for a large multi-front empire unless we're talking Russia, hordes (which with quantity have 40% manpower recovery speed), Ottomans or something like those NIs manpower can be a significant bottleneck.

Obviously revoked vassal swarms are excepted as well.

 

[josh127]

If memory serves (and it rarely does for me) a few months ago you were looking at starting options for grabbing the Luebeck node early with Muscovy. I see you grabbed that and English Channel, did you go with that opening? If so, now that this game is over, did you find it worthwhile?

 

[OldmansHQ]

Manpower efficiency works only off the base manpower of the province. Right culture, quantity ideas, none of that matters.

I find that for a large multi-front empire unless we're talking Russia, hordes (which with quantity have 40% manpower recovery speed), Ottomans or something like those NIs manpower can be a significant bottleneck.

Obviously revoked vassal swarms are excepted as well.

Hmm... You speak truth. I can't disagree with you. Manpower recovery (not necessarily the +20% quantity but in general) is one of those bonuses I check very often and strive to increase at all times.

If memory serves (and it rarely does for me) a few months ago you were looking at starting options for grabbing the Luebeck node early with Muscovy. I see you grabbed that and English Channel, did you go with that opening? If so, now that this game is over, did you find it worthwhile?

Haha, correct . However, shortly after that, the beta was released and with it a couple of significant changes, like the ability to westernize by just owning say Danzig, which changed priorities. If I remember correctly, even though I did not beeline for it, I still conquered a chunk of the node relatively early, but I did not collect there until much later. The reason being, most of trade money was halted in the Baltic node by Poland. Even though pulling through Baltic, considering I owned Danzig and collecting in Lubeck would most likely have been more lucrative than collecting in Novgorod. I just couldn't bare the thought of Poland robbing me of half the monthly trade income I was gathering in Novgorod at that time ^_^. If I were to play Russian world conquest again - and I most certainly will at some point, because as I said I thoroughly enjoy playing Russia - I will definitely try to optimize that part, since I did have money issues early on.

And yeah... I took my time playing.

 

[ThePatriotOfDreumel]

Your problem is having -troops.

 

[OldmansHQ]

Ohh I just remembered one thing. That's probably even more ground breaking than my money <= military epiphany. Not once was I attacked by a coalition. Why? In the early game I planned it well to attack different religions and cultures to balance out aggressive expansion (I think only Russia and Turks pull this off due to their great location between Europe and Asia), and later on I'm pretty sure it was my FL that discouraged everyone. You'd think it makes sense, if I had an army of 50 and was in a playground and then a guy with an army of 4 million appeared, I'd totally let him have his way with the slide, and pretend I don't see him stealing lunch from fat Ming. Force limit, the greatest coalition deterrent, and it's relatively easy to gain with no monarch points lost.

 

[alexti]

The early game was amazing, before 1500 I took over half Scandinavia, Kazan, almost all of Golden Horde, Livonian area, Danzig and of course Novgorod. I did test MANY openers, now I don't exactly remember how it went.

This doesn't seem like a good start to me from strategic point of view. Coring costs in the early game are horrible, you need to get influence and admin ideas (and unlock your coring discount) as soon as possible. This means that the only provinces worth coring are the ones that you need to get immediate grow in power (Russian orthodox ones for which you have few good missions) and the ones that you need to expand in the right direction (bridge to India and couple of provinces in Baltic to get to Danzig). Kazan and GH that early have very little value - wrong culture and religion and no way to convert religion. Creating sunni vassal (likely from Astrakhan) and feeding it will give you more power and will cost no ADM points. You can annex it later when you got diplo-annex discounts and you have some solid possessions in India to connect. Scandinavia and Livonia are only marginally better. You could feed Livonia to Pskov instead.

In general, for the strong nations it's usually better to invest ADM into acquiring key ideas rather than coring early on. As long as you are strong enough to comfortably win the wars you need to fight, there is no additional advantage in being more powerful (you might be able to afford ADM+3 advisor sooner, but you'll use more points for coring to get there). As Muscovy/Russia, P&L is the only strong nation you have good reason to fight

 

[ozyhuboi]

Well there's your problem! You have -2141207 troops! Can't conquer the world with negative soldiers!

 

[alpaca]

To be honest, even 1M troops in your main armies is generally overkill if you are on-time in mil. Mid-game, even 150k troops are generally enough to beat down any enemy in any theatre if you divide and conquer a little. Don't let potential rivals get too strong. For lame WC, you probably want to keep several big-ass vassals around and protectorate most of Asia and Africa. Americas can be easily taken for your CNs. If you want to get it all under direct control, OE and vassal integration are more relevant bottlenecks than army size.

 

[OldmansHQ]

This doesn't seem like a good start to me from strategic point of view. Coring costs in the early game are horrible, you need to get influence and admin ideas (and unlock your coring discount) as soon as possible. This means that the only provinces worth coring are the ones that you need to get immediate grow in power (Russian orthodox ones for which you have few good missions) and the ones that you need to expand in the right direction (bridge to India and couple of provinces in Baltic to get to Danzig). Kazan and GH that early have very little value - wrong culture and religion and no way to convert religion. Creating sunni vassal (likely from Astrakhan) and feeding it will give you more power and will cost no ADM points. You can annex it later when you got diplo-annex discounts and you have some solid possessions in India to connect. Scandinavia and Livonia are only marginally better. You could feed Livonia to Pskov instead.

