Huge armies too easy to move too far (especially overseas)

[Ojodeaguila]

With a different land limit for each continent you will need to slowly increase your involvement in a region, and small nation like Portugal can have a good adventage overseas vs land powers like France, with increased attrittion all the nations will be penalized.

 

[mursolini]

For small armies probably, but 20-50-80 thousand? They probably didn't even bother sending them all so far in the first place.

That is more of a problem of EU economy, as 80ish k armies were extremely rare in the first place.

The supply from locals may be possible, but the cost of the whole operation would probably make it unfeasible, or at least, not worth it, especially in early stages of the game's timespan. And even more so if they hadn't already previous possessions and established armies in the area.

Precicely what "cost" are we talking about here? The weapons are already there, you just transfer those from dead to new recruits.
If the army has arrived to hostile land, there is pretty close to no cost.

Take into account that I'm talking troops that are far away from controlled territories and just disembark from overseas, and also remember that cases like the one you describe with India and GB didn't happen until the second half of the 18th C, when trading companies etc. were already established previously.

You mean, like crusades? Or maybe Punic wars, where Romans managed to transport thousands over sea to siege Carthage? Or maybe, the Spanish armada?

It simply boils down to having enough capacity of ports along the route, similarly how the size of an army moving around should depend on how many can locals support.

Anyway, the problem can be solved easily by penalizing A LOT the reinforce rate of your armies if they are in any overseas province and putting atrocious attrition while traveling by boat. Then you fine tune this ideas and it is no more viable to transport huge armies to the other side of the world.

If the attrition of traveling by boat is really so brutal, how come crews of naval vessels survive sailing for years (obviously with coming ashore occasioanlly)?

 

[Jomini]

I've always felt it's too easy to have huge armies fighting too far from owned provinces, which I think may be partially addressed by the upcoming forts mechanics/Zone of Control. I think big armies deep within enemy territory for a long time should have more attrition or something.

But I feel this is especially true overseas. Europowers Transporting 20-60 thousand soldiers to East Asia, America etc. by 1550 and having them disembark and fight all over the territory like it's nothing, crushing less advanced nations... I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any of that would have been plausible during most of the game's timespan.

The colonization of the Americas, etc was not the imperialistic wars of the 19th C. These countries didn't have that much capacity at the time logistically and otherwise. The colonization of North America and wars against the tribes in a massive way only exploded after US independence, the Spanish colonies gained their independence and it's not like Spain had the capacity to send a hundred thousand troops overseas to prevent that (and it was already late 18th-early 19th C.) For the Opium Wars, for instance, GB mobilized a maximum of 50.000 men... and it was 1850+ already, and the British dominion in India was well established.

...I've seen Portugal and Castille attacking Manchu by 1600, with 25.000 men each like it's no big deal.

I don't know how to implement this in-game, some kind of penalties to attrition or embarked troops, depending on distance from supply lines, ships taking damage in coastal overseas provinces when in war, more penalties when fighting overseas.... I don't know, but I'd definitely welcome something like that in "common sense 2"

Ugg not this ahistorical dreck again.

No the imperialism in the Americas resulted from a very simple fact that the colonizers were able to take out entire empires with under a regiment. Cortez and Pizarro both established Spanish hegemony with a fraction of the soldiers need to crush the weakest native state in EUIV. The travesty is not the Europeans running around with 25k troops in America - it is that they can't shellack the place with a tenth of that (supplemented by the universal ability of the Europeans to bribe, cajole, and threaten masses of locals into their service). The Dutch stopped Koxinga while outnumbered 20:1 (with worse artillery ratios and no source of fresh water at hand) and only lost because: 1. reinforcements weren't sent and 2. the flag ship hadn't managed to torch off its own magazine. Yes the Americas/East Asia should be an afterthought - because the Europeans should be trouncing everyone there if even a 10th of their forces were employed.

