How to end the total wars?

[Torredebelem]

The OP nails it with his/her opinion about warfare. The problem starts as the game is designed from the ground up for territorial conquest for everybody. The main objective of every country is painting the map a single colour. That has nothing to do with History or reality. Certainly there were examples of such behaviour in History and they are the most celebrated after all, but they were far from being the most common.

I believe a very significant drop in AI aggressiveness, going hand in hand with complex challenges about the internal management of the country given by a large pool of events, creating dilemmas for the player to juggle between several variables go a long way to make everything more credible and interesting to play.

Also important is the existence of an event pool that given time and under most circumstances (I am making an exception of colonial powers, including Russia), created enough havoc to split the huge polity into other tags - for instance, several tags separated close to the same time - following for instance, the problems Spain had to face at the time of Portuguese independence in 1640: They knew they didn't have enough power to deal with both Aragon and Portugal and in the end, they gave preference to Aragon, losing Portugal in the process.

This case also highlights other problems with the game, after all. Even today, after so many centuries have passed, the culture of "Aragon" (Catalan) has not yet been converted to Spanish and continued disputes for independence arise in that part of the peninsula... there are many more examples like this across the world and these should provide food for thought about how converting culturally or religiously works as of now and how different they happen in real life.

 

[Battlex]

its called eu3 and it was a dark time back then.

but this is the modern game, with various changes

 

[Arizal]

I believe a very significant drop in AI aggressiveness, going hand in hand with complex challenges about the internal management of the country given by a large pool of events, creating dilemmas for the player to juggle between several variables go a long way to make everything more credible and interesting to play.

The problem has always been that you can envision a bunch of mechanics, but you have to be careful that those mechanics integrate well with the rest of the game. And we might think managing the country would be fun, but it must also not be so oppressive that when you are at war you are overwhelmed by the country management. Ideally, an internal politics mechanic should be able to handle itslef for a few years before threatening to derail (or having an important action the player must make).

Also important is the existence of an event pool that given time and under most circumstances (I am making an exception of colonial powers, including Russia), created enough havoc to split the huge polity into other tags - for instance, several tags separated close to the same time - following for instance, the problems Spain had to face at the time of Portuguese independence in 1640: They knew they didn't have enough power to deal with both Aragon and Portugal and in the end, they gave preference to Aragon, losing Portugal in the process.

I would certainly like that! When they announced the new "decline of empire" mechanic in the DDs, I immediately thought that it seemed interesting, but it should have been a global mechanic. I also think releasing countries should be more encouraged, so that regions don't automatically turn into blobs. However, defensive coalitions and cooperations between countries who dislike each others should be more effective in order to prevent the survival of small countries to be unfun because the player can just stromp them all separately.

 

[Runite Drill]

I always imagined an escalation system.

For example:
Conquest wars would start as localised border conflicts between adjacent states/regions. Only troops within those regions (and perhaps the ones adjacent) can participate in the war and peace demand are largely limited to the involved areas. Then, if a country brings reinforcements from a far the war begins to escalate, eventually growing in scope from a local conflict to a full war between two nations.. and then their allies.. and then total war. As it escalates, the scale and scope of the peace treaties and war goals increases too. More advanced CB's would have wars beginning at a higher escalation level, or escalating faster - to move warfare from localised conflicts early in the period to more common massive wars int he later years.

It would drastically change the way we manage our armies, particularly the need to protect border regions. Less doomstacks in the early game I think.

 

[Arizal]

@Runite Drill I understand your goal, but I wary that the system you are proposing might be too rigid. Tying it to CBs also ignores that there were full wars of conquest early on. The Ottoman-Mamluk war often comes to mind, but I can also think about the Hundred Years War or the conquest of Hungary by the Ottomans.

That said, you are bound to have rigidity in any system. Currently, for example, we can't change the war goal once the war is launched. The system which has my preference is still Vicky 2's system, with addable war goals and thus possible escalation of a war as each time you add a war goal people might react.

What is tricky is that you could play such a system by fully occupying a country (or being in an extremely favorable position) before you add a bunch of wargoals and basically place everyone before a "fait accompli". Nobody would expect you, fully occupying a whole country, to take it whole, right? That's why your idea of a kind of presumed war goals, makes sense after all. But I don't know how we could balance it so that it is still fun to play.

Maybe occupying most of a region could trigger a timer automatically adding a presumption from other country's that you will add that wargoal. Maybe this could be "temporary AE", which would unlock wartime reactions from other countries, as I was proposing earlier in this thread. If you then really selected the wargoal, the AE would become permanent. If not, once peace is made or the region is retaken, things would revert to normal.

