- Friedrich's Ambition (A Saxony AAR) -

[KingOfTheIsles]

I agree with Brownbeard, it looks worryingly like Austria is throwing itself into a series of wars that is going to lead to a BB spiral, à la Burgundy in EUII. It would be nice to see the AI at least try and gain a caus belli on its intended target.

Another thing that I am wondering about for the new inheritance system is if BB would be gained if you legitimately inherited another country. Obviously, the various "succession" wars come to mind, but it could be annoying to inherit some unwanted out of the way country if it gets unwanted badboy/reputation drop.

It would be interesting to see the crown being offered around countries with RMs in that situation, if the first nation could refuse.

 

[otacu]

All 30 are available throughout since they're "designed" to be non-tech-dependent. It gives you a ton of flexibility to take your country in whatever direction you'd like to; but sometimes it's a horribly difficult choice to make since you only get a new idea every handful of government tech levels. IIRC, my next idea slot won't be available until close to the turn of the century (depends on my gov tech investment decision) so I have to choose based on my expected needs for the next 30-40 years. It can be a very painful choice at times...for instance, as Portugal I can go for the Quest for the New World idea as my first one, set out and explore new areas, but then I probably won't have a good enough economy to take good advantage of my early discoveries, nor will I reap many rewards for the new colonies I set up because I lack the idea that removes a heavy overseas income penalty. I can change an idea, but there's a stab hit involved that makes it a not-very-good policy. All in all, those first few ideas selections can be incredibly difficult to make.

Anticipating the next question...yes, the AI nations make intelligent choices that are appropriate for them.

There are also incremental series of government types that get "unlocked" as you go up in government technology, and these involve a tough decision sometimes as well.

I see. I'm happy about the introduction of the National ideas. It sounds building a colonial empire won't be a simple matter as in EU2 where with money and colonists you could create a profitable empire in a couple of years. You have to plan ahead... good.

But now i wonder if it's possible to mod new national ideas (i know it's possible to add new National Ideas) to made them tech dependent (or event dependent or form-of-government dependent). Basically i ask if you can mod National Ideas with "triggers". It would be nice.



Back on the AAR i'm really thrilled by how the war is progressing. After the first battle of Dresden and with one province captured and Prague under siege i would have guessed the Bohemians were doomed (and they had their King killed too!) but i'm happy to see they managed to make a comeback like that. I know i will like the new feature that doesn't replenish garrison soldiers in a blink of an eye.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Mr T,
you wrote somewhere that you hired "local" mercenaries. Would you have had the possibility to hire "foreign" regiments as well?
Would be very interesting to get units of different types, e.g. light cavallery instead of knights or longbowmen instead of regular infantery even if you couldn't recruit such units in your own realm.

The regiments available for recruitment or for hire depend on who has a core claim against the province. Being in the heart of Germany, I'm not going to get a troop of English longbowmen meandering by and looking for work. I might, however, be able to hire some eastern cavalry or infantry if Poland happens to have a claim on one of my provinces. I could then either recruit my own regiment of that type, or hire a merc regiment if there's one available in the local mercenary pool.

While the diversity can be nice at times, there's also a down-side to it. As I say in the AAR and have posted earlier in this thread, I find that mercenaries are not a great choice for your country except in case of emergencies. They are expensive and don't contribute at all to your military tradition when they're in combat. That's a major disadvantage when leadership can play an important role in the outcome of battle. Using lots of mercenaries will eventually lead to really crappy generals, while an opponent who relies on his national armies to do his fighting will often be able to field one or two really kick-ass generals that can really make your life miserable.

The other disadvantage involves more of a long-term issue: advancing tech levels will unlock better regiment types and allow you to upgrade any of your national forces that are of your prefered type to this new more powerful unit. It's a free upgrade accomplished for your entire national military with 2 clicks of a mouse (but makes them useless in combat until they've recovered from such a drastic change...not a good idea during wartime). Any regiments that aren't your prefered national type (or are mercenaries) are not upgraded, so you'd have to disband them and buy new ones (or leave outdated regiments in the field). That can get expensive; and if you forget about any you could get some unexpected battle losses. The bonus is that sometimes you can hire a mercenary regiment that is more advanced than any regiment you could build on your own (again, depending on who has cores on your provinces) so there's some very interesting strategic decisions involved in army composition.

What might not be immediately obvious is that there cab be soime very difficult decisions involved in pressing provincial claims (when the opportunity arises) since by doing so you will be giving your potential enemy access to your current military land technology in that province. (Before the historical realism crowd gets all up in arms about this, the mechanism is actually amazingly great for the strategic game play and is one of the coolest changes in the game. Conquer Iroqois lands and you'll only have access to Iroquis regiments in that region until the provinces later become considered your cores...meaning that if you want advanced technology regiments you're going to have to import them from elsewhere...and lots of other nifty stuff. The "realism" trade-off is more than worthwhile IMO).