How about logistics in general? Well let's look at history (those interested are encouraged to read Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton). Armies of the EU era needed a few things to fight:
1. Weapons
2. Ammunition
3. Powder
4. Clothing
5. Food
6. Water
7. Pay


If you intended to use artillery you also needed:
1. Draft horses (mules, oxen, elephants)
2. Massive increases in powder.
3. Tools
4. Horse fodder



Okay so from the top:
Weapons: lasted literally centuries and were carried on the backs of the men. The logistical burden of weaponry is identical in home territory or overseas.
Ammunition: this is an era of cast lead shot (in the early eras you had stone shot, arrows, and bolts). All of this was reusable. As long as you won, you go find the spent shots, heat up a crucible, and pour the lead into a mold (which could be little more than a hole in sand). The logistical burden of ammunition was virtually identical in home territory or overseas. You could march a little bit faster if you could rely of magazine stored munitions, but this was a convenience, not a necessity.
Powder: This had a real logistical burden - but only if you fought. Armies (and navies for that matter) did not do so much in the way of live fire training. Yes it was hard to replace powder once expanded at the far side of the world ... but that is why everyone freaking set up powder mills in the early Caribbean colonies.
Clothing: could be looted from the peasants, everywhere
Food: could be looted from the peasants, everywhere
Water: only an issue for extreme length voyages (e.g. crossing the Pacific) or in desert terrain. Even in the later, you normally could get enough to get buy without too much trouble.
Pay: could be looted from the peasants, everywhere (most armies of the era were not paid wages and instead signed on for the privilege of looting peasants).

As long as you were fighting on land with lots of peasants that hadn't been pillaged recently, infantry were arguably cheaper to maintain in the New World than the old (at least that is what the actual surviving records indicate). In every single war, it was always cheaper to fight on someone else's land than on your own (peasants being easier to pillage then).

Now what about artillery? Well yes, artillery sucks up a huge logistical train. You need draft animals to pull the guns that either need huge amounts of fresh grasses to eat (and that slows down march) or you need fodder with you. Fodder follows a rocketry equation (more fodder requires more draft teams which requires more fodder) ... except for the cases where you were fighting near the ocean and could use ships to do the heavy hauling. This defined the logistical burden of the EUIV era - oceanic shipping was the cheapest way to keep the guns supplied. England could more easily support artillery in Australia than it could in Bavaria. If you couldn't ship your guns & their powder by ocean going ships then your next best option was riverine transport - that is why every campaign in the 30 years war followed one or more waterways. That is why Gustavus Adolphus would surrender the initiative and snake his way through odd bits of Germany while leaving allies to die. Rivers were that damn important. Lastly you had the direct overland option. This was the most expensive and had the highest logistical burden; it was the most common because the other options often had these pesky navies or river forts blocking their use.

Take an historical example: the Ottoman Empire. The OE broadly fought in three main theaters: the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Persia. In the Mediterranean they sent their forces the furthest from the Ottoman heartland (e.g. Malta) but did so cheaply and easily. In the Balkans, they handily overwhelmed the Hungarians, Austrians, and Poles (sometimes combined) with their superior logistics. Some of this was a better system ... but a lot of this was that they could use the Danube as a massive super highway to move men and material to all their major points of entry. While maybe 10x as expensive to move goods per mile, the Danube was a cheap way to mass men and artillery. In Persia, there were few major riverine networks for the OE to exploit. Moving overland was terrible. Not surprisingly, the OE had the greatest difficulty moving men in this theater - even though it was closest to the Anatolian heartland from where the bulk of the military was drawn.

Historical logistics would thus be easiest on the coast anywhere in the world, then following rivers, then going overland. France should have a hard time marching through Switzerland than attacking Mexico. Yes there was a high capital cost to building ships, but once you had those, you couldn't beat them for marginal costs.