Of course, any scheme like these should make it so that it is sufficient and desirable to only control one's war goal by opposition to occupying the whole country, or that you could trade the occupation of one place in the country for the wargoal if you fail to take it but still occupy a lot of territories elsewhere.

 

[CrackingShow]

The biggest problem I see is that the AI is very "stubborn". There's a "Lenght of War" modifier which starts at -60 and ticks up by 1/month at war. This means that that the AI wants to fight for at least 5 years before it is willing to admit that the war has gone on longer than it should have. This "stubbornness" is I feel the crux of the issue: The AI doesn't recognise that peacing out early is much more beneficial in certain circumstances.
On the other hand, if modifiers, which make the AI "stubborn", were to be removed, wars would end after the first battle which is also an undesirable outcome.

If they change that, it could make the game too easy because the AI gives up early.

 

[blackbirdgriffi]

I see your point, and it does apply to A.I behavior, but tbh I find that as a player you can be quite defensive and fight a short war for small territorial gain, the Warscore system works well in that manner, as an exemple playing as Byzantium I fought the mamluk in a first war for Antioch in order to release syria and then core fee them, therefore I just blitzed through Haleb and Damas, stackwipped some very small armies and avoided big engagement as we where roughly similar in terms of armies quality/quantity and it didn't feel worth it. and I ended up just taking antioch and some money for my loans when I was around 20%-25%.

Those wars are quite good as they are low cost, while allowing me to pay my loans release antioch and most importantly forbiding the mamlucks from joining in a coalition rendering the potential sunni coalition very weak. This lead to another two wars of low scale before I finished the ottos and was able to decisively defeat the mamluks.

It would be nice to see such behavior in A.I vs A.I wars, but I find it viable in an A.I vs Players context.

Disclaimers : I play SP and on normal diff so maybe those wars are exclusif to my context.

 

[gronak]

Perhaps war exhaustion should kick in way sooner - tie it to the amount of men lost and/or percentage of your forts sieged. Might need to increase the rate it ticks up too, right now it feels like a useless number - most games I don't even need to reduce it.

 

[Battlex]

The problem has always been that you can envision a bunch of mechanics, but you have to be careful that those mechanics integrate well with the rest of the game. And we might think managing the country would be fun, but it must also not be so oppressive that when you are at war you are overwhelmed by the country management. Ideally, an internal politics mechanic should be able to handle itslef for a few years before threatening to derail (or having an important action the player must make).


I would certainly like that! When they announced the new "decline of empire" mechanic in the DDs, I immediately thought that it seemed interesting, but it should have been a global mechanic. I also think releasing countries should be more encouraged, so that regions don't automatically turn into blobs. However, defensive coalitions and cooperations between countries who dislike each others should be more effective in order to prevent the survival of small countries to be unfun because the player can just stromp them all separately.

Having

@Runite Drill I understand your goal, but I wary that the system you are proposing might be too rigid. Tying it to CBs also ignores that there were full wars of conquest early on. The Ottoman-Mamluk war often comes to mind, but I can also think about the Hundred Years War or the conquest of Hungary by the Ottomans.

That said, you are bound to have rigidity in any system. Currently, for example, we can't change the war goal once the war is launched. The system which has my preference is still Vicky 2's system, with addable war goals and thus possible escalation of a war as each time you add a war goal people might react.

What is tricky is that you could play such a system by fully occupying a country (or being in an extremely favorable position) before you add a bunch of wargoals and basically place everyone before a "fait accompli". Nobody would expect you, fully occupying a whole country, to take it whole, right? That's why your idea of a kind of presumed war goals, makes sense after all. But I don't know how we could balance it so that it is still fun to play.

Maybe occupying most of a region could trigger a timer automatically adding a presumption from other country's that you will add that wargoal. Maybe this could be "temporary AE", which would unlock wartime reactions from other countries, as I was proposing earlier in this thread. If you then really selected the wargoal, the AE would become permanent. If not, once peace is made or the region is retaken, things would revert to normal.

Of course, any scheme like these should make it so that it is sufficient and desirable to only control one's war goal by opposition to occupying the whole country, or that you could trade the occupation of one place in the country for the wargoal if you fail to take it but still occupy a lot of territories elsewhere.

Eh ottoman conquest of Hungary is different I'd say. It's only with Zapolya's son that Ottomans actually annex central Hungary rather than just collecting tribute

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

Aragon

It was just Catalonia, not the entire crown of Aragon.

 

[Torredebelem]

It was just Catalonia, not the entire crown of Aragon.

Whatever, my point still stands.