* * * *

And now a more general comment in response to many of the comments and concerns that people have expressed:

While EU3 shares the same name as its predecessors, it is a mistake to make assumptions based on your understanding of the EU2 game system. There are a lot of major changes -- many of them "under the hood" -- that make EU3 a very different game. It very much ups the ante in the area of strategic planning. If you're used to winning based on your ability to do seat-of-your-pants reactions to the AI then you're going to get your ass handed to you on a platter. Every EU2 player will have to unlearn some EU2 habits and develop new EU3 ones. If you don't, you're likely to have problems. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised to see newbies to the series do better in play than EU2 vets for the first little while since they won't have those misconceptions coming into the game.

Royal marriages, alliances, etc are now far more important decisions than they used to be because they involve risk-reward exposures. You want the benefits? Then you have to accept the risks. EU2 was far more frivilous in this respect, so if you approach the game with EU2 habits and expectations then at some point it's going to bite you in the ass. Badly.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

But now i wonder if it's possible to mod new national ideas (i know it's possible to add new National Ideas) to made them tech dependent (or event dependent or form-of-government dependent). Basically i ask if you can mod National Ideas with "triggers". It would be nice.

I'm not sure if that's possible or not. From a design standpoint it's not intended that ideas be tech-dependent so I would be inclined to think that trigger-check code wouldn't be written into it. That's a guess though.

However...

If there's something that you want to add as a new "idea" that's tech dependent, there are other ways to accomplish this. You could script an event to handle it, or perhaps a triggered effect, or...well...if there's a will, there's usually a way.

 

[EvilSanta]

So how much are battles random now? I am not too eager about that dice roll system but if usually bigger, more quality force with better leader wins, I am happy.

 

[unmerged(59881)]

The regiments available for recruitment or for hire depend on who has a core claim against the province. Being in the heart of Germany, I'm not going to get a troop of English longbowmen meandering by and looking for work. I might, however, be able to hire some eastern cavalry or infantry if Poland happens to have a claim on one of my provinces. I could then either recruit my own regiment of that type, or hire a merc regiment if there's one available in the local mercenary pool.

Thanks a lot for the answer. Sounds very reasonable I'm really going to like that.
And about the other information you gave: even better, sounds like the diplomatic actions will affect gameplay much more than in EU II.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

So how much are battles random now? I am not too eager about that dice roll system but if usually bigger, more quality force with better leader wins, I am happy.

No moreso than EU2 which was based heavily on die rolls. Overall, EU3 probably depends a little less if anything.

 

[TheExecuter]

I'd simply like to see the AI pursue a sustainable strategy and keep track of its effects, like badboy and diplomatic relations, thus I'd rather see Austria using force-vassalising and possible future diplo-annexation than outright force-annexation. Its not the war thats the centre of controversy, its the peace demand and its net effect.

I too have problems with how the EU2 ai handles its peace demands for long-term sustainability. I don't think it would be unreasonable for a nation to vassilize rather than annex if the following conditions apply:

The target nation has:
A different culture
AND
Same religion

This could be overridden if the defeated province was of a different religion (jihad or the wars of religion) or if the aggressor had a core on the province.

This style of annexation would keep things like Sweden in Italy and Poland and Denmark completely preventing the formation of Prussia from happening with monotonous regularity in the Grand Campaign. It would also result in more historical power growth. This may have the effect of making the game too stale and predictable however...just my 2 ducats into the discussion.

 

[Skarion]

The AI sacrifices long term development in favour of short term gain.

Yeh, I think this quite sum it up.

AI should be inteligent in how they handle battles (Hopefully using human strategies). Then the general strategy should be kept quite to how the philosophy of the time was.

Basicly príor the second half of the 17th century most nations built most often on Machiavellian or economic reasons.

One of the most existed philosophies was to attack an enemy before they can attack you. This would be nice to implement in the game that nations that you have declared war on earlier are more inclined to declare war on you. Then after a nation has acknowledged a goal in the area (A very profitable province in a neighbouring nation), they wait until they get a BB or bad relations and they declare war.

After the second half of the 17th century the Westphalian system was quite in effect, meaning that nations rather begun to gather up and ally eachother in systems to try to make alliance system which were quite equal to eachother. Ingame terms this would mean that all nations should try to gather up against nations they got bad relationships with and try to beat them back for a certain ammount of provinces.

 

[NitramDatsgnos]

A question on the casualty statistics:

Before The Battle of Dresden your army consisted of 6 1000 man regiments. After the battle you still had 6 regiments, but some of them suffered considerably higher casualties than others. Is there a reason for this, could you have done something different in order to spread the casualties more evenly? Does it even matter from a strategic point of view?

 

[coz1]

A definite see-saw in that last update, MrT. I thought you had it for a minute and then...well, good luck.