What about manpower? This is not an era of undying national loyalty. Everyone had mercenaries who would join people who promised them a chance to loot. It was routine for the effective military strength of colonial powers to grow as campaigns went on. Yes you might be replacing 20 European musketeers with 300 natives with bows ... but success is the mother of all recruitment tools.


So why didn't Europe just take out the rest of the world wholesale? Because they were too busy killing each other. Spain freelanced half their conquests because sending real line infantry would have invited France to come take what was perceived to be more valuable real estate. EUIV is completely unsuited to this dynamic. We have freaking truces that last a decade which if you violate them makes everyone hate you (your own populace through WE/stab, and everyone remotely in the area through AE). It is, and always will be trivial for the Spanish AI to send 90+% of its troops to some distant land when it can rest safe in long truces against the French or can rely on its allies Austria and Poland to fight to the last man against France.

If you want to model the real limits on European conquest of the RotW, you need to make European conquest more valuable and easier so shipping off the army is downright dangerous. Further if we want real logistics then we need to start PTIing a good bit more of the map. There is no way in hell any army is going to transit the Rockies in game era. The Frazier could barely support fur trade, marching even 1000K soldiers through is a death sentence. Marching armies from West to East Africa was likewise suicidal and the only trans-Saharan military campaign of note followed the old line strip of land for a reason. The Himalayas need a lot more PTI; you really could hold the passes against armies there. The Great Plains should be unpassable off the river network - walking between rivers in this era was a death sentence (when the conquistadors did it they had to pre-arrange food caches for even a few hundred men). It is hilarious to me that everyone wants to be settle every strip of land that ever had two fur traders working it and be able to march 20,000 men through ... but then gets irate because, quite historically, the Europeans are able to take out the RotW and use ships to do it.

Adding in a bunch of ahistorical costs for regiments in foreign territory is BS. This isn't WWII where you need a logistics train to carrying food, jacketed bullets, industrial ammunition, spare parts, fresh soldiers, and above all fuel. These were armies that mostly consisted of marching men with simple weapons that could forage off the country side (and could continue to do so up until Sherman). Fighting outside of Europe should be cheap and easy ... right up until a competing power (France, Spain, Netherlands, OE) makes it a lot harder.

 

[FrigidSoul]

Ugg not this ahistorical dreck again.

My only regret is that I have but one Agree to give.

 

[durvas]

Ah yes, the old anti-expansion playstyle arguments based in selective history. Again. For the millionth time.

 

[Chamboozer]

In Persia, there were few major riverine networks for the OE to exploit. Moving overland was terrible. Not surprisingly, the OE had the greatest difficulty moving men in this theater - even though it was closest to the Anatolian heartland from where the bulk of the military was drawn.

Your post is entirely correct, but for most of its history the Safavid border was further from Constantinople than Vienna was - Rhodes Murphy calculated that the marching route to Vienna covered 956 miles, while the one to Yerevan was 1091 miles. On the Eastern frontier both the lack of a major river for transport as well as the distance was working against them. The timar-based military was split pretty evenly between Anatolia and Rumelia as well.

 

[Keioel]

If it's feasible code the AI to keep track of it's opponents if they get bogged down in a war with Natives with over 25% of their FL overseas give them a CB to declare war and invade. You could even make a mechanic similar to a coalition where a countries enemies have the option to begin banding together immediately after you declare an overseas war and once a percentage of your FL leaves the area the CB activates. This would apply to everyone not just Europeans.

 

[William Shakens]

Ugg not this ahistorical dreck again.

No the imperialism in the Americas resulted from a very simple fact that the colonizers were able to take out entire empires with under a regiment. Cortez and Pizarro both established Spanish hegemony with a fraction of the soldiers need to crush the weakest native state in EUIV. The travesty is not the Europeans running around with 25k troops in America - it is that they can't shellack the place with a tenth of that (supplemented by the universal ability of the Europeans to bribe, cajole, and threaten masses of locals into their service). The Dutch stopped Koxinga while outnumbered 20:1 (with worse artillery ratios and no source of fresh water at hand) and only lost because: 1. reinforcements weren't sent and 2. the flag ship hadn't managed to torch off its own magazine. Yes the Americas/East Asia should be an afterthought - because the Europeans should be trouncing everyone there if even a 10th of their forces were employed.