In general, for the strong nations it's usually better to invest ADM into acquiring key ideas rather than coring early on. As long as you are strong enough to comfortably win the wars you need to fight, there is no additional advantage in being more powerful (you might be able to afford ADM+3 advisor sooner, but you'll use more points for coring to get there). As Muscovy/Russia, P&L is the only strong nation you have good reason to fight

I think that balance is key. I also think that conquering Norway was a brilliant idea, because they take Aristocratic (increased coring cost) as their second idea group, Catholics are easy to convert, since they are far from everyone the AE wasn't that bad, and most of all, it allowed me to compete in American conquest. To spread the usage of monarch points I fed the entire Kazan to Perm, and then annexed Perm. I kept delaying diplo and admin techs to lower their costs. But I always stayed on time in mil tech. The -15% coring cost from Muscovite ideas is welcome of course, but it's not much at this point, it counts over time, when you snowball, manpower is not an issue and you do mass conquest. Since Religious was an absolute must first, second had to be either exploration or influence. After testing I decided that while influence improves the things you can already do, exploration opens new doors and speeds up the snowballing. You can for example conquer primitives en masse, if you take care of it well, I think that's a giant boost early in the game. So the soonest I could select admin ideas was in the third place, which I did. It's my favourite idea group. With it, westernized and purposely delayed tech, leveling admin was super cheap. That's when fooling around stops and serious conquering begins.

I could agree with you about how poor the hordes' lands are, considering the religion and culture, but they had to be conquered at some point and I selected religious first, so I could use Deus Vult and not discriminate land based on religion. They fought each other, an opportunity was created, so I hugged the land. I mean, might as well, right? It's so close, it was just hanging there, so I thought I'd just take it under my despotic protective wing... The land might not be the richest, but after taking over I was WAY stronger than before. The steppes are expansive and there's two trade nodes.

As for advisers, I went for level 2 and then level 3 admin advisor the earliest I ever have (perhaps it's thanks to owning the steppes?), set my national focus on admin from day one and never changed it. What I could have done far better was diplo annexing, I neglected that part. Also, not engaging in war with Lithuania early on was a conscious choice. I specifically decided not to fight them until I knew I could win fast and easy. My goal was to keep on steam rolling, outgrow then assimilate. Getting stuck in a big war and then licking wounds for years was the opposite of what I wanted. Was it a good idea to wait instead of striking Lithuania early on? I couldn't say.

I'm trying to judge myself objectively, and I really think the early game was a success, except for a couple of minor details. It was the middle game where I lost the momentum I hoped to increase. I never even came close getting any personal unions, I failed in the marriage and diplo annexation department.

This is of course all my opinion.

To be honest, even 1M troops in your main armies is generally overkill if you are on-time in mil. Mid-game, even 150k troops are generally enough to beat down any enemy in any theatre if you divide and conquer a little. Don't let potential rivals get too strong. For lame WC, you probably want to keep several big-ass vassals around and protectorate most of Asia and Africa. Americas can be easily taken for your CNs. If you want to get it all under direct control, OE and vassal integration are more relevant bottlenecks than army size.

Yeah... I agree :<. The 4 million really happened by an accident. I had the money to spend, so I built buildings! I really didn't need all the troops, but they allowed me for sloppy play and did well with rebellions. To avoid getting overextension over 100%, I'd be stuck on four simultaneous wars, which I won already, but I waited for one batch of provinces to core before I struck the next deal. The goal was keep this going so long as admin points allowed. I'm sure it's a common practice.

How do you actually take land from colonial nations? Do you make them rebel, beat them and demand their provinces? Is it as simple as that?

 

[alpaca]

Yeah... I agree :<. The 4 million really happened by an accident. I had the money to spend, so I built buildings! I really didn't need all the troops, but they allowed me for sloppy play and did well with rebellions. To avoid getting overextension over 100%, I'd be stuck on four simultaneous wars, which I won already, but I waited for one batch of provinces to core before I struck the next deal. The goal was keep this going so long as admin points allowed. I'm sure it's a common practice.

How do you actually take land from colonial nations? Do you make them rebel, beat them and demand their provinces? Is it as simple as that?

You can't, unfortunately. As soon as you have 5 core provinces, you'll form a new CN. The only way around it would be to move your capital to the americas, and even then you can still get CNs if they are far enough away from your capital to be overseas.