And it does appear that Austria/HRE is near to the good old Big White Blob they have always been known for. Realistic or not, I suppose it is comforting to know that some things never change.

I am starting to see why you like that outliner so much, but it seems like one would have to be careful not to set it to follow too terribly much lest the listing get long and thus less helpful rather than more.

And your discussions of tradition are very helpful in understanding these new mechanics. I suppose if you have a regiment that is not fully refreshed and thus at 100 troops, you will lose it if in battle and each of those 100 die, yes? Vickie and CK are like that IIRC.

Oh - and where are you seeing the dice roles on screen? Or are you checking those in the save game or some such?

 

[unmerged(6777)]

A question on the casualty statistics:

Before The Battle of Dresden your army consisted of 6 1000 man regiments. After the battle you still had 6 regiments, but some of them suffered considerably higher casualties than others. Is there a reason for this, could you have done something different in order to spread the casualties more evenly? Does it even matter from a strategic point of view?

The combat mechanics are rather complex and would take too long to describe here. They are clearly explained in the manual, though.

Loosely, each combat round each regiment tries to attack a regiment on the opposing side of the field. The regiment placement shown in the screenie gives you the position of each regiment on the field, and the regiment's manouevre rating determines how distant a regiment it is able to attack. This usually means that regiments near the center of the front line will be targetted more often by opposing regiments and will usually sustain the most damage. You don't have any options to control placement, but the game handles placement for both sides to optimize each side's capabilities.

My regiments were all at full strength going into the battle, so even though my total force was a little smaller I can actually do more direct damage on an equivalent die roll than the under-strength enemy regiments can do. I know this going into battle, so the strategic decision involves deciding the best time to initiate combat. That's why I waited as long as I dared, hoping that the attrition would soak down the enemy regiments which would help to even the odds. My flanks would have taken higher casualties because the units towards the ends of the enemy lines (which was longer) would be getting multiple hits per round against my exposed regiments.

There's nothing I can do to spread this out, or to later re-organise my individual regiment components to distribute men between them. Ideally I'd have regiments in reserve that would be brought in to replace the ones that sustained the most damage, and I'd split out and retreat the ones that needed time to regain strength and morale (morale is tracked separately per regiment too). Unfortunately, my country isn't large enough to support those reserves so I have to decide whether to press on with understrength units (like Bohemia did) or whether to wait a while for the automatic reinforcements to arrive from my manpower pool. As a final option, I could disband a regiment that has suffered horrendous casualties, and then recruit a replacement (proviced I have enough money and manpower in reserve) or hire a merc (provided that I have the cash). A regiment could take up to nearly two years to fully replenish its losses...making regiment management a major strategic consideration in war.

The other danger is running out of reserves in my national manpower pool, since my reinforcement rate could easily exceed my monthly pool replenishment. I mentioned in my first post that Saxony adds about 100 men to the pool each month, but my 6 damaged regiments could draw up to 300 men out of the pool each month to reinforce their losses. Once my manpower reserve dries up, my reinforcement rate will plummet and I could be in for a world of hurt.

One of the advantages of being in the Holy Roman Empire is that each member state gets a modest boost to the rate that its manpower pool replenishes. Being the Emperor gives a massive boost that virtually guarantees that your pool could almost never run dry. It still takes a while to reinforce the losses, but at least you're extremely unlikely to exhaust your pool. That's why earlier in this thread I was a bit evasive when asked if "all the Emperor gets is some manpower". It's not all the Emperor gets, but it's a major thing that has vastly greater importance in EU3 than it did in EU2, and it's one of those preconceptions that EU2 players will need to un-learn.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

A definite see-saw in that last update, MrT. I thought you had it for a minute and then...well, good luck.

And it does appear that Austria/HRE is near to the good old Big White Blob they have always been known for. Realistic or not, I suppose it is comforting to know that some things never change.

It can be. It varies from game to game and depends on all sorts of stuff (like the progress made by the Ottomans in the region). Much as I'm sure certain forum members would like to see Balkan mini-states survive and prosper on their own, the odds continue to be heavily stacked against them.

I am starting to see why you like that outliner so much, but it seems like one would have to be careful not to set it to follow too terribly much lest the listing get long and thus less helpful rather than more.

You can change what's displayed on the fly (and the order that it's displayed...or whether it's displayed at all) so it's never really been an issue for me at all. I love it. To me, it's probably the single greatest new interface element that's been added to the game.

And your discussions of tradition are very helpful in understanding these new mechanics. I suppose if you have a regiment that is not fully refreshed and thus at 100 troops, you will lose it if in battle and each of those 100 die, yes? Vickie and CK are like that IIRC.