How about logistics in general? Well let's look at history (those interested are encouraged to read Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton). Armies of the EU era needed a few things to fight:
1. Weapons
2. Ammunition
3. Powder
4. Clothing
5. Food
6. Water
7. Pay


If you intended to use artillery you also needed:
1. Draft horses (mules, oxen, elephants)
2. Massive increases in powder.
3. Tools
4. Horse fodder



Okay so from the top:
Weapons: lasted literally centuries and were carried on the backs of the men. The logistical burden of weaponry is identical in home territory or overseas.
Ammunition: this is an era of cast lead shot (in the early eras you had stone shot, arrows, and bolts). All of this was reusable. As long as you won, you go find the spent shots, heat up a crucible, and pour the lead into a mold (which could be little more than a hole in sand). The logistical burden of ammunition was virtually identical in home territory or overseas. You could march a little bit faster if you could rely of magazine stored munitions, but this was a convenience, not a necessity.
Powder: This had a real logistical burden - but only if you fought. Armies (and navies for that matter) did not do so much in the way of live fire training. Yes it was hard to replace powder once expanded at the far side of the world ... but that is why everyone freaking set up powder mills in the early Caribbean colonies.
Clothing: could be looted from the peasants, everywhere
Food: could be looted from the peasants, everywhere
Water: only an issue for extreme length voyages (e.g. crossing the Pacific) or in desert terrain. Even in the later, you normally could get enough to get buy without too much trouble.
Pay: could be looted from the peasants, everywhere (most armies of the era were not paid wages and instead signed on for the privilege of looting peasants).

As long as you were fighting on land with lots of peasants that hadn't been pillaged recently, infantry were arguably cheaper to maintain in the New World than the old (at least that is what the actual surviving records indicate). In every single war, it was always cheaper to fight on someone else's land than on your own (peasants being easier to pillage then).

Now what about artillery? Well yes, artillery sucks up a huge logistical train. You need draft animals to pull the guns that either need huge amounts of fresh grasses to eat (and that slows down march) or you need fodder with you. Fodder follows a rocketry equation (more fodder requires more draft teams which requires more fodder) ... except for the cases where you were fighting near the ocean and could use ships to do the heavy hauling. This defined the logistical burden of the EUIV era - oceanic shipping was the cheapest way to keep the guns supplied. England could more easily support artillery in Australia than it could in Bavaria. If you couldn't ship your guns & their powder by ocean going ships then your next best option was riverine transport - that is why every campaign in the 30 years war followed one or more waterways. That is why Gustavus Adolphus would surrender the initiative and snake his way through odd bits of Germany while leaving allies to die. Rivers were that damn important. Lastly you had the direct overland option. This was the most expensive and had the highest logistical burden; it was the most common because the other options often had these pesky navies or river forts blocking their use.

Take an historical example: the Ottoman Empire. The OE broadly fought in three main theaters: the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Persia. In the Mediterranean they sent their forces the furthest from the Ottoman heartland (e.g. Malta) but did so cheaply and easily. In the Balkans, they handily overwhelmed the Hungarians, Austrians, and Poles (sometimes combined) with their superior logistics. Some of this was a better system ... but a lot of this was that they could use the Danube as a massive super highway to move men and material to all their major points of entry. While maybe 10x as expensive to move goods per mile, the Danube was a cheap way to mass men and artillery. In Persia, there were few major riverine networks for the OE to exploit. Moving overland was terrible. Not surprisingly, the OE had the greatest difficulty moving men in this theater - even though it was closest to the Anatolian heartland from where the bulk of the military was drawn.