I actually found that if your enemy's fort level isn't too big, you can squeeze in a few months of peace between conquests if you time it well in the late game if you are sufficiently dominant. With Muscovy ideas you core 40% faster (50% with claim), which puts you at about 2 years. If you think you can conquer someone in 1 year for 100% OE (this is possible if their fort level is below 8 and you can instantly siege all their forts), and use a generous 6 month safety buffer, you can still enjoy 6 months of increased WE and LA reduction, as well as opportunities to annex vassals, etc. I was playing the same way you do for a long time, keeping enemies around at 100% WS, but this is generally inefficient, especially if you sometimes get call for peace and then peace out with less warscore (truces are most efficient at 100% WS unless you can ally-troll them a lot). If you intuitively know how long sieges take roughly, you can cut it a bit closer, and it shows over time. I usually take too much of a safety buffer still, like attack enemies worth 125% OE, in case I don't get enough war score, and then sit on 100% WS for a couple months. One of these days I'm gonna have to crunch the numbers and calculate probabilities for this.

Late game money flood is pretty annoying. At some point, I just stop building, because, really, what's the point? Getting more money or military is just overkill, and building stuff takes real-world time. The only thing I may sink some into is going over the colony limit if I still need to conquer some natives and building canals.

 

[alexti]

I think that balance is key. I also think that conquering Norway was a brilliant idea, because they take Aristocratic (increased coring cost) as their second idea group, Catholics are easy to convert, since they are far from everyone the AE wasn't that bad, and most of all, it allowed me to compete in American conquest.

That's not a good reason to conquer them early It might seem you are paying 1x instead of 1.5x cost, but if you took the same provinces later in the game you would have paid only 0.5x. For the America conquest you only need one province in Iceland.

To spread the usage of monarch points I fed the entire Kazan to Perm, and then annexed Perm. I kept delaying diplo and admin techs to lower their costs. But I always stayed on time in mil tech. The -15% coring cost from Muscovite ideas is welcome of course, but it's not much at this point, it counts over time, when you snowball, manpower is not an issue and you do mass conquest. Since Religious was an absolute must first, second had to be either exploration or influence. After testing I decided that while influence improves the things you can already do, exploration opens new doors and speeds up the snowballing. You can for example conquer primitives en masse, if you take care of it well, I think that's a giant boost early in the game. So the soonest I could select admin ideas was in the third place, which I did. It's my favourite idea group. With it, westernized and purposely delayed tech, leveling admin was super cheap. That's when fooling around stops and serious conquering begins.

For admin tech you don't want to delay too much, because you need to unlock ideas. You need to get to 40% coring discount before you can start grow fast. Even 15% discount is useful - 15% are always 15%. I wouldn't take Religious first as Muscovy/Russia - there are plenty of missions that give free claims and you can fabricate claims on rich provinces here and there. With influence discount, taking provinces from rival costs very little DIP, so you can get away without religious CB for a while. I think that optimally the first two idea groups are influence and administrative (in either order). I kind of like influence first, because by the time you research ADM 5 you can have almost enough for 3 DIP idea, so you get both diplo-annex discount and coring discount from the national idea, but taking administrative ideas first is also attractive - with 25+15 from ideas and 10 from your mass-claims you can start expanding fast. Religious can wait until the third slot (even though it presents some logistical inconvenience). Unfortunately, there isn't any real snowballing effect, because monarch points are the main limiting factor, so taking land early doesn't translate into a better end result.

I could agree with you about how poor the hordes' lands are, considering the religion and culture, but they had to be conquered at some point and I selected religious first, so I could use Deus Vult and not discriminate land based on religion. They fought each other, an opportunity was created, so I hugged the land. I mean, might as well, right? It's so close, it was just hanging there, so I thought I'd just take it under my despotic protective wing... The land might not be the richest, but after taking over I was WAY stronger than before. The steppes are expansive and there's two trade nodes.

You don't need Deus Vult for the hordes - you have claims on them. Though I know how tempting it is to conquer them since it's so easy and convenient For the trade Doab and Bengal are much richer trade nodes (and coring cost is twice less), so I would still not advice taking horde land at that point.

As for advisers, I went for level 2 and then level 3 admin advisor the earliest I ever have (perhaps it's thanks to owning the steppes?), set my national focus on admin from day one and never changed it. What I could have done far better was diplo annexing, I neglected that part. Also, not engaging in war with Lithuania early on was a conscious choice. I specifically decided not to fight them until I knew I could win fast and easy. My goal was to keep on steam rolling, outgrow then assimilate. Getting stuck in a big war and then licking wounds for years was the opposite of what I wanted. Was it a good idea to wait instead of striking Lithuania early on? I couldn't say.

Russia is quite rich, so ADM-3 advisor is quite affordable, perhaps it's even worth getting one right from the start. If you were falling behind in DIP tech, I assume you were doing reasonable amount of diplo-annexing - what else would you use DIP on? You can win vs Lithuania quite easily early on, fast is a bit harder since there are many forts to siege and no cannons in sight. But in the early game there is quite a bit of waiting anyway (because of limited ADM supply), so longish war is not a big problem, besides it gives more time for looting which is helpful in the early game.

I'm trying to judge myself objectively, and I really think the early game was a success, except for a couple of minor details. It was the middle game where I lost the momentum I hoped to increase. I never even came close getting any personal unions, I failed in the marriage and diplo annexation department.

If you were well behind on DIP tech and didn't have spare DIP points then there isn't much you can improve. I don't think you can count on inheriting much, the probability drops too quickly with number of provinces and it takes a diplo-slot.