A 0-strength regiment will continue to exist (and gradually be reinforced) unless it is split away from the rest of the army. Only 0-strength armies are auto-destroyed. This means that even after suffering a massive defeat you don't have to spend the next ten minutes clicking on provinces and recruiting new regiments...quite the time-saver.

Oh - and where are you seeing the dice roles on screen? Or are you checking those in the save game or some such?

Look closely at the combat details in the screenie. You'll see a series of little icons on both sides of the field that show the die rolls each round.

 

[Dakk]

Great explaining T. Can't wait to lay my grubby hand on my (preordered) CE and start browsing the manual and strategy guide.

I was wondering about something though; you mentioned that the Emperor recieves bodies (extra manpower) from the members of the HRE, does this is anyway diminish the manpower a single member accrues or are this extra manpower just abstracted in as 'extra' bodies? Judging by your second to last post where you mention that being in the HRE actually gives you more manpower I would guess that the Emperors extra manpower is just a bonus that does not give anyone else a corresponding malus..?

/D

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Great explaining T. Can't wait to lay my grubby hand on my (preordered) CE and start browsing the manual and strategy guide.

I was wondering about something though; you mentioned that the Emperor recieves bodies (extra manpower) from the members of the HRE, does this is anyway diminish the manpower a single member accrues or are this extra manpower just abstracted in as 'extra' bodies? Judging by your second to last post where you mention that being in the HRE actually gives you more manpower I would guess that the Emperors extra manpower is just a bonus that does not give anyone else a corresponding malus..?

/D

Correct. It's abstracted and doesn't impact on the individual members' pools. In fact, as I mentioned in a post a moment ago, each member state also gets a manpower bonus (though nowhere near on the level that the Emperor does). It's another abstraction related to the HRE spreading around its manpower to support/strengthen the Empire. In the AAR's final instalment, you'll get to see the precise Imperial advantages.

 

[Filip de Norre]

btw, Mr. T, you mentioned that this small army would take long time to siege Prague, but hopefully it could soon be supported by a larger force.
Does this mean that the sieges work like in CK, the sieges depending on the number of troops besieging?
And you mentioned that Lausitz wasn't fully garrisioned becuase, does this mean that when you conquer a province, it'll take some time to replenish the fort garrision?

PS. Superb work!

 

[Dakk]

@ Mr.T
Excellent, seems like a good system. Kudos for the fast reply and the (accidental?) spoiler/tidbit!

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Asked in the EU3: GD forum

btw, Mr. T, you mentioned that this small army would take long time to siege Prague, but hopefully it could soon be supported by a larger force.
Does this mean that the sieges work like in CK, the sieges depending on the number of troops besieging?
And you mentioned that Lausitz wasn't fully garrisioned becuase, does this mean that when you conquer a province, it'll take some time to replenish the fort garrision?

PS. Superb work!

Re sieges, see my post a little earlier in this thread.

When a province falls into your hands, the previous garrison will have been wiped out. It will then take you a period of time to replenish the garrison. If your army leaves the province (or is defeated in battle) and and enemy besieges it, the garrison will be at whatever level it is when the siege starts. This could make it super-easy for the province to be recaptured, so you need to devote some thought (and forces) to protecting your gains if you want to keep them.

To answer the inevitable follow-up question...no, you can't drop troops from your regiments into the garrison. The garrison has to be replenished via the monthly regain rate (I forget what that is precisely, but it takes it a while to get back to full strength).

 

[Filip de Norre]

When a province falls into your hands, the previous garrison will have been wiped out. It will then take you a period of time to replenish the garrison. If your army leaves the province (or is defeated in battle) and and enemy besieges it, the garrison will be at whatever level it is when the siege starts. This could make it super-easy for the province to be recaptured, so you need to devote some thought (and forces) to protecting your gains if you want to keep them.

Quite interesting

 

[Filip de Norre]

The progress of a siege is somewhat similar to EU2, although there are some differences in the mechanics and requirements that I won't elaborate on at the moment. Each month of the siege, there's a chance of a "siege progress event" like a water shortage, food shortage, etc. which reduces the size of the defending garrison a little and advances the siege progress %. When it reaches a certain level, you'll get a "walls breeched event" which signals the point where any assault attempt is *a lot* more likely to succeed. If you wait a little longer you'll get a "defenders desert" and then eventually the city will surrender itself to you without a fight.

Note that when I call these "events", they're not scripted events like the random and historical ones. They're part of the general siege progress chain. The rate that you go through the various siege stages will depend on a number of factors including the size of the garrison, the size of the besieging army, the composition of the besieging army (cavalry contribute very little to sieges...artillery contribute a lot), the siege rating of the leader of the besieging army, etc. We're not talking about ultra-detailed modelling though...that's not really appropriate to a grand strategy game.

Ultimately, I'd look at it as game "flavour" that makes it a bit more immersive than just watching a progress % counter tick down.

Three cheers for the new siege system!!!