Historical logistics would thus be easiest on the coast anywhere in the world, then following rivers, then going overland. France should have a hard time marching through Switzerland than attacking Mexico. Yes there was a high capital cost to building ships, but once you had those, you couldn't beat them for marginal costs.

What about manpower? This is not an era of undying national loyalty. Everyone had mercenaries who would join people who promised them a chance to loot. It was routine for the effective military strength of colonial powers to grow as campaigns went on. Yes you might be replacing 20 European musketeers with 300 natives with bows ... but success is the mother of all recruitment tools.


So why didn't Europe just take out the rest of the world wholesale? Because they were too busy killing each other. Spain freelanced half their conquests because sending real line infantry would have invited France to come take what was perceived to be more valuable real estate. EUIV is completely unsuited to this dynamic. We have freaking truces that last a decade which if you violate them makes everyone hate you (your own populace through WE/stab, and everyone remotely in the area through AE). It is, and always will be trivial for the Spanish AI to send 90+% of its troops to some distant land when it can rest safe in long truces against the French or can rely on its allies Austria and Poland to fight to the last man against France.

If you want to model the real limits on European conquest of the RotW, you need to make European conquest more valuable and easier so shipping off the army is downright dangerous. Further if we want real logistics then we need to start PTIing a good bit more of the map. There is no way in hell any army is going to transit the Rockies in game era. The Frazier could barely support fur trade, marching even 1000K soldiers through is a death sentence. Marching armies from West to East Africa was likewise suicidal and the only trans-Saharan military campaign of note followed the old line strip of land for a reason. The Himalayas need a lot more PTI; you really could hold the passes against armies there. The Great Plains should be unpassable off the river network - walking between rivers in this era was a death sentence (when the conquistadors did it they had to pre-arrange food caches for even a few hundred men). It is hilarious to me that everyone wants to be settle every strip of land that ever had two fur traders working it and be able to march 20,000 men through ... but then gets irate because, quite historically, the Europeans are able to take out the RotW and use ships to do it.

Adding in a bunch of ahistorical costs for regiments in foreign territory is BS. This isn't WWII where you need a logistics train to carrying food, jacketed bullets, industrial ammunition, spare parts, fresh soldiers, and above all fuel. These were armies that mostly consisted of marching men with simple weapons that could forage off the country side (and could continue to do so up until Sherman). Fighting outside of Europe should be cheap and easy ... right up until a competing power (France, Spain, Netherlands, OE) makes it a lot harder.

Kudos for effort, good arguments and knowledge.

Not for "Ugg not this ahistorical dreck again." and the 2 subsequent comments from other users, though.

I don't think I have to apologize for exposing an idea in a civil manner, however erroneous. First, it's something that apparently many others also feel it's a bit off, and on the other hand, I don't think I'm required to know if some of this has been discussed previously on the forums.

 

[Jomini]

If it's feasible code the AI to keep track of it's opponents if they get bogged down in a war with Natives with over 25% of their FL overseas give them a CB to declare war and invade. You could even make a mechanic similar to a coalition where a countries enemies have the option to begin banding together immediately after you declare an overseas war and once a percentage of your FL leaves the area the CB activates. This would apply to everyone not just Europeans.

Good luck with that. As a human I will just short circuit it with a maxed out truce timer against the key enemy(particularly if I'm in some restricted access area like Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia, or Turkey). AIs won't max the truce timer, but they still can get a lot of time to go pound something half a world away. In history, truces were made to be broken. Yes people had strong thoughts about that, but you could find a pope/synod/ulema to get around the "honorless scum" aspect of it and nobody at home ever gave a rat's ass if you just happened to tear up a truce, defeat your despised rival and take a lot of land (as long as the taxes weren't raised to pay for the war). As long as truces are set up to be something generally very bad to violate, the European AIs will have plenty of time to go pound the RotW with huge forces (and if they don't, but a human can then the AI is being "dumb").

Beyond truces, you have the problem that allies can also buy you a massive amount of time (and now fortresses too). France declares war on Spain, Spain hides behind its mountain forts (while France takes attrition). Austria invades Provence and another Spanish ally (say Genoa) aids in the fight. Again France can't just stack wipe the interlopers (it takes time to link up with French allies), so Spain can shift back enough forces long before France can gain territory. I mean seriously, the war and peace models vastly reward total war, so the player and any decent AI then develop total war strategies - if you need to invade 3rd party states to secure resources (e.g. the de facto partition of Persia in WWII), then that's what you do.

If you want the AI to follow historical motivation, then you need the AI to be able to lose territory quickly. Anything less is just going to be same ole, same ole. Beating up the natives is lucrative (it should be), beating up the natives is easy (not easy enough), and by the time you are in danger of losing a single European province - you can raise a completely new merc army if needed. You'd have to be an idiot not to exploit that dynamic.

 

[Jomini]

Kudos for effort, good arguments and knowledge.

Not for "Ugg not this ahistorical dreck again." and the 2 subsequent comments from other users, though.

I don't think I have to apologize for exposing an idea in a civil manner, however erroneous. First, it's something that apparently many others also feel it's a bit off, and on the other hand, I don't think I'm required to know if some of this has been discussed previously on the forums.

This is a zombie idea that just won't die. I have literally been explaining this stuff since before the game came out. I have no problem with you bringing it up, but there is a forum search feature for a reason.

Logistics in warfare were vastly different in different time periods. The Romans actually paid their soldiers. Prussia ran telegraph lines to the rear. Levies in the middle ages (and honestly a decent bit in the EUIV era as well) had limits to how far from home they'd fight. If you want to make things more historical by changing system X "to be more historical" then you should take some time to read up on system X. As a bonus, I will just note that the Devs, I, and a lot of other people have noted that pathfinding is a very hard AI problem; these sorts of changes are among the hardest things for the AI to deal with, and that should be fairly obvious (calculating battle odds is maybe 20 mostly static variables; calculating pathfinding is a dynamic non-tractable problem with nearly unlimited potential variables).

The problem that really tends to drive all this is that on one hand we have historical outcomes that were driven by non-unitary decision making (successive kings have different goals) and highly fluid terms of engagement (can you just seize this land, or must you make a treaty with the Turks or how important is this truce really?) with no foreknowledge of what will be possible (oh no, one told you that buttering up an early Polish vassal for two centuries will allow you to co-opt an elite strike force of doom?). On the other hand we have players who maintain decision unity for four hundred years, a very rigid set of engagement terms, and buckets of foreknowledge.

You then can either have historical outcomes for the AI, and let the human's advantages eat if for lunch diminishing challenge or you can have ahistorical play by the AI and give the human more challenge.

No matter what you do, there will be gross ahistorical outcomes because we cannot blind the player to foreknowledge (nor likely introduce real non-unitary decision making); certainly we can't have anything approaching the real give, take, and adaptation of real world diplomacy. So we do the best we can - I prefer to model the historical mechanisms as much as the engine/AI can allow and leave outcomes to sort themselves out; but you can't get rid of ahistorical outcomes if your player base knows history.

As Wiz's sig notes, there is always a simple, obvious answer to every problem that just happens to be wrong. You found that out here (it happens to everyone, I just learned my logistics when studying it formally at MCWAR and believe me this is a lot less "challenging" place to learn that lesson) so, no hard feelings, no foul. Live, learn, and enjoy.

 

[Keioel]

The AI can always be exploited in every aspect of this game so I don't see how that alone is a reason not to consider something that would help those in both multiplayer and especially in single player. After all if you're playing single player and you're a European colonizer short of a direct divine intervention never before recorded in gaming history you will wipe the floor with native powers. Defeating native powers in it's current iteration is ridiculously easy and of minimal challenge.

Good luck with that. As a human I will just short circuit it with a maxed out truce timer against the key enemy(particularly if I'm in some restricted access area like Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia, or Turkey). AIs won't max the truce timer, but they still can get a lot of time to go pound something half a world away. In history, truces were made to be broken. Yes people had strong thoughts about that, but you could find a pope/synod/ulema to get around the "honorless scum" aspect of it and nobody at home ever gave a rat's ass if you just happened to tear up a truce, defeat your despised rival and take a lot of land (as long as the taxes weren't raised to pay for the war). As long as truces are set up to be something generally very bad to violate, the European AIs will have plenty of time to go pound the RotW with huge forces (and if they don't, but a human can then the AI is being "dumb").

Beyond truces, you have the problem that allies can also buy you a massive amount of time (and now fortresses too). France declares war on Spain, Spain hides behind its mountain forts (while France takes attrition). Austria invades Provence and another Spanish ally (say Genoa) aids in the fight. Again France can't just stack wipe the interlopers (it takes time to link up with French allies), so Spain can shift back enough forces long before France can gain territory. I mean seriously, the war and peace models vastly reward total war, so the player and any decent AI then develop total war strategies - if you need to invade 3rd party states to secure resources (e.g. the de facto partition of Persia in WWII), then that's what you do.

If you want the AI to follow historical motivation, then you need the AI to be able to lose territory quickly. Anything less is just going to be same ole, same ole. Beating up the natives is lucrative (it should be), beating up the natives is easy (not easy enough), and by the time you are in danger of losing a single European province - you can raise a completely new merc army if needed. You'd have to be an idiot not to exploit that dynamic.

 

[William Shakens]

This is a zombie idea that just won't die. I have literally been explaining this stuff since before the game came out. I have no problem with you bringing it up, but there is a forum search feature for a reason

I wouldn't know what words to use to search for this particular matter without perusing dozens of threads. And it's not like we're running out of space in the forum or something. This is apparently a thing that some people take issue with in most forums, and I personally don't get, when someone opens a thread to discuss anything that has been discussed in the past. It's a forum, not a wiki. In an open space for discussion with thousands of active users, redundancy or partially redundant threads are just going to happen. If you feel it's unnecessary to answer them again, leave the discussion for those who hadn't discussed it previously.

That said, many of your arguments are very good and well exposed. However, I want to clarify that for me it's not an AI vs human issue. As I mentioned before I rarely play natives. I feel exactly the same about it when it's me taking 30.000 Castilian troops overseas in 1525 or traversing from Russia to Aragon with 50k and back in time for dinner with barely noticeable losses.

 

[justin6477]

So, I'd like to point out that there are two issues at play. First is the logistical problems of fielding an army abroad, especially a larger army; as the discussion brings up, some of these concerns are more valid than others. The second issue, and the one I find more troubling, is the ability to actually get an army abroad. In the naval context, we arrive at a simple problem: it makes sense for the Turks to land an army of 30k or more on Malta since they did it IRL, but it doesn't make sense for an English army of 30k to casually show up in Indonesia during a war in the late 1600's. How do we arrive at a situation where one nation is able to transport a sizable army for a local naval invasion, but another is unable or unlikely to do the same in a theater a world away? I believe the answer is that we can't so long as a transport is a transport and each ship has a force limit weight of 1.

In the interest of not creating new ship types, I'd suggest permitting galleys and/or light ships to allow troops, but restrict their movement to coastal and inland sea tiles when doing so. This restriction could either be with a hard cap or an effective soft cap in the form of incredibly bad attrition. This way, Milan can now mount an invasion of Corsica without sinking all of her galleys and spending the next five years building transports, and transports can be made prohibitively expensive enough to deter players & the AI from keeping a massive transport fleet. That or go Civ style and let land units embark onto ocean tiles as incredibly fragile "barges" with zero combat ability.

 

[Beta1001]

Nothing like a 100k stack of AI units moving through montains in about 2 days.

 

[grommile]

How do we arrive at a situation where one nation is able to transport a sizable army for a local naval invasion, but another is unable or unlikely to do the same in a theater a world away? I believe the answer is that we can't so long as a transport is a transport and each ship has a force limit weight of 1.

The problem is "how do we arrive at such a situation, and make it manageable for the AI to play under the resulting rules, and still cater to an audience that is not particularly grognardy?" Because if it was just human players, well, you could do things like "bump attrition under transit". It's not far from an Ottoman port to Malta; it's a very long way from Southampton to Singapore. Unfortunately, handling attrition is one of the things the AI has never been terribly good at (which is why it still doesn't suffer naval attrition).

 

[TheAtreides84]

The problem, I think, it's that AI only look at your army to decide if you're weak, not where said army is located. There is no need for a hard counter, just teach the AI to evaluate forces in a theater (western europe, eastern europe, north africa, middle east and so on) and defend or attack accordingly. So, say, AI Russia has a friendly China, a hostile Poland and a neutral Ottomans: should position its forces, like, 20% in East Asia, 50 in Eastern Europe and 30 in Middle East. Ottomans AI, sensing a weakness in the Middle Eastern theater, should start to consider an attack. A France with powerful rivals in Europe (it always has some) will not ship more then 10% of its army to America, then, while a Portugal with a long standing spanish alliance could afford an all-out invasion of Aztecs.

 

[Assalander]

The problem is not so much the supply once you get overseas, but that getting there was actually risky. Long sea voyages are dangerous, particularly in open oceans. Of course, a chance of randomly lose all of your troops in a storm, while an effective deterent from sending 100% of your countrie's regiments at once, would be frustrating in the context of a game. Attrition could be a compromise, but AI can't handle sea attrition. So... not so easy after all.

Even after Jomini's useful explanations, I still think transporting troops at sea should cost additional money (proportionnate to the time at sea), because they can't forage at sea so someone has to pay for that. It might work even for the AI as it probably knows where it wants to send troops when it embarks them and then could compare the cost to its budget.

 

[bex I]

I think extra maintenance for oversea units depending on the oversea regiment / transport ratio would be fine. The transports should be very expensive in maintenance too. Of course a country with a lot of overseas units would weak the rest of the navy and pay enormous sums to supply the units, especially if the supply chains are overextended (buying from neutral smugglers etc.). There could also be events/ideas etc to modify this ratio. (disovery of america, england)
Also on other continents there could be only cheap colonial units recruitable, which could work like mercs with lower pips. So europeans would use some expensive but stronger european units and a lot of weaker (compareable to the surrounding units) but cheap colonial units in the colonies. perhaps this colonial units could have an own forcelimit, depending on cns + tcs + oversea colonies bt/development. Also there could be events/ideas to change fl, costs etc.

There wouldnt be unrealstic amounts of european soldiers all over the world, but a small force in every region supported by colonial armys if needed.

 

[justin6477]

The problem is "how do we arrive at such a situation, and make it manageable for the AI to play under the resulting rules, and still cater to an audience that is not particularly grognardy?" Because if it was just human players, well, you could do things like "bump attrition under transit". It's not far from an Ottoman port to Malta; it's a very long way from Southampton to Singapore. Unfortunately, handling attrition is one of the things the AI has never been terribly good at (which is why it still doesn't suffer naval attrition).

True, AI limitations are a very important consideration when trying to adjust any other game mechanics. While I'd prefer the soft cap of attrition, this is why I suggested maybe putting a hard cap in place and finding a way to limit the number of dedicated transports in a given nation's fleet. If the AI can't completely handle making certain decisions, than it can be useful to tie their hands (and ours) as a way of simulating and enforcing prudent planning. It's hardly a good or elegant long-term solution, but it could be a decent makeshift in the mean while.

 

[highsis]

Even in Europe power concentration is a huge problem. France shouldn't be able to commit 95% of their army to invade an OPM. Even if they do, other neighbors should take advantage of undefended borders of France.